Alan Johnson and I had talked about going back out to Lighthouse Park and exploring the drop off that we had found previously and had planned to do that this day. But, the tides were too big so we put that off for another time. Instead, we planned to do a skills dive at Whytecliff instead.
It was a pretty miserable rainy day, but at least it wasn't cold. I stopped off at Cafe Artigianos and got us both an Americano which helped. We geared up in the empty parking lot and went over the dive plan. Once in the water we got to work.
On the bottom, Alan used his surface marker buoy to mark a starting location. Then he ran a line along the bottom from there to a piece of rock and we used that for reference. The first thing I did was to show how my propulsion was coming along. So I did a frog kick, a modified frog kick, a flutter kick and a modified flutter kick up and down the line focusing on form and not speed. I really thought that my frog kick was great, but would soon find out otherwise! After that, I tried backfinning. It went terribly! I was hovering there psyching myself up, but when I went to try and actually do the motion I saw in my mind, my legs just wouldn't cooperate. I was actually expecting to do a lot better, but it was pretty much the first time I'd ever seriously attempted it. After that, we ran through deploying your backup light. That went ok, but I had problems stowing it again, as well as forgetting to signal the problem to my team. Then we went through the full S-drill a few times, which was basically just responding to an out of gas diver. Again, I had problems because I was trying to go too fast and wasn't thinking through the steps. I got it done, but not as efficiently as it could be. My light cord got tangled, for example. When we finished that up, we came up to the surface for a bit to talk. Alan said that it was good that I wasn't floating up during the drills as much as I used to, and that my flutter kicks were great. However, my frog kick wasn't that good and he'd go over what was going on later. Also, the S-drills went pretty poorly so he wanted to do them again. I also wanted to try backfinning again after a few pointers. So we went back down, recovered the line and I tried backfinning again this time extending my legs out farther and pointing my fins down. It worked a bit better. I didn't go backwards, but I didn't go forwards either. We went through the S-drill again and it went ok. Not as good as I wanted, but a bit better. I didn't go slow enough again. I also ended up floating up pretty far. Finally, I deployed my surface marker buoy and we ascended. A couple of problems arose when I did that. One I didn't open up the SMB enough, and two I inflated it very awkwardly. Alan gave some good tips on how to hold it in one hand so you could inflate it while holding your regulator.
Once back in the parking lot, we went over my problems with my frog kick. I wasn't extending my legs far enough, and one of my fins was cocked to the side reducing efficiency. Also, even though I had thought I was clapping my fins together at the end of the stroke, I wasn't. So I had to concentrate on keeping my fins horizontal, extending my legs more, and really clap the fin blades together. Since I had been trying to use a frog kick as much as possible lately it could have been the reason why my air consumption was so high. If I was doing it very inefficiently, I could have been using up far more air than I might have if I could increase my efficiency. Something to try out!
All in all, a very valuable day of learning. A bit disheartening, but good! The biggest thing I needed to remember was to relax, think and take things slower. I felt a lot better about the upcoming Fundamentals course I would be taking since Alan said that I was in good enough shape to succeed.
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