UTD TECH 1 Vancouver

Hey Everyone little late in getting this up on the forum, been a few months since I took the course. But here is my write up from another website I frequent.

Recently I traveled to Vancouver to try out this UTD Tech 1 training with Todd Powell from Ocean Quest dive shop. To sum it all up in the first few lines, all I can say is wow, I have never spent so much time with out my mask in my life, oh and the course was awesome. Overall though I squeaked through the course and got the pass. Now for the detailed description feel free to skip.

Thursday February 19th 2009.

Well the day started off early with me hauling my butt out of bed at around 4 to make the drive over to Vancouver to get the course started. I was a bit nervous and also not sure if I should be going to do the course as I had only dove once in the past 3 months due to work and buddy scheduling. After having numerous phone calls from work and managing to solve a bunch of problems while on the road I made it to the hotel the 401 on Boundary Way and Canada Way in Burnaby (not the best hotel but I wasn't spending much time there to begin with).

After arriving at the hotel Todd contacted me and we went out for coffee to get to know each other. Right off the bat I knew he would be an out standing guy to work with, his instructor abilities were yet to be tested but having been trained by AG I was pretty confident in those abilities. After our meet and greet it was back to the hotel and rest time.

Friday, February 20th 2009

The day started of at noon as Todd had a meeting with the university about setting up a course or something. Anyways we decided to go to Kates park to take advantage of the warm weather and the day light. Well we suited up and we went over what he wanted me to go through the basic 6, finning techniques and the valve drills.

To start off I shot the bag which went really well, but I wasn’t feeling comfortable in the water I was really head heavy, but I thought it might have been due to just being nervous etc. I started to go through the basic six and I literally blew it on them, as I was not able to get neutral and was just uncomfortable. I then moved onto the fin techniques and had no problems with that. But the valve drill was different from what I had learned in my GUE class, and I had a hard time getting that out of my mind, as well I had been doing it that way for so long. Anyways the day went all right but I determined my tanks were to high in the bands, they had been recently vip'd and I hadn't dove them yet. Own fault should have noticed that prior.

The equipment issues were quickly sorted out and we went back to his place to hit the theory part, well we went through all the lectures we could and called it a night at around 11.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

The morning started off at 7:30AM where we topped off the tanks and met up with my Dive partner for the course. The first dives were going through everything from yesterday we did in the water and everything went smoothly today well as smoothly as it could when your nervous etc. As the day went on we went through the 9 failures of the tanks, out of air scenarios, buddy breathing on a reg with no masks and no bc's to come up with, you name it he threw it at us. Well to say we nailed all these inconveniences, as he likes to call them would be a bold face lie. After each dive we debriefed on the surface and discussed why we made the decisions. What I quickly learned was that there is no right or wrong answer with UTD, they are trying to make people think underwater versus following protocols like GUE does. I see the advantages to both and will definitely question why certain things are done one-way and not another.

Overall the dive portion of the day went well and my buddy and I starting to work together as a team versus just two people being in the water, which also played a role in our failures as we had to get use to each other etc. Well to be honest I would say that we died many times throughout the day and I think might have lived on maybe 2 of the dives.

After the day of diving was completed we had to make a pit stop at the local coffee shop, yeah you guessed it star bucks, what is with all these star bucks runs throughout the day with all you instructors. I don't understand the whole draw but that can be discussed in another thread.

We proceeded back to his place where we went through some more theory with myself and his girlfriend, who was a recent graduate of the tech one program. The night was called at about 9ish so that we could go catch the UFC fight, and then back to timmies to get some coffee hot chocolate whatever and cover so more theory.

February 22, 2009

The morning started off early once again with the routine star bucks stop, and another through out the day. Today was stage/deco bottle work and the failures associated with them. To my surprise I was pretty good with using the stage/deco or I thought so anyways, I have had nothing but problems with them before and that was mainly with the stowing of the reg. For some reason everything just clicked.

Well the day progressed with compounding failures happening to us like, Buddies out of air/light failure/I m out of air(buddy breath until stage switch)/masks mysteriously gone, that was just one of the scenarios, and again today I think I spent abut 20 minutes in the water at one point with no mask, oddly enough I was getting really comfortable with it. At one point in the day we were doing buddy-breathing ascents with no masks and when we hit 10 feet the surge separated us by about 3 feet in the water column and we were literally throwing the reg up and down in the water column to each other. When I hit five feet I was like this is just retarded and looked up to see where the surface was (no mask to check gage). Realizing it was only 4 feet above me I gave the reg back to my buddy, looked for the Camera/Todd and flipped the bird while he was chuckling at the gong show going on.

The dives were all discussed as they were yesterday and things went from there. On the way back to Todds place we again stopped at Star Bucks and got coffee to help us out with hammering through the rest of the theory. Well the theory part covered the deco portion of the class (ratio deco 1:1), which I was pretty confident on how to do, but I didn't understand this whole shaping of the deco, as they are talking about all these curves etc, and me having an engineering degree and a strong math background, I as up for an argument on this. Well I came ill prepared on that portion cause everything I had read left out one important clue while doing ratio deco and that was the oxygen window. After getting that bit of information it all made sense. So much that we went into the tech 2 course deco and I was having no problems with it at all, had to think about a few things as it was late but I was always coming out with the answer.

Well we wrapped it up at 12:00am and I had to hit the road to get back for work the next afternoon. The drive was going good until it started snowing at Kamloops/Merit, and I had to pull over, as the roads were rather crappy at that point. Nothing like sleeping in your truck all night in the freezing cold weather, to complete the trip. I ended up back in Calgary at 4pm in the afternoon due to being stuck behind really slow drivers on good roads.

Well in summary I cannot recommend taking this course enough to anyone interested in pursuing Technical diving. The course was well thought out and having the materials in front of you to review is also a great help unlike GUE or at least when I was with them that is how it was. Not trying to knock GUE I still follow a lot of the things I learned there but this course opened my eyes up to the real world and that is that everyone is different and that you don’t have to do everything by the book (protocols). They are looking for people who think for them selves and work in a team to develop their own deco schedules etc, and what works for them. Ultimately they want people to have fun on the course and enjoy diving once again versus making it a chore.

Anyways if anyone out there is looking to get more information feel free to contact me at anytime, I would be glad to sit down and talk to someone about the course.

Steve