Like anything I do I can't wait to get on and do the next bit of whatever it is I'm doing, luckily enough I was able to get a second dive in this week to complete my Confined Water Dive 3. Instead of going to the pool in Great Yarmouth which isn't particularly deep we went to the Lowestoft College Environmental Training Tank, which is used by all sorts of people and companies for training people in conditions at sea, and it's 4m deep which is 2m deeper than the Great Yarmouth pool. When I first thought about it 4m didn't actually sound like it was actually that deep at all, but after descending 4m really having to equalise you really do get an idea of how deep 4m actually is, I can't wait to go deeper!
After doing the pre dive checks which should be done before any dive now I know them, we did a deep water entry (from a higher side than last time which was fun) and got straight to doing some surface skills. This included things like cramp removal, buddy cramp removal, and tired diver tows which were all pretty simple and easy. Once we'd gone through surface stuff it was time to go under and get to the rest of the skills under water. This involved some buoyancy control exercises called fin pivots which allowed me to find the optimal way of controlling my buoyancy using my breathing, it really is pretty amazing when you take a breath in you rise, and when you breathe out you fall then you can take slightly smaller breaths to hold yourself at a level I found. The fin pivots led nicely onto a nice swim around with neutral buoyancy and with a pool that was 4m deep it was such an awesome feeling to actually be swimming around under water with such little effort, whilst staying at the same depth neither on the bottom or the surface, feeling weightless!
This session also covered some other emergency procedures during which I was shocked to find that I could swim for 9m whilst slowly exhaling under water whilst still feeling like I could probably have gone for longer, this is done in an emergency to get to the surface and apparently you have even more air whilst doing an ascent! There was another skill that had intrigued me for a while which is breathing from a free flowing regulator which is simulated by holding the purge button down on your 2nd stage and breathing from that, I didn't see how you could breathe without water getting in you mouth too but after actually doing it you really can quite easily breathe like that.
I've decided to get my book work done for chapters 4 and 5 over the weekend, and then I can get the pool sessions for those done in 1 hopefully and then it's just Skin Diving and Dry Suit Orientation left for my Open Water course before I have to do my 4 open water dives, then it's on to my Dry Suit Diver speciality course :-D
