UW Navigation dive

The Dive Club had a great time at Lover’s Cove on February 11, at the Underwater Navigation Class and Challenge. The weather was perfect (high 60’s to 70’s) clear and calm. Tourists were on the beach catching rays!!! The DM’s came very early to setup the course ? 6:00am ? and I REALLY appreciate all their help! Krassi, Jason, and Rolf were all there to get us started. The class got started at 9:00 by doing dry runs in the parking lot and really getting to know their compasses.

Once we hit the water we were all very pleased by the incredible clarity (30+) and the abundant marine life. It was beautiful in the cove! The surge was just enough to make sure the class was getting training on estimating 100’ when the surge throws you off a bit. Between time, kick cycle and air usage, everybody figured it out. We practiced various multi-point patterns, did out and backs, used natural nav as well as our compasses underwater and learned how to mark a position in the water using shore alignment points to find it again on the next dive. After three training dives, I feel that anybody in the club that wants to make sure they don’t lose their way underwater should buddy-up with Jason, Krassi, Rolf, Andy, Karen, Joe, or Ryan! These cool-cats know how to navigate! They are Navi-Guessers no more!

Setting up the UW Challenge turned-out to be a bigger challenge than we thought it would be! Getting each of the markers in place and making sure that we could actually find them again turned out to be a bit difficult. We all learned a lot about setting up courses like this and have a much better idea how to do it next time. Everybody did great, but once the challenge was finally set-up, the only ones that could actually find all the markers were the DM’s who set-up the course. We had a few club visitors who dropped-in to actually run the Challenge Course, and everybody had fun trying!

Andy and Chris stuck around for the night-dive which was fun, although the viz had dropped down to about 15-20’ by then. I had a seal that kept following me around throughout the night dive, staying just out of my light, obviously waiting to munch on light-blinded fish! Andy helped me pick up the markers and we left Lover’s around 7:00pm. Tired, but full of pride about how well our DCOSV club members did today and how everybody pitched in to make it successful!