The Love Affair Continues...

Staying faithful and true to my only other love, continual diving education, this past Saturday was the culmination point of another series of courses I have undertaken lately. While on pre-deployment training and under a form of distance-learning, I dove into the world of technical diving. I had been diving doubles, stages, and other forms of technical-oriented activities for quite some time, but had never taken any formal training associated with the rigors of planned and structured technical diving.

Decompression Procedures, Advanced Nitrox, and Solo Diver, prepare divers to plan and execute complex decompression dives in up to 150 feet with a ''virtual'' overhead environment. A large portion of the course was to learn problem-solving skills in order to safely return to the surface if things go wrong underwater. Mastery of such skills as mask replacement at depth, managing back gas and stage bottle freeflows, left or right-post failures, BCD and drysuit inflator failures, gas planning and management, decompression schedule planning, and inflating surface markers were only a portion of what you learn....the list of skills goes on and on...

Throughout the course, my instructor took pleasure in throwing multiple problems at me during our training dives, enabling me to learn to prioritize problems, solve them underwater while keeping a decompression schedule on track. The picture above is a photo of my graduation dive on the Munson this past Saturday. In all, it took me a total of 9 training dives to complete all 3 courses.

Many thanks go out to Anne and Harold from Kingston Dive Charters, members from the club for their support in coming along for the dive, and my instructor Dan Downes for putting me through some of the toughest diving I had yet to encounter. His mantra throughout the course was: ''Technical diving is not a destination, but a journey...'' Are YOU up to the challenge ?