Edd Sorenson's KISS Sidewinder Rebreather Training VLOG

foreign [Music] so cameraman Todd and I are here to do a vlog that's right we haven't done a vlog in a long time it's been a while in a couple years it's been a hot minute since we've done a vlog Vlogs are fun and we like to do them when the adventure we just had is very fresh in our minds and so we just finished a pretty amazing experience why don't you tell them that's correct so we are back down at Merritt's Mill Pond in sort of the Panhandle Florida Jonathan and I are getting rebreather certified which is how the week started our instructor was the world famous Ed Sorensen and uh he made the week exceptional in all sorts of ways yes so we decided that we wanted to get certified on the kiss Sidewinder rebreather which has sort of become the overwhelmingly most popular rebreather for cave diving because if it's a very low profile and just the way that it emulates uh side mount open circuit in a package that's actually somehow smaller um so once we decided that you know we had to pick an instructor and there really was no question that it had to be had um it really is like the best sort of travel Reed breather in the sort of the best rebreather for side mount cave diving passages I think bar none at this point yes and that's why Ed Sorensen and Brian K cook both are who are friends uh use them and two of the top instructors in the world yeah uh if you go through a list of the who's who of rebreather cave divers you'll find it the kiss sidewinders in a large percentage of those people's main thing so you know when we decided that that was the rebreather we wanted um we knew that we wanted Ed Sorensen to be our instructor and one of the reasons was you know he doesn't have a reputation for being easy he has a reputation for being hard and frankly I don't want an instructor that's easy I want an instructor that teaches me so that when I get out of the class I don't die yeah especially with this you know this is not unlike many scuba certifications because there's you know this plethora out there you know River diving certification there's all these like cards that are a little bit almost of a business model when you're moving to a rebreather it's not you're talking a very serious piece of Life equipment very different very different from open circuit diving you have to know open circuit diving already and then rebreather is a very next level to that but the mistakes only have a grave outcome there's no casual there's very little in the way of like a real mistake in rebreather diving that doesn't have serious consequences or the potential of serious the most serious consequences on the back end um and that's why you want really good instruction yes and that's what we got and so I you know the reason we're doing the Vlog is because we wanted to talk about some of the stuff that happened in the class yes and and so the thing about Ed though he is a wonderful super nice guy and we've known him for years and he's always been very cordial but have you ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket yes because as an instructor you get to a moment where you feel like you're like private pile and you're under the drill sergeant from the movie Full Metal Jacket he is like full and in in point of fact he does actual military training for training for the Navy to train rebreather divers and he uh he makes you he presses upon you the severity of each lesson in a way that many instructors do not these days right his his rationale for being toughested he doesn't want you to do something stupid he wants to train you to be awesome and he doesn't he's not going to let you pass unless you can do it and he's got there are stories I mean just people we talk to at the shop people that work for him that he wouldn't pass yes they had to take extra days of training because they were not living up to his level of expectation and he was not going to pass them even if they worked for him until they met his standard it was mentioned many times by both the some of the customers who had previously gone through the training and by some of the people in the shop and by Ed himself that crying was not uncommon I almost cried something I I have to say you know there were I had uh I think day one I had some very significant issues in day two I had even more significant issues where Ed was definitely not happy I and it to be to be blunt uh I stepped into the water and immediately flooded my Loop and Ed and you've got to be kidding me yeah I came down very assertively and and directly but was correct uh I had made a terrible mistake he said you have got to be bleeping kidding me I told you this on day one close the dsv before you do anything in my in my defense my prior the other rebreather that I use uh has a valve that shuts this way so like a lot of sort of Plumbing in a household you know this is flow and this is you know if the flow is this way then 90 degrees to the slow it's off so I have a bov a bailout valve which is a built-in open circuit second stage with the dive surface valve you turn it this way it flows you turn it 90 degrees to that and it's off and you have a regular Scuba I have never used the lever where it's like up his clothes up is open up is on I still don't know it still doesn't Up is on meaning it's a full it's the closed circuit rebreather and down is off and there's a little little peephole you have to kind of pull it down and then breathe out and then just that little people will blow air out I have to I have to admit like you're used to it no I didn't mess it up because the the shut off on the mouthpiece is on the kiss is the same as on my old Drager that I dove for like six years in season one of blue world so um I'm actually that that I'm used to so I didn't have to get used to a new shutoff on my dsv so that you know I feel bad for you big mistake no but you know no no no I will not make that you'll never you'll never make that yes and I let's be clear I've also never looked down that mistake no you won't no definitely not definitely not but but uh rather learn it in training that was the right place to do it and it came at such a high emotional context I will not soon forget you had nightmares I did I didn't sleep that night like Ed yelled at you and you had nightmares yes I didn't quite get to tears but there were moments and everybody got really quiet yes and you know I felt like cracking a joke but I was like this is not this is not the time you get yelled at it felt like you get yelled at accept the joke later like the teacher's upset you know the whole the whole classroom might pay the best part was that underwater he wears a little para lens video camera on his mask it's like a GoPro but it's designed to go on a scuba mask and after every dive we would review the footage and he would make little hand signals into the floor to the camera he'd have he'd be shooting like one of us Swimming by and he'd put do a hand smoke on him no he's he's head up you know he's doing this he's doing this it's like a virtual reality game you see what's going on but all you see is a couple hands yeah and then and then what you see is all the footage would go back and forth because he's going ah so we're going to put that in the segment it's going to be the edcam yeah so we're going to make some fun out of it but you know it was tough and and what's very interesting is that normally uh you would take the rebreather class in Open Water you know not in a can yeah but because Ed doesn't really have open water to teach in he has special permission from Kiss to teach his class in the cavern zone of Jackson Blue Springs and so you're doing your training in an overhead environment you're not far from the exit but you are in an overhead environment and so he feels that he should teach the whole class knowing full well that most of the people that take the class from him are gonna go on to Cave dive with it he feels that he should take teach the whole class as if everyone is going to Cave dive with it and so you are expected to have all cave diver everything yeah cave diver attitude cave diver equipment cave diver body positioning cave cave diver fin etiquette and let's just say he's really strict about that very strict I don't think my ankles go that way but no by the end of the class I learned they're gonna go that way or it's gonna yell at me yes yes and he expects you to have like perfect buoyancy control and why don't we talk about buoyancy controlling the rebreather well this is this is the thing right the the biggest piece of transition I think other than you know the mechanics and the physics and setting things up and the caring stuff but as far as the actual operation of the unit while diving it buoyancy buoyancy buoyancy that's what you're really there to nail like obviously you can you monitor like your ppo2 you can add oxygen you can add dilute there's all these safety procedures but actually driving and flying the unit um it's buoyancy is the issue because it's open circuit we've taken inhalation and so we get a little more buoyant and then when we exhale that that air or whatever we're breathing leaves us and so we start to sink and so you and I have been doing this so long that it's instinctive to us to like inhale and start going up a little and exhale and start going down a little and that has become a part of how we swim and maneuver it in a cave or in any environment it's just it's instinctual and we have to now fight that hard-earned skill yeah and relearn because now breathing and breathing out doesn't change your buoyancy at all but if you move up a foot well all that air expanded and now you're gonna like be rapidly ascending it's not like you can just exhale a little bit and make a correction no no no you you actually you have you can but you have to do it through your nose it doesn't have to suddenly create bubbles exhale you know through your nose really or out the side of your lips and then counteract that buoyancy change even for just a little change like a foot up or down now it's the opposite if you go down that means you have to add a little bit of gas to make up for that you can't just like take in a slightly larger breath which is what we'd instinctually do and literally one foot makes a difference yes but yeah when you nail it you are you could just free float in in perpetuity in a position you're not going up you're not going down you've got it and the key is that you can breathe so for the non-divers yeah you have this you have air in your scuba tank that's highly compressed it's compacted down to be super high density and very low buoyancy for how much air is in there because it's just super compressed and every time you take a breath your regulator brings that air into your lungs and it expands into lung volume right and and then you're when your lungs fill up it's like you have a balloon and now you start to float and then when you exhale all those bubbles go out your lungs get small and you start to sink and so when you're swimming along as an open circuit scuba diver as you inhale your body naturally goes up and as you exhale you naturally go down and you get used to it so that if you're swimming along and there's an obstacle that you want to go over you'll be swimming along you're neutrally buoyant and you take it just oh here's an obstacle you inhale gently and you go up and then when you go over you exhale and you go back down and you keep on going and you you've been doing this for a long time yeah I mean we've been diving for 30 something years you've been diving 35 years 39 39 years so in any case so you're so used to this and the analogy that I like to give people is like imagine you you're you're learning to drive a car with a manual transmission right when you first start to drive you got to get the hang of the clutch and the gas and the shift and the whole thing and you have to focus your attention on driving because you really have to think about doing those shifts and after a while you get so used to it it's like muscle memory you just shift you don't even think you could be having a conversation you could be you know talking on the phone well maybe not talking on the phone but you could be doing a lot of multitasking while you're driving not even thinking about shifting now imagine now that somebody flipped the the gas pedal and the clutch that's all they did they just flipped the gas pedal in the clutch you know you would crash into a tree instantly you would never be able to it would take so long to learn but if I took someone that had never driven before and put them in the car that had the clutch and and the gas backwards they could learn it probably just as fast as you learned it the other way right sure so if you take someone that's been diving open circuit scuba for 30 years and then you slap them in a rebreather and it does nothing the way they expect when I'm swimming along and I inhale it just takes some air from the counter lung and moves it into my lung the volume doesn't change it just moves around in a circle and so when I swim up to something and I inhale literally nothing happens but now we know the solution take Ed Sorensen's class and Sorensen the solution that is the solution yeah so it was rigorous so it was five days it was five days and every day he would add some new things in five long days very long these were especially the day where you flooded your Loop and we had to wait for you to go back and repack your scrubbers I mean the first couple days were like 13 13 hour days yeah there it was exhausting it was awesome but it was fun it was fun so he had these like underwater flashcards yes the flash cards but now like you know nightmare cards and and he had a circuit in the cave that you had to swim and it was a torture circuit because it was 40 feet deep on one end and it was like 30 feet deep on the other end and it went up and then it went down and then it went up and it went down but it's a cave so it's it's a passageway so all along the way if you float up you hit the ceiling and of course that's bad and if you float down you hit the floor if you're not allowed to hit the ceiling or the floor in a sense like the cave training in the cave was an advantage because in Open Water if you were being trained on this rebreather you could kind of cheat right like you can you know if it's open water like who's gonna know if you win how are they gonna Force you up this way or that way it'd be a little tough but here like you have no option like there's no way to cheat it you're going up you're going down yeah and then you go down into the chimney to his second torture chamber room then you come back from that torture chamber room then there was medies terrified which was the worst torture of torture room torture chamber number three because that one had a huge huge huge change of depth but you went down to you went down to like 50 and then you came up to like 20. and then you went around a big loop and you very slowly went back down to 50 then you came up to 20. then he reversed it you need to do the quick chain and if you went down the deep down from 20 down to 50 and you touched the bottom you got this you got the stair yes it would be I saw that right on the review suck [Applause] we've been found out oh so horrible and I think I'm such a good diver and then and then I take Ed's class and I find out that uh not so much there's levels yeah is it nice these next level yeah so then what would happen he had these cards and you'd be swimming this lap of torture trying to keep your buoyancy going up over here going down over here and you're we're gonna move all the controls and try not to look like an idiot try to keep your Fins Up try to keep your posture right try to keep your hands out try to monitor your po2 you're doing all the right things and then you swim by it and you just go oh please let him not please please don't let him and he he'd whip out a flash card and you go you're low on po2 you'd be like what do we do oh [Laughter] would come around and Todd would go oh I see what he did he flashed the low on po2 card I'm ready but then when you got to him I would become something completely if he likes hypoxia or something else completely different yeah but every once in a while he will give you the fist bump that should be like every once in a while every once in a while you would you would do well and you'd get the fist balls and when you got the fist bump you were so happy like oh yeah I mean now I see his formula was like you start out outside the cave just at this top he runs towards you too he runs through the cards then he checks your trim and buoyancy in a little section and then after that you go start entering the cave you do your you know 20 foot checks for uh for uh cell verification uh and and uh 1.6 check for oxygen and to check yourselves then you enter the cave and then you get to torch chamber number one you you switch he said you swim for like 20 minutes and then the card starts [Applause] for what seems like forever yeah and then you're into the deep section and it's cards bang bang bang bang harder drills just buoyancy up and down I see our drills all the tough stuff deep and then you're out of that and then don't forget we have to we had to bail out open circuits deep to shallow that's right and and manage the expanding buoyancy of everything yes while you're on open circuit I'm doing the chicken let's burping the platter and all that stuff it was it was really interesting it was challenging yeah it was definitely challenging but how do you feel as a diver right now by the way did you pass I did pass I think we both passed we passed we passed but I gotta tell you it was not a foregone conclusion in the last day we were feeling the pressure because before the dive he said you know you guys have been doing pretty well but you know we're gonna we're gonna wait and see how you do on the checkout the final checkout and we're both like if we screw up anything Ed's gonna fail us and then we're gonna have the Ed Sorensen failure of Shame that's it that's it what would be the way I mean we're discussing what would be the correction process is it a coming back for a week right get an extra day yeah how's that all work now fortunately we had left two extra days in our trip just in case we did but well and you know there were degrees I think what it comes down to is he needed confidence that you could safely run the unit everything else you know this you come out of the class knowing you need to work on some skills oh yeah you come out and I think that's gonna be true literally terrible at diving it yes but you can dive it but you're you're you can you could you're safe at dying you're safe you can you can run it you're safe yes you but you're terrible at it yes yeah it's like you went to Driver's Ed and you know you know how to you drive a car and then you you win you win your driver's test and you passed but everybody knows you still really suck at driving it's the old adage you know this you get the card and it's the license to learn it's the license to learn you get you get your driver's license and it's now you start driving and you really start learning and it's the same thing here now we're ready to like really learn how to use the units and you know what the worst part is what's the worst part well it's December it's December we just got our new rebreathers and we're gonna go home where it's winter yes how are we gonna practice I'm feeling like a dive trip is coming on some place warm I like the way that sounds ah someplace warm that's rebreather friendly something with caves maybe no we can't dive it in caves yet can't drive it okay diving in caves yet you had to do open water for a while before you do the Cave thing I guess it's tropical water then I'm thinking someplace warm so if you are the owner of a tropical hotel and dive shop call us that's it we're looking for some segment ideas that can support rebreathers that's right yeah that's cool but anything else we want to do to talk about this in our amazing vlog I you know you know I think it's been a great week and uh yeah I think that's all for town it's been great yeah so um we were terrified by Ed yes but we love him and we thought the class was amazing and we think we learned so much and we're glad that we had an instructor that brought the best of our skills out and let's be clear about it one of he's an amazing person and one of the most amazing skills he has is as angry as he seems he's actually not he's not he's just not hold the grudge he's just loud he's like he's you know when you get to the surface he's kind of laughing at it he's done it so long uh and brought so many people up from nothing to be exceptional divers that like while you feel like you you know you let the professor down like he's he's very very uh friendly and humble and just a wonderful human being well and and every returning guest gets a big hug yes like you know he's just a very warm guy he comes off like a tough guy but he's actually he's a teddy bear teddy bear yeah he is but he will give you the Ed Sorensen headshake of shame or water if you suck he will keep you alive right he'll make sure you know the unit so that you can stay alive no matter what happened yeah oh God what are you doing all right well everybody that's our Vlog stay tuned for the episode or maybe the episode already came out I don't know how do we do vlogs no we're gonna find out you probably already saw the episode but if you did or you didn't I hope you liked the Vlog no subscribe yeah subscribe again later hey everyone thanks for watching our latest episode all the way to the end you're crazy if you don't subscribe hit that subscribe button now so you won't miss our next episode and check out our merch Link in the description for some blue World swag [Music]

Channel: BlueWorld_plus

Views: 15,491

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Id: 0Ps7WESLCn0

Length: 24min 16sec (1456 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 04 2023