It's been a fair while since I last posted anything on here, there are multiple reasons for this, so while I'm sat on a 6 hour train journey I thought I may as well write something as I can't do anything else. I've been mega busy with things at work recently with a few projects that were coming to a close, I've also been rebuilding this site from the ground up with a new design and feature set. The new site is nowhere near finished yet due to again lack of time to work on it but it should be running in the next month or so I'm hoping (yea right!). I've also been doing a lot of diving in my 'spare' time recently rather than sitting in front of a computer every day.
Since my last diving related post I've actually been diving an awful lot more and have actually clocked up 31 dives and over 9 hours underwater now. I have decided on the routes in my diving career that I want to pursue as they interest me a lot and also scare me silly at the same time. These are routes that I'm going to be pursuing at the same time, one of these is to become a PADI Divemaster. This is something I've been thinking about for a while now as it will let me get more out of diving by allowing me to aid instructors, helping at a dive center, and leads me up the path towards a PADI Open Water Instructor which would allow me to actually teach. Another route I'll be taking is down the technical diving area which teaches skills needed for deeper, and longer diving.
While recreational diving is fantastic and I highly recommend it to anyone (at least to have a go anyway) a lot of the stuff I'm really interested in being wrecks and caves requires a longer dive time, which when only being recreational qualified you are limited by the NDL (no decompression limit) as all recreational divers don't get trained in decompression diving. This is where technical diving comes in and you start learning about decompression, effects on your body at depth, diving with multiple cylinders (normally a twinset or sidemount), advanced gas mix use, and various other advanced techniques. These techniques will allow me to pursue a path down to the deeper wrecks some of which sitting around 60-70m down, and also down the route of cave diving which can have time times of many hours but are generally not as deep, although they can be.
I am happy to say that I've already started on the path to becoming a PADI Divemaster by completing my PADI Advanced Open Water course which was absolutely brilliant fun, it's also given me more confidence as I've tried out some of the specialities that I will be doing. During my AOW course I did the Dry Suit, Wreck, Peak Performance Buoyancy adventure dives along with the Deep and Underwater Navivation dives which are mandatory. The same weekend as doing my AOW course I also did my Peak Performance Buoyancy speciality and my Enriched Air speciality which was great as that now gives me three specialities. I decided to do PPB and EANx specialities mainly due to the technical route I have decided to take as they will both help immensely with that sort of diving, and the EANx course is actually a pre-requisite of the TecRec courses. This leaves me with my EFR (Emergency First Responder) course and PADI Rescue Diver course to complete and then I can sign up to start my Divemaster training. I have my Rescue Diver and EFR courses already penciled in for September if funds allow which is fantastic.
I have also begun my path to the technical diving I want to do by arranging to do my Deep speciality in October which is another pre-requisite of the TecRec courses. I have also begun to buy the extra equipment needed for technical diving and also added some new kit to my recreatinoal rig so I don't need to keep borrowing it off my boss. I've bought myself two single 12l Faber cylinders of which one has been O2 cleaned ready for using enriched air, the other being for just standard breathing air. I have also bought myself a 2x12l Faber twinset which I am picking up this weekend while in Manchester (pretty excited about that), as I already dive a wing / backplate rig with my single cylinder and have already purchased a wing with more lift for the twinset, the only bits I will need to start diving the twinset is a new set of regs as they are setup in a specific way on the twinset.
I think that about covers everything going on at the moment in my life, I suppose I could have just summed it up with "Work and diving" but that wouldn't have been half as interesting and wouldn't have occupied me for an hour on the train!