Students – Page 11 – Learn to Dive Today Blog

Zero to… HERO!

Congratulations to Kate, who arrived in Cape Town on 8 October 2010 having never dived before, and is leaving on 10 December qualified as a Divemaster, with more than 60 dives and over 45 hours underwater under her belt!

Kate demonstrates incorrect snorkel technique (in the car, on the wrong side)

While she was here we dived almost every day, in all sorts of conditions. She dived in visibility ranging from pea soup (with croutons) to over 10 metres, water temperatures from 11 degrees up to 18 degrees, and experienced a wide range of what Cape Town diving has to offer. She even did a dive in just a shorty wetsuit – the water LOOKED warm but wasn’t – and I am pretty sure she’s the first diver EVER to do something like that in this city!

She experienced everything from orally inflating another diver’s BCD at 15 metres, to securing Clare’s cylinder when it came loose (oops!), tying knots underwater, a meeting with a very frisky sevengill cowshark on her first ever dive with sharks at Shark Alley, and using a lift bag to ferry our artificial reef out to the correct depth.

Kate transporting part of the artificial reef

She spent a lot of time towing the buoy line, inflated SMBs and balloons underwater (the latter was highly amusing to watch), mapped wrecks and the pipeline at Long Beach, exchanged information on the layout of the SAS Pietermaritzburg with wikivoyage guru Peter Southwood, enjoyed high-speed boat rides to various local dive sites, filled cylinders at a local dive centre, and navigated at night in order to find the yellow buoy at Long Beach. She’s breathed from a hang tank at a safety stop after a deep dive, and from another diver’s octo while swimming to shore. She’s a pro with a compass. She’s also done some underwater photography – thanks to her, the gobies at Long Beach have a serious complex about the paparazzi!

Kate and Clare getting their bearings on the beach. To infinity and beyond!

Kate dived with and without a computer, in various types of gear and several different wetsuits. She knows the difference between an A-clamp and a DIN fitting. She removes and replaces inserts on cylinders with her eyes closed, changes O-rings, and puts on her own kit. She has filled over twenty cylinders as part of her compressor operator course.

Kate was also a fantastic ambassador for diving for the various students of mine that she interacted with. As part of her Divemaster training, she led dives, demonstrated skills, helped students with their kit, and took on various tasks in order to prepare her for the responsibilities that go with this qualification. She did all of this with good humour, good sense and great precision.

During her stay, Kate buddied with all kinds of divers. She met Russians, Swedes, Canadians, French and fellow British divers, and some regte egte South Africans. She assisted foreign-language students with understanding the questions on the quizzes and exams when their English wasn’t up to the task. She got on famously with everyone she encountered, and was never grumpy or a prima donna.

In the ocean she encountered seals (she’s not a fan), giant short-tailed sting rays, hundreds of octopus, sevengill cowsharks, and her favourite friends – barehead gobies! They’re going to miss you, Kate… And especially your underwater singing!

Barehead goby — Look at that sad little goby face!

The courses Kate completed during her stay in Cape Town are:

Open Water: 21 October 2010
Advanced: 27 October 2010
Emergency First Responder (EFR): 3 November 2010
Nitrox/Enriched Air Specialty: 8 November 2010
Rescue Diver: 17 November 2010
CMAS Compressor Operator: 24 November 2010
Wreck Specialty: 7 December 2010
Night Specialty: 7 December 2010
Divemaster: 8 December 2010

I am confident that she is a safe, capable diver with excellent experience under her belt so far, and I look forward to hearing about her future exploits in the underwater world.

Handy Hints: Suiting up in the rain

Lots of boot space can be useful when you need to get dressed in the rain. Here, Kate demonstrates the proper technique for putting on a wetsuit inside a Nissan Tiida, which apparently has 467 litres of luggage space.

Toad Nuts raffle winner

Congratulations to Ruan, the winner of a Discover Scuba Diving experience in the ToadNUTS raffle held last month. We blogged about this raffle in November.

We look forward to introducing Ruan to the underwater world!

Wreck specialty course… Part 1

Tami, Kate and I are busy with the PADI Wreck Specialty course. It involves four wreck dives, and a theory component. You don’t need to be an Advanced diver to do the course – though all three of us are – but an Adventure Diver qualification is sufficient.

(The Adventure Diver qualification is like Advanced-lite: instead of five adventure dives, you only do three. Also, you can credit each adventure dive towards the first dive of the corresponding specialty course.)

The theory component is simple: there’s a short (50 page) manual that covers safety aspects of wreck diving as well as some of the historical and (marine) biological considerations that should be borne in mind when exploring wrecks. I was particularly struck by the section pointing out that some wrecks are war graves or the final resting place (like Titanic) of many civilian souls, and should thus be treated with the same respect as you would a grave in a cemetery.

The manual is also very clear and forceful on the subject of wreck penetration, an activity that seems terrifying to me. You need the correct equipment, and (as Peter Southwood says repeatedly on his Wikivoyage pages) if you don’t know what that is, you’re not qualified to enter a wreck! Also, there are particular techniques required to handle that equipment: you need to know how to manage a reel, belaying it correctly, as well as how to handle yourself in case of entrapment, entanglement, or disorientation. Added to all this, many wrecks are unstable and all of them are in a state of decay… Locally, the SAS Transvaal, SAS Pietermaritzburg and BOS 400 come to mind (the latter collapsed during a storm this past winter, and is now in a radically different orientation).

Four wreck dives are required to complete the course. This past weekend we did two: a deep dive on the MV Rockeater, a fantastic former diamond driller in Smitswinkel Bay, and a dive on the SAS Pietermaritzburg.

Dive 1: MV Rockeater

The MV Rockeater is the oldest of the Smitswinkel Bay wrecks – it’s been down there since 1972. The ship has a lot of interesting bits and pieces sticking up off it, as well as a collapsed helicopter pad and a drilling derrick that is lying on the sand next to it. It’s 65 metres long and very, very lively. We saw a sleeping pyjama catshark in the wreck, as well as nudibranchs, lots of fish, and the most beautiful sea fans. Space cadet here didn’t lower her camera’s lens cover before putting it in the housing, and didn’t check that everything was in order with the camera while still on the boat… So at 20 metres when I switched it on, it told me to “lower the lens cover in order to shoot”… Opening the housing to do so was not an option! So I just had to look, no pictures.

Our project on this dive was to determine which way the current was flowing, and then swim from the shot line down the wreck into the current. We’d do this to 1/4 of our air, and then turn around and swim back with the current.

Dive 2: SAS Pietermaritzburg

The SAS Pietermaritzburg is a more recent scuttling (1994) but lies in a very exposed spot just off the Miller’s Point slipway. It has a fascinating history – before being purchased and renamed by the South African government, it took place as the lead minesweeper in the D Day invasion of Normandy. And now it’s lying 1 kilometre from Miller’s Point!

The visibility wasn’t great (apparently fairly standard for this site), but it’s a fantastic wreck. Maximum depth (on the sand) is about 22 metres, so you can have a nice long dive in relative comfort. The wreck has all sorts of cool places to look inside, a ladder up to the deck, and for the brave (or foolhardy), some swimthroughs under the hull.

It was nudibranch paradise… Instead of giving my full attention to the mapping project we’d been set (drawing the wreck including estimates of width and length, the compass direction in which it’s lying, and depths on the deck and sand), I was taking National Geographic quality photos of those gorgeous sea slugs.Fortunately Kate’s map was good enough for both of us!

Tony was doing dive 4 with Cindy, an Open Water student, so Gerard, Kate, Tami (once she found us!) and I cruised the wreck investigating all the awesome features. We will definitely be diving this wreck a lot more in the future.

Weather permitting, we’ll do the second and third dives for the Wreck specialty next weekend or the weekend after that.

Why I teach PADI

I do not profess to having much insight into how other certifying agencies equip their Instructors but I do know how PADI does.

As PADI Instructors we are kept up to date with the latest training information quarterly, and we receive an up dated Instructor’s Manual every year with all changes, alterations and additions to the curriculum. We attend forums where we are given the latest info, what’s new for the year, statistics and on the PADI Pro website there is a host of white paper topics relating to marketing, training and PADI programs, and an endless supply of diving related indemnity forms etc. For every program there is an underwater slate, detailing the requirements for each dive. PADI do ensure that we, as instructors have every bit of information available.

For every program, training course or any aspect of your diving business PADI has made all the info readily available for Instructors. PADI also continues to evolve an often leads the way in improving the training courses.

For example, the PADI Open Water course training materials – crew pack as we commonly know it – originally contained a manual and a dive tables. Today it also contains an electronic dive planner, your own set of DVDs, an amazing log book for all your courses (Open Water, Advanced, Rescue, Specialty courses, and forty odd fun dives), plus loads of information on specialties, and a booklet giving you some insight on the diving options you have. All this in addition to the manual!

Learning to dive in Cape Town with me at Learn to Dive Today means you also get a SURG slate on the common creatures we have here, plus free DAN diving medical cover for the duration of your Open Water course.

SURG Marine Animals of the Cape Peninsula slate

Handy hints: Choosing a rental car

Travelling with dive gear requires extreme patience, and great packing expertise. Fitting both clothing and dive gear into a single bag for airline check-in is a mission of note… Re-packing the wet dive gear at the end of a trip is even more challenging. Dive gear is bulky, and fairly heavy. BCDs and wetsuits are not very compressible, and you want to protect regulators and other expensive bits and pieces from being crushed on the conveyor belts.

Let’s assume you managed to pass unscathed through check-in at the airport, that your bag was neither too big nor too heavy, and that you’ve arrived to pick up your rental car. Let’s also assume that, like me, you are a budget traveller who prefers to splurge on things that will last after the trip – like an awesome experience, a special souvenir, or a nice camera to document things. That means you won’t have a big budget left over for the car.

As Fritz says:

“A rental car is a magic thing.”

But not all rental cars are equally magical…

Picking the cheapest car on offer may seem like a good idea at the time, especially given the other expenses associated with travel. We saw first hand on our Sodwana trip that cheapest means smallest, and that car manufacturers’ imaginations are limitless when it comes to space saving.

Gerard and his Kia Picanto, known as "The Golden Bomber"

Take the Kia Picanto, a spunky looking car – until you open the boot. It has just enough space for one piece of luggage… preferably HAND luggage… and then it’s full. I am not joking. We managed to squeeze a little handbag in on top of the togbag, but that was about it. On the way to Sodwana we packed it to the gills with four people, and as much luggage (very little) as would fit. Gerard managed a top speed of 144 kilometres per hour, downhill, with a tailwind. For the rest of the time, the car looked as if it was about to explode from effort as he coaxed maximum performance out of it.

The Hyundai Atos, which seems to be of similar size, actually has quite reasonable boot space and can accommodate a single large bag or two medium sized ones, with a bit of room to spare. We drove one in Johannesburg last month when we went up for the boat show. It has good headroom if you’re tall, but a high centre of gravity and ridiculous little Marie biscuit wheels.

The Hyundai Atos has reasonable boot space

We spent the Sodwana weekend driving a Hyundai i20, which has NO power on the open road and seems impossible to drive slowly and smoothly. Pulling away involved giving the car a massive boost of gas, and then easing off the clutch – waiting for the inevitable jerk as it took. Tony, who has driven almost every kind of car ever made, kept apologising for driving like a beginner.

The car is quite spacious inside, however. We fitted three people plus five people’s luggage into it (including bedding) on the way to Sodwana. It has lots of nifty gadgets (I was particularly taken with the Trip computer, and made extensive use of its statistical features when we came close to running out of fuel on the N2 heading back to Durban…) as well as aircon and a CD player.

In short, local dive travel requires a bit of thought on several fronts. Which bag will you take? How will you pack your gear? And which car will you try to fit it into? Not all rental cars are created equal!

FAQ: How do I shop for a dive course?

Learning to dive is expensive, and for most people it simply cannot be a spur of the moment decision. Problem is, if you’ve never dived before, or hung out with divers, it’s kind of daunting to try and figure out what course to take, where to go, and what seems reasonable in terms of cost.

Costs

Some things to ask the dive centre or Instructor before you part with your hard-earned bucks:

What exactly does the course qualify me to do (how deep can I dive, accompanied by whom, and can I rent kit with my certification)?
Does the course fee include the registration fee with the certifying authority (PADI, NAUI, etc.)? If not, how much will that cost?
Does the course fee include full kit rental for the duration of the course? If not, how much extra will it cost to rent kit (including air fills)?
Does the course fee include extra costs like the MPA permits required for diving in Marine Protected Areas in South Africa?
If you’re doing a course such as Discover Scuba Diving or Scuba Diver, is there a discount if you decide that diving is the bomb, and want to upgrade to Open Water?
Is there an option to pay for the course in more than one installment? This isn’t at all common, but it’s actually quite safe for a dive operator to do this – legally they are allowed to withhold certification (so you won’t get your personal identification card and won’t be able to rent gear or dive anywhere else) if you don’t complete paying for the course.

Course presentation

Some more questions, not related to the financial aspect, but still important:

If I’m slow to catch on with the skills, can I have more than one or an extended confined water session, or is there going to be time pressure (direct or implied)?
How many other people will be doing the course with me? What happens if I fall behind, or if they fall behind?
I can only dive on weekends/Monday afternoons/whatever… Can you structure the course to suit my timetable?
Can you accommodate any specific medical issues I have that don’t make me unfit to dive but will mean I need a bit of special assistance now and then?

The Instructor

Will the same person teach me the entire course? (This isn’t important to everyone, but to some people it may be.)
Can I meet the Instructor before I sign up for the course?
Has the Instructor ever had any disciplinary proceedings against him or been the subject of a QA review?
Can I get the Instructor’s certification number so that I can check his teaching status with PADI Pro Chek (or the equivalent for other certifying authorities)?

The whole caboodle

I actually did this when I signed up for my Open Water course, but generally it’s NOT wise to take the package that many dive centres offer that includes a dive course plus full soft gear (wetsuit, booties, fins, mask, snorkel). There are a variety of reasons to hold back when this package is presented as an option:

As Tony has said repeatedly, you won’t have an idea of what kind of gear configuration suits you until you’ve done quite a few dives.
You may not even enjoy diving after you’ve tried it, and then you’ll be posting one of those “wetsuit worn once” advertisements!
You may end up with a lot of cheap junk instead of quality gear that will last you a long time.
It might not be cheaper than buying the gear piece by piece, yourself.

Certification agencies

This is a decision as to whether you’re going to do a PADI, SDI, NAUI, CMAS, SSI, IANTD or other course. It’s is a whole separate question but one which shouldn’t give you too much cause for concern… More to follow!

Hope this helps! As always, drop Tony an email if you have any more questions that need answering.

Oral inflation

As I have mentioned before, problems arise when we don’t follow our training. I was working at a busy resort as skipper, Divemaster and Instructor. On a busy day I would kit up at 6.00am, launch the boat, dive, hit the beach to collect the next group, quickly change cylinders and head straight back out again to dive, sometimes doing four or five dives a day. We would only be done by early evening so there was no time for kit maintenance.

I had a problem with my inflator during the last dive of the day and quickly replaced it with a spare from my dusty tool kit late in the evening. Being too tired to fetch a cylinder I did not test it (mistake number one). The following morning I was distracted whilst kitting up and did not test it (mistake number two). The first dive of the day was to 40 metres. Being skipper and Divemaster meant I did not have too much time on the boat for a buddy check (mistake number three).

Half way down to the reef I intended slowing my descent and found my inflator was not working. Ah, no problem, I teach people how to orally inflate their BCD every time I have a student so I was not concerned. What I had forgotten was the pressure exerted at 40 metres on the bladder of your BCD is way more than you can imagine and oral inflation at that depth is a lot more difficult than it is at 18 metres. Instead of a few small breaths to reduce my descent it took a good eight or ten and by this time I was ready to bounce off the bottom.

The moral of my story: remember to always do a buddy check even if you have to do it on yourself. Don’t skip this step! And don’t change anything on your kit without testing it prior to dropping off a boat.

Breathing underwater

Most divers ask “how long will my air last?” There are several variables to this but primary factors are how much air you start with, the depth you intend diving to, and your rate of consumption.

Body size is important, and activity underwater and stress levels are also factors. Fitness is not necessarily an huge factor. An unfit overweight diver that moves slowly in a relaxed manner will consume less air than an elite athlete with a high stress level finning inefficiently.

A 12 litre cylinder filled to 200 bar will have 2400 litres of air. If your breathing rate is 20 litres a minute on the surface you could use the cylinder for 120 minutes. The same cylinder at 30 metres will only last 30 minutes.

Cylinders — If you decide to purchase your own cylinder, it’s critical to maintain it

The technical jargon to work out your predicted air consumption per minute is as follows:

The volume of the tank is divided by the breathing rate multiplied by the absolute pressure of the depth at which it is breathed.

Afterwards, you can calculate your realised or actual breathing rate for a particular dive. Take the amount of air you consumed on the dive in bar, and work out how many litres you used using the above information. You can work out how many litres of air you used per minute by dividing the number of litres by the dive time. You can track your air consumption, and tie it to a variety of factors – how you felt on the day, your weighting, how your gear was set up, and of course depth – if you keep proper records in your logbook for each dive.

Finning

Not getting anywhere

Often divers find that the hi-tech latest fins they bought for a packet are not giving them the pleasure and speed they thought. The slightest current has them finning as fast as possible, consuming air rapidly and not keeping up with the other divers.

A decent pair of fins allows you to use your most powerful muscle, your thigh muscles. If you fin like you ride a bicycle you will go nowhere.

The downward stroke delivers the most propulsion. Keep your leg straight and kick down slowly, bending the knee slightly on the upward stroke. You will find long leisurely fin strokes will use little energy and give you exceptional forward movement.

It is also important you have a good horizontal profile in the water because if you are swimming almost upright across the bottom you create a huge amount of resistance. Stay streamlined, keep your arms at your side and ensure all your gear is tucked and clipped close to your body.

Big fins — Ensure you have a good horizontal profile in the water (hint: this isn't good)