Wreck Training – A personal perspective
Posted By Dave Ross on 28 July 2002
"Decompression ceiling, cave or wreck, it's all the same. If it comes to a problem you can't just go up". How many times I've heard or read these words I'm not sure, but thinking back and scratching my head it actually amazes me to think that that I once accepted this as being true!
Re-evaluating that statement was one of the things that started to happen the moment my formal wreck training began. All of that open water deep diving experience, the notion that I'd got everything pretty well worked out and that there couldn't be that much more to it than I was already accomplishing, that belief began to fall apart as soon as the course began taking shape. It opened the door on a vast new field of skills and techniques that one has no option but to get to grips with, and attempt to master. It forced a complete reappraisal of the "decompression and overhead are all the same philosophy". They are not.
My training was conducted with long time dive buddies as classmates, in the capable hands of Alex Santos of IANTD. It began with a dry dive. A line drill simulating a penetration around a children's playground. Straightforward so far, a few minutes of work and we were advised that we'd reached thirds on our imaginary air supply and should head out. Simultaneously our instructor blindfolded us. The unthinkable had happened --a total light failure.
We groped sightless along our guideline until politely informed "Sorry lads, you're dead" This was the first of many rude awakening's. If it had taken five minutes to go in on a third of the available air, then ten minutes worth was available to exit. Simple math shouted that this was ample, and yet the time was up, we had drowned. The simple lesson, don't ever, ever rush a penetration or you will be faced with having to rush out if in difficulty.
Beyond such starkly illustrated points, the four days and more than eleven hours spent inside wrecks served to highlight just how much better a supposedly polished technical diver has to become to be genuinely slick on a penetration dive. What did I begin to reflect on? Perfect buoyancy doesn't give you much without perfect trim and perfect propulsion skills. As partners communications and awareness? An instinctive ability to assess another diver's mental state and stress level by their body language comes easily with years of instructing. But real, effective, light signals, a range of clear and non-ambiguous hand signals, the decision to go to touch contact in a silt out, all were new and required a good degree of conscious effort.
New motor skills where required and a heightened co-operation within the team. Cruising along a wall and eyeing the fish, watching each other shoot an SMB and doing gas switch -- easy. Add clean, fuss free stage drops and retrievals, S-drills with all three lights, choice of primary and secondary tie offs and correctly placing oneself to illuminate for a buddy doing a line wrap or retrieving a reel.
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