Day 2: counting the minutes

Location: Mexico

Date: October 7th, 2012

Day 2

Like yesterday we started in the classroom. We talked about descend rates, ascend rates and deep stops. I now know how to calculate the needed gas however before you can accurately calculate that we need to know how much my SAC rate is. A SAC rate means Surface Air Consumption rate So basically how many liters you breath at the surface. How do you do that I hear you thinking? Well basically you swim around for 10 minutes at a certain depth and you check how much you breath. Guess what I had to do in the dive that afternoon?

Once the theory session was over ( yet another 5 hours however they fly by because the information is so interesting), we analysed the tanks and got the car ready.

Today we went to the pit. the pit is basically a sink hole ( 110m deep) but there is a deep cave line as well. The upcoming days are all to prepare me for my first 60meter deco dive ( last day of course). At the moment the vis in the pit is not great the first 12m. They have been paving the road and the white limestone sand has been washed into the cenote by all the rain we have had lately. 

On the practise dive of today we will only go a max of 30m. The goal of this dive was to see how my stops are. To see if i can maintain a certain depth whilst doing a simulated decompression. Once we jumped in the water we got down to 30M where kelvin layed a line for me to practise taking my deco tanks off. We did a little swim and i ow know that my sac rate is 9 to 10 liters a minute. Which is important for the gas planning of decompression diving. Once we were done with the skills, Kelvin asked me to reel in the primary reel and off course just when i was done and trying to clip the reel to my tail D-ring, Frank had a catastrophic gas failure and signalled out of air. SO here I am desperately trying not to drop the $200 dollar reel and giving Frank my regulator asap. Well I managed. PFFFF. Off course this meant the end of the dive and we started ascending. At 21m we did a gas switch to 50% and continued upwards. The shallower you get the more challenging the buoyoncy control gets. I think i did fairly well. At the surface we debriefed and discussed my ascend rate which i kind of adapted a little but because of a misunderstanding. I now know how to do it properly. Hey I am here to learn right? I also forgot to send up my sausage at 21M. for some reason sending a sausage in a cenote just does not register with me ;). So we descended and did a second shallower dive where i shot up the balloon/sausage ( ok so i did it with precious 50% gas but i did it hahahahahah) and 
continued a shorter deco plan up. Pfff first day done which equals me being knackered and ending up in bed by 9.30. 


Tomorrow is another day!

Ayo XOXO,