Dive Report: Thursday 9/19/03 El Prado Night dive

Team: Christos, Manny, and Matt

Seas: 1-2 ft
Surf: 3-4 ft (serious stuff for FL)
Visibility: 4 ft
Temp: 82 degrees
Bottom Time 49 minutes
Gas: 32%
Time: 7 PM

El Prado is one block North of Commercial. Manny wanted to work on his buoyancy and trim with a back plate and harness. Christos and I wanted to work on mask off hovering and other tech 1 drills.

The seas were not rough, but there were swells and surfers catching a ride the last bit into to shore. Common senses would have been to call it, but we were already there. We geared up and headed in, once you cleared the surf zone it was a piece of cake. We surface swam out past the buoys and descended. 1ft vis. ugly...

I lead out East, Manny was in the middle and Christos brought up the rear. The plan was to swim out to the end of the second reef, hit 20ft of water, drill on masks and swim back in. I swam out ahead of the other two and waited for them to catch up. Our pace was slow so we swam for about 15 minutes out over the first reef line. I felt Christos swim up behind me and then I heard bubbles coming out of the left post. I shut it down, and still heard bubbles. I reached back for the isolator and grabbed one of Christos' valves and started shutting it off. Then he show me the bubbler. I ended the drill with the hand signal saying that my left post was no longer functional. I checked valve and continued.

We were not going to make it out to the second reef line, so I popped my mask off to see how long it would take them to find me. After 15-20 seconds I felt a hand on my arm. After about a minutes I put my mask back on. Christos followed suit. He was floating up very slowly and I tried to tell him to come down a little. I discussed my hovering problem with a veteran cave diver and he gave me a good analogy. When you try to walk with a full cup of hot coffee, consciously trying NOT to spill it, you do. When you walk normally and pay no attention to it, you don't have a problem. I still thought about it, but I tried hard not to think about it. To test the theory on Christos I gave him something else to think about. I switched to my back up reg and put the primary next to his right ear and purged. With his mask off, Christos started to shut down is valve and switch regs. He hovered perfectly under the added task load.

Manny was feeling left out, so it was time to drill with him. I loaned Manny Andrea's HID to play with. Mental note, when giving a new diver a HID light, wear sun glasses! Manny did a great job of keeping the light out in front of me on the swim out. When I gave him an Out of Air, he must have though I wanted to see the inside of the HID light as he put it right in my face. I couldn't see the reg he was trying to donate. We shared gas, swam, and then he put it back. I had him switch the light from the right to the left hand. Then Christos gave Manny an OOA and he got the reg right away. Then Manny got to solve the light cord / long hose problem when sharing gas. Manny floated up while untangling the cords. Christos pulled him back down by the long hose. I cracked up laughing. It was funny, plus the Deja'vu of remember myself being in the same position and seeing Christos have the same problem when he was getting back into diving over a year ago. Everyone forgets that we all walked down that road at some point in their diving career.

Time was ticking on the parking meter. It was time to head back in. On the way and looked back and found the bright beam of the 18 watt HID has been replaced by a dull orange circle. We switched positions and put Christos in the lead with his dull light. We didn't swim very far before he switched back to his primary. I took back over as the lead and started swimming. I checked my compass and it said due East. I paused, engaged the brain, and realized I had gotten turned around and we were heading back out to sea. I asked my buddies which way to swim? They pointed East, Err... primary and back up brains have failed. "East ocean, West Everglades, I want to go West!

We swam until the vis dropped back down to a foot and then surfaced. We were still a ways out and had drifted North of our exit point. A 10 minutes swim in got us to the beach and back to our cars at 8:57 PM, right before the 9 PM parking deadline.

We broke down our gear and headed over to Mulligans to debrief.

--Matt