UTD-BC-Canada

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Comment by TJH on April 19, 2010 at 1:27pm

Awesome... a BC group, maybe a chance to connect or get out with UTD/DIR divers?

Hello all on the Vancouver, BC area group. I actually reside in Norhtern BC (PG), but I thought I would cast out and see if anyone else up here too... If anyone else lives in N or central BC and likes to run lines, spin valves or swim horizontal in some local lakes let me know.

Comment by Mark Gottfried on March 16, 2010 at 5:32pm

I'm uber happy to report that this past weekend we were able to successfully dive on the elusive and NEVER before dived wreck of the Famous.

Over the past two and half years we've been trying to organize an expedition to dive this wreck. The Famous was build in England in 1890 after which she was used all over the world. She sailed in Australia, China and later was used as a passenger ship carrying people to Alaska during the Gold rush. She found her resting place in Indian Arm near Vancouver in 1936. It wasn't till 2007 when she was found again by accident during unrelated sea floor mapping by an ROV. UASBC (Underwater Archeological Society of BC) was able to determine from the coordinates that it was the wreck of the Famous. She lies in 240' of water on a flat and very silty bottom.

In the past there were multiple unsuccessful attempts to dive this wreck. It wasn't till six months ago when we were contacted by the UASBC with the proper coordinates and the task to dive the wreck and gather as much archeological data as possible.

We have spent six months organizing all the logistical details. We have created SOP specific to this project including SOP for Support Divers, Surface Manager and emergency protocols. We have practiced on shallower wrecks gathering archeological measurements.

On March 13th we left Victoria at 4:00 am to catch the ferry from Nanaimo to Vancouver. We met with couple of other divers from Vancouver and by 9:30 the team was assembled: Gas Divers: Mark Gottfried, Guy Shockey, Chris Fenton, Kim Anderson and Alan Johnson. Support Divers: Dave Healy and Richard Parker. Surface Manager: Jeremy Hoey and Captain Shay of the MV Cheers.

Captain Shay has placed an upline in the location provided by the UASBC few days earlier. Double and triple checking the location and watching the blip on the screen we were convinced that we had the right location.

The first Gas Team (Mark Gottfried and Guy Shockey) got geared up and started the descent in pretty much zero viz. By 40' the viz opened up to about 15'. I got excited thinking that we could get lucky in the area that is well known for crapy viz. Well not so, by 120' the viz was maybe 10'. Didn't matter, all of sudden we saw the wreck. The depth was 230', the viz was nice 7'. We tied off from the upline and followed the wrecks railing to what we thought was the bow. The wreck was absolutely covered with life. The plumose anemonies were covering everything. Finding an exposed piece of metal was not easy. Shortly thereafter we were at the bow...50% chance :-). We tied off our reel and deployed the second reel with length marked thicker line that we were going to use as a permanent line running the length of the wreck. After that we hit the trigger and spooled out approximately 220' of line. Tied off on the stern. Looked around in mixture of excitement that we were the very first divers ever on this wreck. We expected a pile of rubble after almost 80 years on the bottom. But to our astonishment this thing was nicely intact covered with life and huge rock fish and lingcods. Even in that lousy viz we were able to clearly see the hull, superstructure, collapsed stack and huge amount of riggings. Before we knew the 20 min was up and we were on our way for long deco. It was great to see the support divers at 70', taking our 120' bottles, watching us brining the O2 bottles forward and getting settled for the next deco phase. There was a lot of elation when we surfaced. It was truly an awesome feeling.

We briefed the second Gas Team of Chris Fenton, Alan Johnson and Kim Anderson on the conditions and the location of the permanent line. Their dive went without a glitch except for loosing the reel with measuring tape. Small price to pay for this experience.

Day two. Guy came down with a nasty cold and had to sit this one out. The first Gas Team of Mark Gottfried and Alan Johnson descended into pretty much 5' viz all the way down to the bottom. We found the line and reel connecting the upline with the wreck in place. It was amazing to see how much silt was already on it. Alan and I then scootered the lenght of the ship following the line we laid down on Saturday. We re-tied the stern end and cut the reel. From there we scootered to the last length mark on our permanent line. We used little "woody" knot that allowed us to clip our tape measure reel to the line and take two offset measurements. We surveyed as much as we could within the 25 min of bottom time and headed up for another long, dark deco.

The second Gas Team of Chris Fenton and Kim Anderson head down for some video footage. They gathered surprisingly decent footage given the viz. They also managed to clearly established that the upline was closer to the bow. That was the place where we started the permanent line from. The footage captured a lot of details on the surprisingly intact wreck that is laying on the port side with the starboard hull collapsing in.

Overall a great success when a difficult diving went without a glitch. We gathered a great deal of useful archeological data. Big thanks to a great team work and special thanks to the support divers and the surface manager making everything go smoothly but most importantly safely. Our endeavor already made the local newspaper on Sunday, even before the expedition was completed. The UASBC was very excited and promised future cooperation on diving more undived wrecks in BC waters.

Mark Gottfried, UTD Instructor

Comment by Lenny Marriott on October 16, 2009 at 7:56am

well Hi all this is good to see a group like UTD BC Canada open up to other
technical training agenices, AS a TDI INSTRUCTOR TRAINER here in Vancouver BC I have noticed alot of changes with technical dive agenices
here, and always thought that shareing each others training values would be more of a learning experience to all the tech dive here in BC ( as we may know this a a very small group) But seems to be increasing more and more with groups suce as TDI, UTD, IANTD ETC. SO the bottom line is why not learn from each other , as group this is one way to make this great sport of ours safer and better to the up and commers

and this is a great start and FYI to all if you go onto face book there is another group in Vancouver starting up BC TECH DIVERS it is a club for tech divers to meet and go for a tech dive and share ideas and have fun
learn other things meet other tech divers from other agenices , Til we meet Dive Save All
Lenny M.
TDI Instructor Trainer
Scubatech 2000
Vancouver BC Canada
WAY TO GO UTD CANADA

Comment by Alan Wong on June 6, 2009 at 11:44pm

The UTD Tech 1 Journey, Van B.C. June 2009

It has been a long journey, but I’m pleased to report that the 3 of us satisfactorily completed the final assessment dive for Tech 1. So tomorrow we look forward to our deco graduation dive with a max depth of 130 on 25/25 and using O2 for deco.

The UTD Tech 1 course ran from April 27 to June 6, 2009. I entered the course recognizing that I was going to experience a significant learning curve as I had great difficulty in reaching my valves, had just switched to doubles, and had no experience with deco bottles. Being a sucker for punishment I decided to proceed with the course and take it with my dive buddy Mike Barass. I would simply work hard, do my best and learn as much as I could. Gary Friesen and Mike Barton also joined us to round out the class at 4.

The class sessions were routine, but admittedly, sometimes a lot of information was downloaded to us. We had some difficulty in grasping some concepts, but a very patient Todd Powell rectified that. We were starting to get tired of those subway dinners. Our first water session was in the pool. While we were wearing our dry suits, I did not wear the bulky undergarments and to my pleasant surprise, I could reach all the valves! There was hope for me yet! Further subsequent tinkering with the harness, undergarments, and greasing the valves really helped. We did some basic skills and did a scenario, which involved one diver with a failed post, one diver out of air and two divers with no masks. At least we had an smb. Despite the fact that we were in confined warm water with unlimited visibility, we did not anticipate the compound failures, and needless to say we made mistakes and some of our dive buddies “died”. That was a taste of what was to come.

Through the month of May we did another 5 water sessions at Whytecliff with a lot of practice sessions in between. The differentiator in this course is the focus on developing the “thinking diver” through numerous scenarios with multiple failures. There was less emphasis on protocol, and more emphasis on what makes sense in priority order to resolve the failure. The analogy of a diver as a “cockroach” emphasizes the actions to survive vs. necessarily wasting time following certain protocol. The trick was to develop judgement to decide what was a waste of time, and what needed to get done to avoid descending further into an incident pit where the situation becomes fatal.

Throughout the scenarios we experience five fingered white rubber gloves descending from above and behind taking our masks off. After we successfully put on our back up masks we barely had time to congratulate ourselves before we lost the backup masks too! We had left post failures, right post failures, manifold failures, out of air, line entanglement, and silt outs courtesy of a zealous application from Todd’s stage bottle. Initially it was rather unnerving to hear a roar of bubbles streaming from your manifold at your ear. Each independent failure is only an inconvenience, but compounding failures often stressed the team such that the correct decisions were not always made. Yes, mistakes were made but we learnt from them. We also learnt to dive as a team, and our communication skills, positioning and problem resolution continued to improve. By no means have we finished our learning’s. However, we have learnt to deal with the failures as mere inconveniences that turn the dive. Still, the course has highlighted the need for continuous learning and regular post assessment of dives so that one can learn from each dive to become a better diver and a better dive buddy.

To assist in the learning, we de-briefed and watched the video with many laughs and expressions of horror. When sitting on a sofa analysing the scenario we have visual clarity of the various situation. We could kick ourselves for some of our “brain farts”.

I learnt a lot about myself as the course highlighted my strengths and embarrassingly accentuated my weaknesses. I thought my biggest hurdle was reaching the valves, but that was only the beginning. I quickly recognized I needed to quickly improve on communication, assertiveness, awareness, positioning, buoyancy & trim, and problem resolution. Gee, did I leave anything out? I can’t emphasize enough - continuous learning…………. I’m pleased to say, that in my opinion, I’m a better diver today, than I was a month ago.

I have to say this was an invaluable course conducted by Todd Powell. While we demonstrated a propensity to kill each other, Todd demonstrated an enormous capacity for patience. He gave us an incredible amount of time to see us through the course and that would not have been possible if he had a different disposition or was an out-of-town instructor. It was obvious that he was silently cheering for us, doing his best to make it an enjoyable learning experience, and hoping things would “click” and we would progress. The other amazing thing is that no matter how bad a scenario was conducted, he would search for something, anything positive to say. i.e. “you did a good and thorough buddy check in the parking lot!” “You descended as a team…” Or even if you lose buoyancy and you are fighting to hold your stop he would say “you are a survivor – can’t fault you on that”. Of course he also pointed out learning moments, and as you can gather there were many. We did manage to leave Todd speechless. On occasion all Todd could muster was “Wow, what did you think of that dive?”

My only regret is that our fourth classmate did not finish before he had to go out of town for work. He will complete the course upon his return.

It was an experiential course that I highly recommend. Many thanks to Todd for his instruction, Blair & Katherine for videoing, and special thanks for the support of my classmates. Without their support I would not have a shoulder to cry on and could not have completed the journey.
Best wishes for safe diving. Look out for blowfish and five fingered white gloves: they are the only things one needs to worry about. Everything else is just an inconvenience!
☺

Comment by Christopher on April 9, 2009 at 7:57pm

Hi everyone! A couple of us are going to be going up to Quadra Isl. to dive with Abyssal next weekend. If you care to join us, it would be great to meet some Northern UTD members!

Comment by Mark Gottfried on February 26, 2009 at 8:21pm

Hi All,

We have couple spots open on our trip to the Red Sea in June on the awesome MV Tala of the Red Sea Explorers. The dates are June 12-24, 2009. We have secured the most attractive itinerary full of wreck diving, beautiful reefs, massive walls and of course endless fun on this 'one of a kind' liveaboard. The trip is suitable for all levels, from recreational to technical, including RB's. Dive-Xtras scooters are available at all times.

In addition UTD Tech 1,2 will be available to interested divers during the trip.

The deadline for a deposit is March 20, 2009

Please contact me for more details at markgott33@gmail.com or markg@unifiedteamdiving.com

Comment by Pieter Kop on February 22, 2009 at 7:57am

Hi all. I joined your group. Since BC as a cold water divespot is on the top of my wishlist.
Best Pieter.

Comment by Maciej Rulka on February 3, 2009 at 3:52pm

Hello BC divers!

A littele OT... anyway... I think that divers from B.C. are traveling by BC Ferries when driving to various dive sites in western Canada.

Recently I have a pleasure to survey new construction of m/f NORTHER EXPEDITION which is currently on the way to Vancouver.
She will fill the gap after m/f QUEEN OF THE NORTH which sunk in 2006.

In second week of January 2009 we have conducted sea trails with NORTHER EXPEDITION on Baltic Sea going around famous wrecks like Wilhelms Gustloff and Steuben. Unfortunalty no diving... only echosounder :(

Hope you will join new ferry on route from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert.

more about new vessel at www.bcferries.com

Enjoy the picture.

rgds Maciej

Comment by Lynne Flaherty on January 26, 2009 at 6:16pm

We had a bit more adventure getting out to do a dive today, but we made it -- report here. (And a good argument for not diving a computer, too.)

Comment by Todd Powell on January 26, 2009 at 4:26pm

Lynne,

Yup wish we could have met up with you. I'm happy to hear you had a great time and thanks for posting the report. Please keep me posted on your next time in the area and hopeully we will get to splash....but if not, the nearest pub will do I am sue to hear some stories :)

Todd

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