Intro to Tech with Poh Chang Chew (01-09-2009 - 06-09-2009)

This weekend I finished my Intro to Tech course on a rocky boat somewhere in the South China Sea.

First of all I would like to thank Poh Chang for his patience and ability to explain the methodology behind UTD. And of course Tracy for being a great buddy.

I think what stood out most for me in this course is a shift from the "unknown unknowns" (a lot of theory goes into this category spastic hands, horrible trim and buoyancy, skill level) to "known knowns". I always thought I was an "ok" diver, didn't crash into coral, tried to keep everything tucked away, kept an eye on depth and BT and some form of buddy awareness. But during the course it became quite obvious that I am nowhere near the diver I want to be.

About the course itself, I will split it into a theory part and the practical part.

The Theory

I really enjoyed this part, being a bit of a geek I loved the "scuba math" and how easily it can be applied. Same goes for equipment setup, I've always believed in using the right tool for the job and KISS (keep it simple, stupid), both IMHO apply to UTD.

The ability to study the material and think about it before the class is also a big plus. And I think my only problem (small) here is the delivery system of the videos, due to a problematic internet connection to the US not all videos wanted to load.

The Frustra..... Pool/Ocean Sessions

My first thought was; I am going to ace this! Having been a competition swimmer and in love with water since a very young age I though this would be easy. It took the pool about 5 minutes to replace this cockiness with frustration and a realization of the long road ahead, and this was before the back kick part. The back kick and camera had me banging the bottom of the pool with my fists in frustration in no time. During the basic 6, s-drills and valve drill I was everywhere to be found except in the same place.

At the end of the day one thing was clear to me and that was I needed more practice before hitting the ocean. Poh Chang was nice enough to schedule an extra session the next week, which went a lot better. I managed to stay in the roughly the same place both on the horizontal and vertical plain and to actually move backwards with the back kick instead of upwards. This all made me a bit more hopeful about the ocean sessions.

During the OW divers I've learned the following

* I have spastic hands, can't keep them still
* Adjusting the position of the tanks does a great deal for my trim
* Your fins will actually be higher then you think they are, this got me out of an "apache helicopter" like trim
* There is no need to rush drills, so don't do it
* Pressing to hard on your bolt-snaps makes your hands bleed
* Always clip off your primary if you aren't using it, no fun having to search for it when you want to stow away your stage bottle
* I get a 10+ on sucking down all the air that can be found in those double tanks (which is quite a lot).
* I need to keep my hands still.
* Damselfish really love to bite students
* Killing your instructor during the toxing diver "rescue" can't be a good thing.
* etc etc

All in all I had a great time and am looking forward on working on the rather large list of improvements.


ps. I am a horrible writer, so my apologies if my grammar makes your eyes bleed.