Introduction
At this point I have been living in my new house in Fife now for a month. I wanted to get back into my diving again so I found a local SCUBA diving club. I had met the club on Thursday night and took a liking to them, the club was full of passionate divers but were also extremely friendly and well equipped, the club has its own rib that seats four divers as well as a compressor and a bank! Not bad!
Well, if I’m going to be diving I’d best test out the gear, it’s been a good 9 months since it was last used, probably when I was doing my dive master course (which is still incomplete). The kit has also been lugged up from Essex to Scotland whilst be roughly handled by my granddad, so I thought it would be prudent to give it a test. So I met the club at the training pool in Burnt Island. I wanted to give ALL my gear a quick test, so that including my dry suit, twinset, two stages, my single tank rig too (that I was using to teach in as part of my DM class).
At The Pool
So to test all the gear, I’d need my dry suit for my “tech rig” and my wetsuit for my “teaching rig”. I decided to wear my wetsuit as a kind of under suit under my dry suit. So imagine how I felt … At a swimming pool, which is heated to like 30 degrees and wearing a 3mm wetsuit and then my dry suit! To say, “sweating like paratrooper in a maths test” would be an understatement. At this point I started thinking what everyone thinks about their gear, “It will be fine, it’s performed me solidly for all these years, nothing is going to go wrong now!”.
But still, I was here so might as well blow a few bubbles, so I jumped in with the twinset, attached the stages and pootled about. I did a couple of valve drills and a few stage drills and switches, like back-gas to stage, stage to stage and then stage to back gas. So twin-12’s, a stage of 50% and a stage of 02 … 2m deep pool, overkill? Ha-ha! Right, time to get out the pool and change out and grab the single tank rig. So out I got and time to get out the dry suit, that was when I ripped one of my wrist seals…. great!
Right then, out the suit and into the single tank rig, got it on my back stood up and started buckling up the waist belt. Oh, I better turn my air on before I jump eh? Got it cranked open, SPG up to 150bar, that will do. Right, regs in mouth for a quick test …. all good, inflate the wing and then POP and the sound of screaming air. Got the tank turned off and sat down. Brilliant, so that's a burst hose then?! BRILLIANT!
Reflection
On reflection going to the pool session, whilst exhausting was extremely worthwhile.
To be honest, I have had the suit for about 6 years and the seals have never been changed in that time, and I started using dry gloves too, which would have fatigued the wrist seals too. So I suppose I got good value from them! Again at least it happened in/at pool and not in the middle of a sea dive with 8 degree water!
Also, testing the single tank regs out in a pool to learn that there was a fault was a prudent decision and to have learned that in the middle of a dive in the sea, potentially in a position where people depended on me, could have caused some serious issues!!
It was very easy to tell myself running up to the pool session (and just before I got in the water), “it will be fine” and certainly the effort I had to go through was epic and ultimately cost me dearly, but it was very much a requirement, had this happened in the sea on a “big” dive…. I (and others) could have been much worse off than just annoyed.
So the lesson I learned and hopefully you agree with me, is that a check out dive is definitely worth doing if your gear has been laid up for a while is certainly worth doing!
