Robbie and I went out for a shore dive at Datura.

I ran him through the paces in true GUE fashion. That is to say, when ever you do something wrong, something else is going to happen to push the snow ball a little further down the hill.

I also videoed some of the skills for Robbie could see for himself. I do not have a fancy camera, but the MPEG video shot by most cameras does the job. First we did all the kicks and he got it and I helped him figure out the backwards kick. He practiced it several times while I was taking photos.

Next step was valve drills. He did that well too, but it took him a little too long. I believe the skill still has to be done in 90 seconds. On the forth try, I asked Robbie do a valve drill WITHOUT his mask, the buoyancy was better and he did it in 90 seconds.

I don't want to give away all my secerts, but Robbie also got to hear and feel what its like to have a first stage failure.

I made some notes during the dive of good discussion topics to be reviewed. I know most of these topics are in our SFL-DIR archive as they are mostly questions I asked when I started diving doubles. I could use some help pulling them out of the archive (I can never find the darn MSG in the yahoo archives).

This dive also reminded me on how important it is for experienced divers to mentor new divers to keep their own skills fresh. I asked Robbie to do a primary light failure (aka, stow and get out a backup). He shrugged his shoulders at me and showed me his empty harness. I missed "1 primary and 2 backups" in the equipment check before the dive. I assumed he had them and never reviewed it at the check. That was my bad!

I had a flag line, Robbie shot a lift bag, while securing the spool, with his wet notes in his hand I ran an OOA drill. Once I got a reg, I took my mask off and just floated there. This level of stress is WAY beyond Fundamentals, but it is a heads up as to what is to come with Tech 1. After trying to push me in one direction, I thumbed the dive and he brought me up for 13ft with a controlled ascent. On the surface, our lines were tangled together and we had to sort them out.

On the surface Robbie said, "What a boondoggle!"

I said, "Hey we didn't die!"

He said, "I shooting for a higher standard than NOT dying!"

I thought to myself on the swim in, "Good, that is what DIR is all about, striving for a higher standard."