Critiquing A Scuba Diver

hey guys this brining in from Lake Hickory goodbye marina this video is gonna be a little bit different than most of the other ones we do this is going to be a commentated video here the purpose of the dive that you're fixing the sea the diver that's with me we're fixing the taking him up north to do some ice diving to get his ice divers hurt so the dive that we're doing now is just to get him used to some colder water prior to going up there get him used to the equipment that he's wearing because he's had to change up his gear configuration a little bit due to what he's trying to get certified in so this is a good dive to prepare him for for what's to come we are also going to use this dive you'll notice half of this video will be what I call selfie cam the other half will be on the dive itself and we get asked by a lot of divers to critique them underwater so you can actually use the camera to critique yourself while diving and that's kind of what we're gonna do I'm gonna critique myself throughout this dive and kind of show you some problems that we occurred or we found and how we fix them right there was the first problem we already had just as soon as we went under my alternate second stage on my primary rig went ahead and started free-flowing anytime you have a problem you want to go ahead and solve it rotting in there don't wait until later on the dive to try to fix it smaller problems can become larger emergencies later on in the dive emergencies can call elevated stress elevated stress can cause panic and of course in scuba diving there's no room for panic if you look there on the right side of the screen you will notice that his second stage is also free-flowing and what causes this a lot of times depending on how you have your second stage attached to you we use either plug top systems that goes inside the mouthpiece to help protect the mouthpiece and then of course you have a carabiner or some type of clip mounting idea that clips to your BC or even if it's not a plug one that completely goes over the mouthpiece itself through differential pressure that usually makes the the second stage free flow and usually what you have to do is pull it out let some of that air out and then simply snap it back in and usually stops the free flow will talk about gear configuration in just a minute because I do have another second stage that is hanging upside down a lot of times second stages you want to hang them sideways and not just like if you notice the orange one there it's not hanging completely upside down it's almost hanging like it would be in my mouth and that one of course is ran to my pony bottle but even though it's hanging off a necklace I have it turned so that the mouthpiece is not facing upward because usually that will cause a second stage to free flow also speaking of gear configuration we'll go ahead and go over the gear that I'm wearing I am of course wearing a dry suit os systems tell us model dry suit I typically would be diving in a steel tank however this one is an aluminum eighty where we are going for his ice diving class the shop that we're using to providing tanks for us because for us traveling from North Carolina all the way up to New York it's actually easier to travel without tanks so we would be using their tanks and all they have available of course is aluminum tanks so even for myself as a nice diving instructor I like to prepare for the classes by wearing the gear that I'll be wearing to teach the class so I can get properly weighted and properly trimmed out of course I could do have an aluminum 30 cubic foot pony bottle there attached a lot of times I prefer to have it underneath my arm instead of on the tank itself however the three of the top siddhappa naidu a law of course ice diving public safety diving and underwater criminal investigations and those three particular incidences I would prefer to have the pony on my back instead of underneath my arm regulator choice I'm diving the Amari Osby US Navy 22 and then they're on the pony I have just a old workhorse it's a sherwood brute first stage it comes down to a sherwood brute second stage which was the orange one you saw hanging underneath Nik their console of choice I'm using a Mario's puck hair dive computer it's an Arian degraded version I also have a Mario's matrix as a backup computer on my wrist and there on my left shoulder you can see I instead of knives I usually use EMT shears as a part-time career I'm also a public servant so I work in the the fire and EMS field also so I have an unlimited supply of EMT shears they work good they'll cut just practically anything that you can come across and in the event that you lose them they're very very inexpensive to replace so they're bumped camera on one of the cars underneath there that the location we're diving is the Lake Norman quarry it's owned and operated by the Piedmont diamond & Rescue Association the PD RA is a probably owned organization they own three quarries here in state of North Carolina you can become a member of it their yearly memberships that you can pay and with the membership of course you get 365 day access you can swim on-site scuba diving on-site you can camp on-site grill out there there are other rules there's no fishing allowed or anything like that but it's a great family-oriented place to become a member of of course you can dive year-round 365 days a year got a lot of neat stuff we just passed one of the training platforms this is just a hula hoop setup for buoyancy control you know Boyd sees a big thing in diving that you constantly have to manipulate your Boise Boise is not one thing that you're going to set up at the beginning of the dive and be done with because especially in the aluminum 80 tank that I'm wearing there as I use the air up I'm actually losing weight so I start to be or start to become a little bit more positively buoyant than neutral so I'm constantly having to manipulate my buoyancy and even and still think you're gonna have to just not quite as much as what an aluminum tank does they do make a neutrally buoyant aluminum eighties which are great but like I said since we're trying to prepare him for his ice dive and of course I'm the instructor going up with him to teach him I also want to be practicing in the same gear that I'll be wearing while I'm up there so hence why I got the tank ohm that I do here we come up this is called the stack swim-throughs these are just four large culverts that are roughly 40 foot deep and in this particular quarry and they're great to practice trim fin techniques or feenin it's great to work on your buoyancy if you're getting into tops of diving the where you're going to have overhead environments this is a good training ground for it you can kind of see there silt that's kind of collected inside there so using proper fitting techniques to get through them and and having proper buoyancy so that you're not beating and banging up all over the culvert itself that's gonna make it much better for the diver that's behind you because you're not stirring up the visibility for him so and now we're back onto selfie cam here we just come out of the culverts you can kind of see the diver there behind me if you'll notice my trim in the water compared to his I am in that horizontal position that's something that US has divers that's what we want to strive to get he's more and you'll see it later on the video too he's more in what I call the bicycling position if you if you kind of imagine someone riding a bike that's the position that he's in we do have him properly weighted with the equipment that he has on however what we don't have he's not properly trimmed out so just because you have the right amount of weight and when you do your weight check at the beginning every dive your your weight check is meant to float you at eye level holding a normal breath at the surface and then as you exhale you should sink below the surface that's that's a good way to check your weights but to check to see if you're properly trimmed out you should be able to be able to hover in that horizontal position and that's when you know that you're properly trimmed out so after this video I was able to show it to him I was able to critique him he could critique himself because he could actually see himself in the video another good thing that these videos are for guys anytime you feel my dive after you watched it a couple of times hit the play button one more time but kind of either turn away from the screen or close your eyes and listen to the sounds cameras are very good to to record your breathing and if you listen you can hear my breathing in the video I have long inhales long exhales there's no pauses I'm not skip breathing I'm not hyperventilating so the the camera is gonna keep you honest it's gonna let you know exactly how you're breathing underwater and we always want to control our breathing you know the deeper we go the more air it takes and if we're hyperventilating we're taking even more air in if we're skip breathing then we're retaining co2 which is not good for us it's very unhealthy for us so you know listen to your dives at when you film them you play them back sometimes just kind of turn away don't focus on the dive itself just listen to your breathing and that's going to help you out later on it'll help get your breathing under control - you'll know kind of how to fix what issues that you have this is another one of the training platforms here there's a little rocket washing actually get on and ride but if you'll notice hanging below the diver he has his flashlight clipped off to his BCD but it's hanging down below him about two foot and a good thing to do it's always good to have your items clipped off your accessories but if they're hanging down that low that can cause some problems that's an entanglement hazard ere he could drag it in a seal especially on these platforms it could get caught in one of the holes of the platform he can get entangled and stuck so if you clip your items off or even if you put them in pockets or whatnot you want to secure them put them in your pocket put it underneath your cummerbund stick it up underneath the shoulder strap when you're not using it you can always pull it out use it but make sure you secure it back that way you don't have entanglement if you kind of look there on that platform there's plenty of holes that a flashlight or something can can sneak down into get stuck and we're we're fixing to go here there's a lot of seal and mud on the bottom and so if that flash life he will say two foot up off the bottom he might have proper trim proper buoyancy but that flashlights starting up to the bottom and that's going to mess up the visibility for the guys that's behind you and let's say that you're running a navigational heading or whatnot when you turn around to come back on your typical heading if you stirred up that bottom it might hinder you a little bit especially if you're using natural navigation you know if you're using a compass as long as you see the confidence you keep it level you can run a straight line for your reciprocal but if you're using natural navigation in your Basin you're heading simply off of landmarks well if you start up the visibility and you can't see those those natural landmarks then you're not going to be able to navigate properly so speaking of navigation on this this whole dive here we've used what's called wine navigation everything in the quarry is tied off to another object so it makes it really easy to navigate from one point to the other point there are navigation there's a map at the when you first come into the what I call the prep area at this at this particular quarry there's a map that you can look at and it shows you the navigational heading so if you dive with a slate you can write those headings down put you a little note of what each heading leads to that way you can run compass navigation if need be however with these ropes throughout the water the the lines make it very easy for us to navigate what we're diving on here of course this is the graveyard scene this was put in a couple years ago by one of our quarry managers he did it for just a cool little diving attraction during Halloween season and it's kind of stuck a lot of the divers like it's something neat to go down there and see we also use this you can kind of see some of the arms and the hands that's men severed and put down in there and of course are all fake none of its real however with that being said we do use this training area for all types of diamond like I said I do a lot of public safety diving and I teach a lot of PSD diving and I also teach a lot of underwater crime scenes and when I'm training students you know one thing that they commonly may see a course are bodies under water so this is a neat place that I can take them to train that way they can see what bodies look like underwater so here's two little Halloween babies over here off to our left and even though they're there Halloween style babies they got sharp vampire teeth and all that this is also good training for drowning victims if I'm training someone how to recover say a child that's drown sometimes psychologically this can this can mess with the divers head so this gives a semi realistic feel to what they may see underwater if say if a child drowns in a swimming pool or even in a local lake or something the public safety diver can go down there it's it's about as realistic so we can get any time that we're training in an area that doesn't have something like this we do have mannequins that we can use that are a little bit more realistic but these are already in there they work great for us for training purposes so that's what we like to use a lot of times this is the actual this I think we're coming up yeah this is the turnaround point for the graveyard it's just one of the sea-doos that they have sunk in there that line there directly front it goes off to another location too I believe it goes off to the vertical boat is the attraction at the end of it but there's a lot of different boats and stuff in this particular query there's several boats several cars there's airplane fuselage there's a school bus several sailboats there's a bunch of these sea-doos here's another like I said the skeletons and stuff for that for the haunted trail also work good for our PS DS and our UC eyes to train with for investigative purposes so kind of gives them a realistic feel of what they may come across underwater but if you'll notice real quick as we'll come around you can see the rope tied off to the sea do there that's the rope we just came in on and if you notice we still got plenty decent visibility we've got about 15 to 20 foot visibility there meaning we did not stir up the bottom as we came through there we stayed far enough up off the bottom without fluctuating up and down too much we use proper feeding techniques because even a flutter kick if you got a good strong powerful fin a flutter kick is gonna pick sealed up anywhere from two to three foot below you and it'll just stir up the visibility to where basically it's blacked out you're not going to have any visibility so use some proper feeding techniques for the environment that you're in or for your location is only help you out even that much more this is the end of the haunted trail here this is just the little graveyard scene they have set up speaking of graveyards if you want a really good enjoyable dive it's a little bit deeper but check out the graveyard at Lake Jocassee down in South Carolina it offers it's an actual graveyard and depending on the time of the year and what the water level is last time I dove it I believe it was around 117 feet I know when the water is up sometimes they claim it's around 130 540 foot deep because I know they regulate the water level there at that particular quarry quite a bit but that's a good dive to go dive it's right here on the verge of technical diving as far as depth limits but it depends on the water level you can really really get a good dive in we're about to the end of video here like I said once again I am an aluminum 80 so I'm constantly having to manipulate my point see here at the end of the dive as I use air up out of my tank I'm constantly having to vent air from my dry suit to help keep myself neutrally buoyant that's just something that that's just part of life when you dive with aluminum cylinders sometimes even with steel cylinders just not quite as much but you'll also notice I'm constantly checking my gauges and checking my air supply it's always good to be vigilant of your air supply your no decompression limit and just always be vigilant where your buddies at here in a minute I'll extend the camera out you'll see both me and my buddy I want you to notice there once again I'm having an event to stay neutrally buoyant but I want you to notice my trim compared to my buddies here like I said I'm in that horizontal trim position he's more in the bicycling position so even though you are properly weighted you may not be properly trimmed out for the dive so that's something to always think about while diving and that's where a video camera really comes in handy you you can really critique yourself by simply just rewatching the video seeing what you look like underwater looking at your gear configuration looking at accessories there you can kind of see his flashlight hanging down below him you can see he's clearly in that box in position so guys use this video as a training video for yourself when you're recording your dive so every now and then turn to came around looked back at yourself and really critique yourself because you're going to be your own worst enemy and that that's going to be the best training that you can do to become a more sufficient and a more efficient diver I guess you could say so guys I really appreciate you watching this video as always make sure you follow us on Twitter make sure you like us on Facebook pin us on Pinterest subscribe to us on YouTube if you got any comments concerns simply put them down below and as always guys we appreciate your business

Channel: LakeHickoryScuba

Views: 5,271

Rating: 4.7037039 out of 5

Keywords: Lake, Hickory, Scuba, Marina, Taylorsville, North, Carolina, Alexander, County, Diving, Drysuit, Wetsuit, BCD, Regulator, Fins, Mask, Snorkel, Public, Safety, Under, Water, Criminal, Investigations, Mares, OS, Systems, Ocean, Reef, Full, Face, Training, XS, Trident, Charter, PDIC, PADI, SEI, CMAS, Educators, International, Boating, Bait, Fishing, Docks, Search, Recovery, Specialty, Night, Drift, EFR, First, Aid, CPR, AED, Emergency, Oxygen, Provider, Divemaster, Assistant, Instructor, Trainer, Walk, Through, Critique, PDRA, Commentary, Selfie, Ice

Id: mltLQmAus1s

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 10 2015