Dive classes are divided into three parts--classroom instruction, pool skills training, and open water dives. The class took advantage of all the facilities a university has to offer, a good classroom, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and in the case of UCSB, the Santa Barbara Channel for open water dives. Ten students enrolled for the four-week-long class. During the swim test, we discovered that while ability varied, they were all competent swimmers. Some would swim like dolphins, the others just kind of paddled along. None swam like an anchor, for which we silently thanked Poseidon.
Students did
not comprise the entire group. A
mother-daughter pair enrolled in the course.
Joy, the daughter, worked on campus.
Gladys, her mom, was doing the course because she thought it would be
fun. She was the trouper in the class
and became something of a “den mother” to the group. She was adventurous and very well-traveled,
striking out on all kinds of treks around the globe. She told me that she went solo on many of
these travels because her retired Air Force husband just did not want to leave
Santa Barbara after so many overseas assignments during his career. One of the youngsters told me after the class
“when you see Gladys going through the drill without complaint, you just kind
of suck it up and do it.”
The group of
ten soon coalesced into a class. We rotated buddies throughout the pool skills
sessions. The class met two nights a week, with each evening session split
evenly between classroom and pool skills.
The classroom exercises covered essential knowledge in a typical lecture
format. To emphasize a point, Ed would occasionally
make reference to a hypothetical diver who thought he knew everything as
"a real Mike Nelson.”
The first
pool session consisted of showing the students how to hook up the scuba gear
and then monitoring as each worked with a buddy to assemble their rig,
practicing various entries and surface dives, swimming with the equipment and
essential skills. We watched to make
sure that each diver adjusted the equipment properly and did each skill
correctly. We emphasized the importance of working as a buddy pair. We also made sure that each diver was paired
with a different buddy for each session.
Confident of
their abilities, the class was ready for the scheduled open water dives at Anacapa
Island for July 26 and a beach dive for July 27--one year to the day that I was
certified as a basic diver.
You may know
the typical July Southern California weather pattern--low clouds and fog, with
partial clearing along the coast in mid-afternoon. (In fact, people speculate
that one reason our TV weather personalities are such clowns is that they have
to be entertaining since the weather seldom varies.) We boarded the M/V Captain
Midnight owned by Jerry Shapiro, attorney-turned-dive-boat-owner, and skippered
by Capt. Don MacIntyre, from whom I learned a great deal about reading the
moods of the sea. The crossing from Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard to Anacapa
Island went very smoothly, the seas behaved with little swell.
First Dive--Bat
Ray Cove
The
appropriately named "Bat Ray Cove," scene of our first dive, did not
live up to its billing on this day, at least for my team. Ed asked me to take
four students on a tour. Jurgen was an exchange student from Germany. Bruce
graduated a few weeks earlier and spent the summer tying up some loose ends in
his academic record before moving on. Dave, in his third year of Pre-law wanted
to learn to dive so he stayed around for the summer session. Bill, a temporary
refugee from urban Los Angeles, came to UCSB for summer school to escape USC.
When we got
to the site, Ed gave the class an overview on conditions and the purpose of the
dive. After the briefing, we told
everyone that they could gear up, cautioning them to don their gear from their
station. We asked that they not to
spread gear all over the deck as it not only constituted a tripping hazard, but
inevitably someone’s gear always came up missing from a pile. Luckily, the boat did not rock much at
anchor. Gearing up on a pitching deck
can present a real challenge for student divers.
After
carefully checking each student's gear at the gate, we entered the water one at
a time, faced the divemaster and gave the "OK" sign. We dropped down
the anchor line and began our underwater tour. The marine life cooperated; we
examined sea hares, identified scallops and the plentiful abalone, and tried to
play tag with an octopus that really didn't want to be "it." The
twenty-five-foot visibility made the dive seem effortless, the group stayed
together. We surfaced near the stern of the boat, climbed aboard the swim
stair, shed our fins, and boarded the boat. I learned working with later
classes things do not always go so well.
Second
Dive--Barracuda Rock
After
recovering all the divers, and taking roll call to make sure, we moved the boat
to Barracuda Rock. This time the location lived up to its billing. My team
consisted of the same four divers with the addition of Mattius, another German
student. I check each diver's repetitive group computation. We visited a nearby
underwater arch, but had to cut the excursion short when the first diver with
750 psi of pressure signaled "low-on-air." We stay longer, 30
minutes, and go a bit deeper, 30 feet, on this dive. On the way to the surface,
we spotted the silver torpedo-like silhouette of a barracuda. On the surface,
we practiced the kelp crawl--a necessary skill to learn.
If you dive
in California, you will eventually find that a rather large kelp bed positioned
itself between you and the boat or the beach during your dive. Also, for some
unexplained reason, you will not have enough air left in the tank to drop down
and swim through the kelp. If you can't go under the canopy, and can't go
around it, you have to go through it. The boat will not come and pick you up.
California divers relish telling horror stories about how
"man-eating" kelp drowns unsuspecting divers when they become
entangled in the algae, akin to the Sargasso Sea trapping ships. My own
optometrist related how he quit diving after finding the body of a diver wound
into the kelp at Catalina. Don't believe it! To listen to these stories, one
would conclude that the kelp beds are littered with bodies and that more divers
are attacked by the kelp than are certified in any single year! Crawling
through kelp can be a pain-in-the-ass, but if done correctly is a mere
nuisance. The secret is not to panic, keep air in the BC, pass over it, and
next time plan your dive a little bit better!
Third
Dive--Barracuda Rock
We don't move
the boat for the third and final dive of the day. On this dive, I show two
divers around the area. Both divers adapt well to the ocean, but the look in
the eyes of one of the divers makes me a little more cautious on this dive.
Despite the OK sign, I see in one of the divers the onset of wide-eye
apprehension. I do what my training tells me to do, I stop the tour, evaluate
the situation, and decide on a course of action, which means getting the diver
to the surface. The situation did not turn into limb-thrashing panic nor was it
likely that it would have. I still have a conservative approach whenever I work
with new divers.
We again took roll-call. In the decade that I worked as a dive master, I always had an irrational fear of leaving someone behind. Can you imagine coming to the surface only to see the boat sailing away? Can you imagine getting a call from the Coast Guard as your boat pulls into the slip inquiring about the one you left behind?
I always insisted on positive verification that all the divers
were indeed back onboard before we pulled the hook and headed for the barn.
That habit started on this trip and has served me (and my divers) well. Not
only have my boats always returned to shore with the same number of divers,
they were same divers who got on board the boat that morning.
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