11.20.10
6:58am to 7:29am
Buddy: Jenni Wilson-Cooper, Linda, Sam
Depth: 25ft
Bottom Time: 31 minutes
Vis: 12ft
Temp: 63°
Notes:
This was the beach day for our Rescue Diver Course. We were taught by Linda Shafer at Beach Cities Scuba in Orange County. She was a very good instructor, we usually work with Joe Tustison also a great instructor but he was not available on the dates we wanted.
The day started out early. We met at 6:30am. It was cold and rainy, however, it was just acceptable enough to go out.
When we first went into the water the swells were pretty mild maybe 2 feet. But within 1 minute of getting past the surf zone swells picked up to 3/4ft with some 5ft swells in there. The conditions were also pretty choppy with mild white caps in the open water. Once we dropped down it was much calmer and the conditions were actually pretty decent for Shaws Cove.
Our dive was a 'Search for Missing Diver' dive. Think of it as hide and seek. So once we were down, we swam to the main reef and the three of us taking the course waited while Linda disappeared into the blue. We waited the planned 2 minutes and began our search patterns. Per previous conversations with Jenni and Sam, we went with a U-Shaped search pattern. Basically, set your compass swim 3 minutes, turn 90°, swim 15 seconds, turn 90°, swim 3 minutes and repeat.
Sadly we did not find Linda, however, she said that she saw us swim by twice. So we did the search patterns fine, but need to be more aware with our looking around.
The rest of the day we did things like recover unconscious divers from the sea floor, do CPR in the water, take off a non-breathing victims gear, etc. etc. It was very choppy by the end of our day, Linda assured us if we were able to do our drills today we would be fine helping people in real life.
Although I hope we will never have to recover and unconscious diver and perform CPR in the ocean, it feels good to know how to handle it.
