Dive Week 3/5

Week 3/5 complete. Only one week left in Victoria in the hands of the Navy… it has been a frustrating few weeks with the Navy. They do things in a strange way and it makes things more complicated… but either way we’re almost there.

Another long week. We swam a LOT!

Monday morning we re did the pt test. 1.5mile run, pushups, situps,  pullups, 1 mile swim. We all bested our previous times. The week started off really well. The clearance diver selection was underway, and since we can’t get in their way the week was promising to be quiet. But it seemed to turn to a week of being messed with and dealing with some annoying things.

Diving was pretty decent this week, finally did some fun diving, exploring the Pacific. Saw some cool fish, couple dudes found a big box crab. Even though we got it, the supervisor navy dude decided to take it… meh. We got a cool pic.

The mornings this week were classroom  and exams here and there. Learned more about diving tables and how to calculate how long you can dive at certain depths ect. We also wrote some physics test and a physiology test.

We swam every morning… Tuesday was a short run that exposed some fatigue and injuries so we swam instead… wednesday was an open water swim, the boat us out to the middle of no where and said “swim back”… Thursday was a “mud run” which had nothing to do with running or mud. We just swam for 90 min. Annnnd Friday we each grabbed a log and took it for an hour swim. Not to mention you fin every time you’re diving… it was a pretty fatiguing week.

Another night dive happened Thursday night. We did a night compass dive. We all taped glow Sticks to our compasses and swam for an hour.

The week ended on a beautiful Friday. Did a fun dive in the morning, ate lunch and cleaned up. We had everything done, everything cleaned, everything put away… ready to leave…… “Akward! Full Gear, ready to dive. GO!”

We had to get fully dressed in dry suits. Go get all of our gear, set everything back up, pull everything back out. Setup tanks, and we did a dive… What?… either way Friday finally came to an end, the gents hung out at our shacks, had a few beer and passed out.

Overall a good week. And one more before we head back into the arms of SAR Techs to do some search and rescue oriented diving. Dive into some capsized vessels etc. We’re excited to get back…

Thanks again guys, until next week…

RESCUE!!!!

Dive Phase 2 / 5

This was a long one…

Last weekend was quite uneventful, lots of resting and relaxing. A few people headed back to Comox while the other half of us hung out in Victoria.  Which ended up being much needed. It got to the point this week where everyone is kinda zombeeing around, we’re exhausted.

Every morning this week we ran, far. The morning runs have been around 10km each, plus remember that we have to run everywhere we go… And swimming? geeze. 2 days this week it seemed like all we did was swim haha. Every little thing that “went wrong” we were in the water and swimming. “To the dock and back!” (about 600m). Or 90 seconds of swimming 90 seconds of rest over and over and over… We’re doing pretty good, we missed a few timings this week and paid for it via swimming. Which let water into your dry suit, which made you cold…

This doesnt include the swimming involved in SCUBA diving. This week we did some underwater searching. The instructors would throw some tools and stuff in the water, we hop into the water, and a guy on the surface with a tether gives us rope signals to tell us where to go. Sound like a terrible way to communicate? It actually works quite well, assuming you can remember what each number of tugs on the rope means. It was pretty fun, i found a badass knife that i plan on keeping. Some people found some interesting things, one dude brought up what looked like a giant white board.

The days have been pretty cold aswell. constantly cold and wet. Seems to be impossible to take enough hot showers to warm back up, and the mess doesn’t make enough soup haha.

It all got interesting, however, at night.

Twice this week we dove at around 7pm, pitch dark, you literally can’t see your hand infront of your face. You get a glowstick to check how much air you have left and thats all. Down you go to 40feet below the surface and follow what they call a “Jackstay”. It’s a rope laying on the ocean floor in a giant square. You basically have to get over knowing that you’re swimming through darkness with sea lions and otters and you name it, and just swim until you’re out of air.

We also got some experience with underwater navigation. This was pretty cool, swimming with an underwater compass. The thing that sucked is you had to really swim. The currents are strong and the boat drops you off in the middle of nowhere. if you don’t swim hard enough, you wont move. It’s quite disorienting, sometimes you feel like you’re swimming in circles when  in reality you’re swimming straight… and every now and then it’d feel like you’re swimming straight  (meaning you were going in circles )

The remainder of the week was made up of classes and lectures on various aspects of diving (decompression, physics etc.)

But 2/5 weeks done, we all have about 10 hours underwater. We begin next week with another pt test and a full schedule of exploring the shallow green ocean of western Canada…

RESCUE!

Dive Phase 1/5

In the pool

Happy new year every Happy new year everyone!…

We started Dive phase this week. As a military requirement, since Sar Techs spend a lot of time in the water, we have to be qualified as CABA divers. (Compressed air breathing apparatus) it’s SCUBA diving… don’t know why the military insists on being different but it’s scuba diving.

 

Everyone had mixed feelings, driving down to Victoria Sunday morning, about starting dive the next day. We had no idea what to expect for day 1…

 

The start was quite calm… some administration stuff, everyone is coming back from holidays so a little disorganized. We got lockers, unloaded all our gear (we have A LOT of gear). I’ll try to attach a photo of the locker space. It’s ridiculous, and when you hear what we end up doing in the space it seems impossible.

Yes thats my ass… Then an instructor came in and said “akward PT gear”. An akward is changing as fast as you can. So this ment change as fast as you can into shorts and a t-shirt. The akward comes from an old Navy thing where people on ship have to change quickly. The name probably comes from how akward and funny everyone looks trying to put on neoprene suits that are crazy sticky to get into. They took us for a run to show us the 1.5mile route they use. After the run the instructor said “welcome to your first PT test”. We now had to race the 1.5mile run as fast as possible. After which we did max sit ups,  pushups, pullups… “Akward Wet Suit!”… no way!, it was so cold, couldn’t use my hands very well and I knew the ocean was even colder.

 

We changed into our wetsuits as quick as possible, utter chaos! We had to set the dock up, raise flags the whole bit… as fast as possible. Our first time took 10min. Not too shabby… on Friday we did it in 3min 32 seconds.

 

After we got ready we jumped into the ocean and swam 1.5miles as a race… this is called the “morning swim”… I kinda look forward to it now, we want to get the akward under 3min. All of this was before lunch. Needless to say, it’s very easy to get a good night sleep.

 

There’s pt every morning, you have to run everywhere you go… no walking. Always moving, lifting etc. Very active course, should be interesting. I like moving around doing shit, makes the day go by a bit faster…

 

Tuesday/Wednesday we spent in a swimming pool learning about all the equipment and emergency procedures for scuba diving… spent the 2 days underwater. We practiced sharing air in the event you’re out. Practiced changing into different masks etc..

 

Thursday/Friday we did the same in the ocean, aswell as some searching underwater… you’re attached to a rope that’s being pulled on a certain amount of times to tell you what direction to swim (since you can’t see anything). The difficulty is we all barely knew what the different pulls ment. The blind was leading the blind… very basic stuff, walk before you run. It’ll get more difficult and complex. .. we’re all looking forward to it.

Amongst all this we did some lectures on how diving can kill you. And we had some discussions on the different animals/creatures we will encounter while diving. Some physics lessons on buoyancy  (flims from the 1800’s), and some pt cock sessions.

 

Until Monday I’m going to rest up for the weekend, drink some coffee and see what next week holds. Scuba diving at night? Should be interesting.

On the dock

RESCUE!

Here We Go…

Happy New Year everyone! And a Merry Christmas to you and your families.

The fun is just beginning…

Now that the longest phase of the course is done, the blog will be updated more frequently as the phases get shorter and quite frankly way more fun. Don’t get me wrong medical was awesome and a lot of really good knowledge, but there are only so many things i can write about when it comes to blood and diabetes.

 

So last we left off we were finished medical and off to Nova Scotia for Helicopter Underwater Escape Training. That was loads of fun and we all went straight to Christmas Leave. Suppose to be a break… It was crazy! As most of you know, over the break I got married… So 12 people came from England a week early, spent Christmas with my whole family then the wedding. It was awesome! But now back to reality…

I flew back into Comox on Friday, did a bunch of laundry, ran around to buy some stuff I needed, and I’m heading into work this morning… The 49ers will be reunited today, get issued a bunch more kit. And we’re off to Victoria BC for the next several weeks. Dive phase.

I don’t know too much about SCUBA Diving other then what SCUBA stands for… So this will be a very interesting phase. There’s been mixed reports on whether the course is fun or not so only time will tell. I do know that it is January… so it’ll be cold -_-… but im sure they will find ways to “keep us warm”. This phase is run by the Navy instead of run by SAR Techs… it’s a long story… I’ll be updating every phase from here on out.

 

RESCUE!