Naui Advanced Class Weekend

First, I'm disappointed we didn't get actual pictures from our weekend. The Gilboa Quarry really was a cool place to dive, there was so much to see. With the class and the required dives, it was difficult taking the camera, plus it was just another piece of gear to drag around and keep track of. Walking away from our weekend, that is the only thing I feel bad about, but I look at it as a reason to go back. So, the picture for this entry is my deep water dive profile for our trip, 77 feet down at a balmy 46 degrees!

This entry also comes with cliff notes, because it's going to get long and detailed. So, if you want the quick and short of our weekend here it is: First dive fun, second questionable, third wow lost, fourth laser light show, fifth deep and cold, and sixth a goat rodeo but fun. I'm sure we passed, we are both alive, and are tired from carrying gear and getting into wet wetsuits! We had a good time, learned some things and overall was a good experience. That's it for the quick and short, stop here if you don't want the details.

Dive 1
The first dive was a weight check. The purpose was to remain neutrally buoyant and hover about a foot off a platform around 20 ft under. Surprisingly, Becca and I both had our weights to the instructor's liking. There were a total of twelve advanced students and we were broken up into three groups of four. After all four of us were checked out, then the instructor picked me to lead the dive. My first question was why, because I had no idea what direction to go. So, I picked a direction and headed out. Of course, I picked the one direction that has no objects in it's path and leads directly to the wall that drops down to 120 feet. I was relieved as dive leader at this point, to a more logical choice of another person in our group who had dove here before. I was also criticized on the surface for swimming too fast! I can't help it if people can't keep up! I think my dad could out pace the other two underwater, so I don't feel bad.

Once on a course to find things, we did. Our first object was a pop machine, I didn't attempt to put any money in it because I figured I already dumped enough cash into this sport. Next was a plane. I have to admit, that was very cool. The instructor even let us go inside it. I did, after I bashed the top of my tank into the doorway with a nice underwater bang sound! There are fish everywhere in this quarry, tons of rainbow trout. Becca yelled at me, but I couldn't resist the urge to reach out and grab one. It wouldn't fit in my pocket, so I let it go.

The major event that will stick with us for the rest of our diving careers, is the fact that we lost one of our dive lights. Because we needed to do so many dives for this class in a short period of time, we got two additional tanks. With our previous lack of visibility in the local lakes, we got bright yellow tanks and put special underwater lights on them for our night dive which we would do later in the class. We had never used these tanks yet, so we decided to use them on our first dive to test them out and feel confident they would work for our night dive. They worked great, the issue became when Becca surfaced after our first dive and we were changing tanks, we realized her light was gone. Brand new light, never used, lost without even getting used! Talk about a bummer. Going back to the learning, lesson learned, attach the lights to the tank better!

Dive 2
Technically, this doesn't even qualify as a dive to me. The purpose was to snorkel around and try to dive deeper then you ever had before. Our first stop was out to a set of big truck tires suspended on a buoy making it possible to swim through them. I'm not exactly sure how far down they were, but I made it through the bottom tire and that was probably between 20 and 25 feet. I thought that was good enough and much deeper then I ever remember going before. Next, was a sunken boat with an entry in the cabin and a hole in the bow, the point being to swim in and through it. I did that as well, making sure to clear the hole in the bow, because it was a much smaller hole and I didn't want to become a permanent attraction. We went to a few other objects, but I didn't bother to dive down to them. My ears were already bothering me, plus we were in a very large group and three quarters of the people weren't even trying, so I figured why bother. As a whole, I thought the exercise was rather silly and would have rather got an actual dive in.

Here's the sunken boat:


Here's me about to swim through it:


Dive 3
This was the navigation dive. I thought this would be an easy dive, it proved anything but. By this time in the day, enough divers were in the water that the visibility was reduced from the thirty feet in the morning to a dismal eight feet at the most. That played a big factor in the underwater fiasco that was about to play out. On land we were given our course, four compass headings to locate clothes pins on various objects. Grab the pins, lap the course twice with each person navigating, come up with eight clothes pins total.

Becca has a touchy compass to begin with. It's nice that it's built in to her computer, but it's very difficult to operate and needs to be kept perfectly level to read the bearing. Then to make it even more difficult, for some reason they put the heading towards the bottom of the display which makes it hard to read. We knew this going in, but figured we could deal with it. We started out with her leading the way. I checked a couple times on my own compass to make sure we were heading the correct direction. We came to two guide wires for a platform first and swam between them, didn't see anything and kept going. Soon it became apparent to me that we must have passed the first point, so I gave the signal to turn around. Got back to the wires again, playing a hunch (probably my geocaching skills), I decided to check further west, sure enough on the third guide wire, there were a bunch of clothes pins. Yay, found the first one and although we over swam it, I felt good because it was only the lack of visibility that prevented us from finding it quickly.

At this point, I knew Becca was really struggling with her compass, so I took over navigating. I really didn't fair much better, for one thing it's surprising how much the compass is effected by metal. So after finding the first one, just the metal from the platform (which the wires were attached to) messed with the compass. Second object, the same thing happened as the first one. We were off just enough, probably only about ten to fifteen feet, where we swam right by it without seeing it. Again, had to turn around and waste time and air looking for it.

The third one was the worst. Again swam right by it, not once but twice. At this point Becca had a problem with her mask, so she went to the surface to fix it. I stayed below and watched her. As I was waiting, I got to thinking about the heading and the distance and really there was only one object in the general area which happened to be a motorcycle. Once Becca came back down, I headed us back to the motorcycle and I circled it one full time before I spotted the clothes pins. With the color of the bike and the color of the clothes pins, it was next to impossible to see them. Any more then a couple feet away and they were invisible. We had three out of four, but we were also getting low on air. I knew there was zero chance to have us both completely the drill and wasn't confident that we'd even get all four.

The fourth was more of the same, pass it, swim by it, turn around, circle it and find it. At this point I was just relieve to actually have all four. After the hunt for the third one and the time it took, I was sure we were coming up without finding them all. The most amazing part was after all the difficulty finding the clothes pins, I did get us back to the exact point we entered the water.

It wasn't a complete disaster, but it definitely was more challenging then I thought it would be. If the game ever becomes navigating accurately underwater, then we'll both get analog compasses. The ones we have are nice because we don't have to carry anything extra, but they are not the easiest to use. They will get the job done for what we need currently, but finding clothes pins in a large body of water, I'd prefer to have my gps!

Dive 4
This was the night dive, probably my favorite dive of the weekend. Becca did get a loaner light for the dive and we didn't loose it, so it was a successful dive just from that point. It was a free dive, so it was only Becca and myself and we had free reign to go wherever we wanted. We both like dives best where we can go explore on our own without a specific purpose. We went to the the plane first and looked for her lost light. She had bumped her tank exiting the plane, so we hoped to find it in that area, we did not. The helicopter was sweet. It's huge and has big doors on the front to load cargo (well now only divers and fish).

Next, we followed a line out into complete darkness. The line brought us out to sunken tubes that I can only describe as large drainage pipes. Up until this point, nothing has rattled me underwater, this was as close as it got. First, the water temp dropped as we got closer to them and the complete darkness made them feel very eerie to me. At one point my light hit a fish (I can only guess...or maybe it was a monster) and for a brief second I saw something white and moving. That freaked me out a little and it almost came to the point where I drew my knife, gutted Becca, and left her corpse for the monster as I made my escape. Luckily, for Becca's sake, I didn't see the monster again.

We headed back and found the majority of the other divers. It was almost like a laser light show as light beams could be seen all over the place. The only way to describe it is it reminded me of the scene in ET where all the action is taking place in the woods and light beams are flashing all around in a chaotic fashion. We surfaced and exited the water, it was fun to watch the light show from the surface as well. I so wish we could have got pictures of this.

This was the end of Saturday. Both of us were completely whipped from putting equipment on, taking it off, carrying it, moving it. It was a chore just getting back to the hotel and then we still had to log our dives, so basically homework!

Dive 5
The morning came way too fast. Our first dive of the day was our deep water dive. Looking around at the other divers, I wasn't the only one who could have used more sleep!

Looking at my profile, took about five minutes to get to 77 feet and I did have to slow down for my ears a little. Talk about an express elevator down, this was it. It was a cool dive and I mean that literally and figuratively. By the end, my fingers were numb. The wall of the quarry is almost a vertical face down to around 120 ft. It was strange to look below and see nothing but darkness, yet see a wall on our left side. For the record, Becca is gloating because she hit 80 feet to my 77. For the record, I think my buoyancy control is better and I stayed with the instructor better! That's my story and I'm sticking too it.

I'm glad that not only did we have an instructor with us, but also had a backup helper watching us from behind if there were any problems. One guy in the other group did have a freeflow problem. I'm very confident in my equipment and my dive buddy, but not much room for problems. I think that is about the limit where I'd feel safe without any backup gear. I wish as a group we would have gone deeper, I want to hit triple digits bad. It was a fun dive though. I liked the trout that came over to us and checked us out doing a safety stop at 40 feet. It was the only fish I saw on that dive anyway.

Dive 6
This dive was our elective dive. You'd think with the amount of camera gear I have, the photography option would have been the logical choice. Instead we opted for something called surface marker deployment. I figure I have some much camera experience that my time would be better spent learning a new skill. Surface deployment becomes useful when on a ship dive and you become separated from group, you deploy a buoy so the boat can find you. Much better to take the boat in, then that few mile swim to shore!

The marker reminds me of a long balloon. Concept is simple, add air, let it pull a line up to the surface. Once on the surface it sticks out of the water enough for the dive boat to see you. I deployed it first from about twenty feet under. I could see it from below and it didn't look like it stuck out of the water much. When it was Becca's turn, I signaled for her to put two breaths of air into it. She deployed it fine, but the challenge was dragging the damn thing back down to do it again. I took two of use to pull it down. Obviously, we couldn't talk underwater, but I knew on the surface, I was going to catch some sh*t for telling her to do that. I did.

We could only do that for so long before it got boring, so we still had plenty of air to use to drain the tanks, so we went on one last tour of Gilboa. It turned out to be our longest dive of the weekend, we were down for an hour.

By the end of the weekend I was sore and tired. My fingers were sore from being in the water so long. I'm not sure how that's possible, but raisin hands is a understatement. Becca and I both decided that we'd like diving even more if we had a dive caddy. You know, somebody to carry all our gear, clean it, and put it on for us.

Should be next week and we'll have nice and new advanced diver certification cards.