Maple Bay Skills 03/09/2013

Back to Maple Bay! Guy Shockey was kind enough to do an informal, quick refresher on valve failures for us at Maple Bay. I had never been to his home before, and it is quite the place! Once we finished our talking on land, it was into the water at Maple Bay to do some drills. Two light mishaps happened, Shawn's light stopped working near the end of the dive, and at the beginning of the dive, Greg's did too. I gave Greg a hand to check the battery before we went in the water, and I swore I checked the clips. Unfortunately, I didn't check them well enough, and one of the clips was open when Greg walked into the water. Shawn noticed, and Greg got back out, but some water had already got in. I hoped it hadn't damaged the light, I felt terrible. For the dive itself, it was a lot of fun. Probably the most fun I had had on a skills dive in a long time. I felt very good during the whole thing, and the refresher was just what I needed. We descended, shot an SMB, tied it off to the bottom, then ran a reel from there out and about. While running the line, Guy simulated various valve failures with an air gun. We were a team of 4, which was very unwieldy and never something you'd do in reality, but it worked well enough. The failures were handled well. Well enough that Guy started to get bored and began shutting people's lights off, making us switch to backups and reposition the team. At the end, there were 3 light failures, and we had quite the train going following the main line back to the SMB. At one point in the dive, I noticed Guy unclip Jim's SPG and place it on the back of Jim's cylinders. I thought Guy was messing with Jim, to see how long it would take him to notice that his SPG was missing. I prompted Jim by asking what his pressure was, and when he couldn't find his SPG, gave it back to him. After the dive, Guy explained that he was using Jim's SPG to monitor his gas on purpose! Jim had the least gas volume, and since we were task-loaded with failures, I could see why it was a good idea. The things I re-learned from the practice was to always stop and think, then act, to verify first what your team-mate was breathing, and to relax. So thanks again to Guy for giving us such a great refresher!