Meet-Swim-Dive West Palm Beach Sep 6 2008

The Meet-Swim-Dive in West Palm Beach was very successful. Marc, Lee
and I met at the Aquatic Complex
(http://www.pbgfl.com/resident/aquatic/aquatic.asp). Each of us swam
and exceeded our targets. We then tried the breath hold and went
further than the target of 60', also. The facilities were very nice
and we only waited about 10 mins for lanes to clear.

A short 20 mins later, we showed up to Blue Heron bridge and met with
Henry and Keat to set up our gear for review. This walk through of our
gear with the team was very helpful to help us get on the same page
and point out any differences between the set ups. Since I am just
getting back into diving and still acquiring gear, I had the most
different rig than the rest of the team. Yoke reg/K-valve valve was
the biggest difference and that's my first priority to change and it
will be happening very soon now that I found some tanks. I also see a
doubles set up in my near future, too.

We also talked a about back up hose routing for doubles and necklace
type (Permanent 1 zip tie, 2 zipties or Not Permanent). We walked
through stage deployment and shared our versions of training and there
are some differences there, too. The 45 mins or so walking through
this stuff was excellent and much better to figure out above the water
to get on the same page.

The teams split up by equipment set up. Team1: (DBL AL80s and 40
stage)Henry, Marc and Lee. Team 2: (No stages) Keat and William We
agreed to start the dive with some drills and shoot video. Team 1
worked on air shares and switching to stages. Team 2 worked on air
share and lift bag deployment. The viz was not ideal but we were able
to get some video of each diver doing a skill. (I am happy to shoot
video of anyone that wants it.) Once the skills were complete we
started our dive with a plan to do one more drill while on the dive.

Keat and I were pretty close for most of the dive because the viz was
about 20-25' with a green haze. Frakenlight died about 20 mins into
the dive and I got to use my brand new LED Scout. (That's more
practice on switching to back up). At one point Keat went over some
of the wreckage and I went around. When I turned to see him about 20'
away looking in a hole checking out the critters, I wondered if I
could make it to him on one breath. I took out my reg and started
swimming over flashing the emergency signal. About 5' away Keat saw
the flashing and had the reg ready for me. I had pretty much exhaled
all of my gas by that time and used the purge button plus dropped to
the bottom for a second before I could inhale and regain my buoyancy.
Maybe I should change from exhaling "Ahhhh." to "Eeeeeeeee" for this
drill 

We got into position and started swimming back towards the bridge and
I heard Frakenlight and clips banging around on my harness. It
happened a couple of times and I thought it was Keat readjust his grip
on my arm or fiddling around with something. We continued to swim and
I felt Keat making us ascend a couple of feet but thought it was way
too early since we had plenty of sand before having to go up and over
the wreckage. I continued to swim until I felt it again and finally
turned to see what the fuss was all about and that's when I saw a hook
and weight getting reeled up. I signaled line to Keat and thought he
saw it, too. The banging and ascending was because Frakenlight had
been hooked while it was stowed. Not sure how it managed to get in
between us because we were in touch-contact doing an air share. Later
I would find out the Keat was just following me up thinking that I
wanted to ascend and when I have the signal for line he didn't see the
line but knew something was wrong when I looked back. For future
communication the better signal should be entanglement or
Hold/entanglement.

The rest of the dive only had one more air share without any fishing
hooks this time. I also swapped to my back up mask and had a good
reminder that I need to defog both masks before each dive. We
wrapped up the dive with some trash clean up and made our way back to
the entry point to chat about the dive and wait for the other team.

We wrapped up the SFL-DIR Meet-Swim-Dive with a group photo.



Check out the Pics and Videos. I have added them to the site.

http://picasaweb.google.com/sfldir/MeetSwimDiveSep2008
(Please let me know if
this works correctly for you. I am being prompted to enter my Google
user id and pass but I think it's only affecting me because I have
multiple accounts open and about 6 windows both in IE and Firefox)

Feedback on the videos is encouraged…please feel free to post helpful
hints or let us know if you are doing it differently.

Now that we have completed this in West Palm Beach, I'd like to start
promoting a SFL-DIR Meet-Swim-Dive for next month that will be an open
invitation for anyone to join. Sunday Oct 5th has a high tide of
12:57 PM which should work pretty similar to this one.

Anyone have a conflict with that Date?

I like the idea of every 3 months since it will give us flexibility
for the holidays and tides. Plus we can set up team dives in between
Meets.

William