Sunday 12 September 2010

Vobster Quay 10th September


Well as I was off on holiday I thought we could have a dive at Vobster Quay on the way down to Brixham.

We'd arranged to meet James and Mark, with Sarah and myslef travelling down together, James somehow managed to have a car accident the night before so it was just left to the 3 of us.

The traffic was terrible and we arrived just before 11.00am, Mark had been sat there for a couple of hours waiting for us.

DIVE 1: Anyway finally made it into the water with Mark and myself our first dive was going to be the deepest of the day. I've been wanting to dive the Jacquin II wreck for a while, so we set off to it the bouy and started a free decent down the line, the visability was a good 10m, as we got down to 8m we could start to see the wreck beneath us, the Jacquin II is nearly 60 foot long and was lying on it's side. After swiming round it, Mark managed to get a few pictures I headed over to the PIT which bottoms out at 26m with a car sat in the bottom of it, we headed out of the pit as it was a warm 9C in there. We swam on the 13 meter ledge over to the plane wreck and the tempature came up to a nice 16C. The plane wreck is split into three sections and the first part was the tail section, then swimming through the middle section and finally through the side door of the cockpit and out throught the back.

We headed over to the Ford Escort as we was making our way up the road, I showed Mark where the tunnel starts as we started our ascent up from 12m when we got to 6m we had the usual 3 minute safety stop and then exited the water for a nice cup of coffee.

DIVE 2: Mark wanted to have a look at the Crushing works and Sarah was going to join us for this dive. So we all did a giant stride into the water, we all started to desend however Sarah had a problem with her ear which ment she couldn't equilize properly, which ended her dive.

Mark and myself waited for Sarah to safely get out the water so we could carry on as Mark wanted to have a look at the crushing works , so we swam round the side and descended down to 6m platform I led and swam over to a small boat wreck and then a drop off to 12 meters and over towards the plane wreck and onto the concrete swim through's as we came out of the last swim through we could see the top of the crushing works. Mark was snapping away , I thought it would be good to swap onto my deco cylinder of 50% as we was at 13m , after spending a few minutes looking at the steel work we headed towards the road to start our ascent to 6m for the usual 3minute safety stop at 6 meters.

We got out the water and had anoth cup of coffee, and completed our log books, the first dive had been Mark's 100th dive. Thanks to Mark for the pic's

Wednesday 8 September 2010

PADi Instructor Exam



The Instructor Exams are being held in Bristol and at Vobster on the 2nd and 3rd of October 2010. The group from Blue Ocean will be travelling down on the friday and staying over night ready for the start at 7.30am.




Day 1

Meet up and get a breifing from PADi staff regarding the flow of the weekend

Standards Exam50 questions from the PADi standards this is an open book exam lasting 1.5 hours

5 Core Exams

12 questions on each topic closed book

Physics
Physiology
Equipment
Recreatational Dive Planning
Enviorment


Knowledge Development Presentation:
OWD Manual, Knowledge Review Chapter 5 question 6 eRDP ML

Q. What is the minimum surface interval required between a dive to 18 meters for 40 minutes followed by a dive to 14meters for 60 minutes.

A. 28 minutes


Skills Circuit: Jon was the lucky man to pick the skills circuit that we had to do, we later found that it didn't matter which one he picked they was all the same.

1. Weight Belt removal at the surface
2. Alternative Air Source Use
3. Hoover
4. Mask removal and Replace


5. Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent (CESA)


Teaching in confined water:

Skill: Neutral Buoyancy Underwater (Power Inflation) OWD Course Dive 2


Day2

Teching in Open Water

Skill 1: Alternate Air Source Stationary OWD Course Dive 2

Skill 2: Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent (CESA) OWD Course Dive Flexible Skill


Rescue Assesment
These are two very long days and you feel drained after you have completed after the exams you get some time to prepare the classroom presentation, then a short break and into the pool for the skills circuit followed by your confined water presentation. Is required the following:

BREIFING
DEMOSTRATION
STUDENTS DEMO
DE-BREIFING



You are then free to leave and relax that evening ready for day two. If you have failed any exams from the Core Exams then you can resit them in the morning, I'm glad to say that I didn't need to resit any part of the IE.

Finally I was given this

Thursday 2 September 2010

On with the PADi IDC


I've now started my PADi IDC (Instructor Development Course) with Blue Ocean Diving , the first 2 days are all classroom based, going through all the PADi standards and understanding how modules and courses are taught.

Tonight is the first pool session watching a presentation to get the feeling and know how it's done.

4th/5th September was a full on more classrom room presentations with my second classroom presentation of the "5 pieces of specialized equipment used for deep diving. After 6 -7 minutes of my talk I was told that I'd achieved the pass rate however I'd managed to get a 4.0, a 3.6 being the minimum pass mark.

The evening session (saturday) was to confined water presentation the first being partial mask flood, and fin pivot using low pressure inflator. Sunday's session was regulator recovery, the second skill was remove and replace scuba unit in water to deep to reach the surface.

Well another pool session last night thought I'd got away without doing another demo from the confined open water, wrong as Justin had man flew I ended up doing "Air from an alternate source I happy with the result I managed a 4.6 even that I got a couple of things wrong. So overall a great result and the marks are going in the right direction upwards.

The IDC is a massive learning curve and you have to be committed to it as you could get anything from any of the padi courses, meaning lots of reading, more revision and more practice.