Spherical Chicken

Very often its stated that 60# wings must be used with 130s or that 60# wings are necessary to float gear in cold water, and that 60# wings are designed for 8″ tanks, while 40# wings are designed for 7.25″ tanks. Over the past year, however, I’ve started to dive my Halycon Evolve 40# wing more exclusively both with smaller and larger diameter tanks and have found that it works well for most reasonable diving. This is substantially more in adherence with the original Hogarthian minimalization philosophy, and highlights how some poor gear choices can have consequences that lead to other poor gear choices.

Since the question came up over if a 40# wing would be capable of floating gear when boat diving and ditching gear on the surface I went out and did some tests with my gear, with full tanks, throwing the gear into the water and adding lead until it sank. The tests in freshwater were in some cases done with gear configs that I wouldn’t necessarily dive in freshwater because they were too inherently overweighted (although they do highlight what might happen if divers forgot to adjust gear for freshwater compared to salt).

Continue reading ‘Wing Size and Gear Buoyancy’ »

This article is about everything involved in a valve drill other than the proper procedure to do valve drills. This article is on how to do a valve drill well and not struggle. And unlike other advice on the internet I’m concerned with stretching exercises dead last since that takes the most amount of time and effort to fix, and the practice of loosening up waist belts and hiking up tanks as a cheat I view as counter productive and something to be avoided at all costs.

Continue reading ‘Struggling with Valve Drills’ »

Trimming out divers in warm water and single tanks is relatively easy. Where things become difficult is with cold salt water, with a lot of buoyant insulation and big steel tanks. Some divers with skinny bodies and big ape arms and legs will find this easier, but for the rest of us, getting into a decent trim position in cold water can be a huge struggle. There are some tips, however, that can straighten just about anyone out.

Continue reading ‘Steel Doubles, Cold Water and Trim’ »

A short note on what it means to have high standards around trim position and why, and where the focus on trim becomes silly. There is a middle ground with appropriate focus on trim that assists our diving and striving for excellence in the water, while at the same time not leading to attempts to look perfect at all times which begins to hinder our diving.

Continue reading ‘Trim Nazis’ »

A quick note on correct head/shoulders/arm positioning when doing valve drills.

Continue reading ‘Valve Drill Positioning’ »

This entry is slightly misnamed and should really be lessons learned from Tech 1 about what skills to focus on before going into Tech 1. I include how this gets applied in the course and what the bar needs to be raised to after coming out of the course, so practicing these skills to Tech 2 perfection is not necessary. The point of this article is really to get the focus of pre-course practice going in the correct direction, and away from some of the distractions which are going to be less useful to practice beforehand.

Continue reading ‘Lessons from Tech 1’ »

Slogging through P-valve threads you’ll find an unusual focus on manscaping, and endless size jokes. Venturing into the she-p threads there is a wealth of information, but there are certain bits of information that most Y-chromosome carrying organisms do not strictly need to know. What’s buried in those threads is just a simple mechanical explanation of the P-valve duckbill. The duckbill is what accomplishes the ‘balancing’ while keeping the urine out of your drysuit.
Continue reading ‘The Halcyon Balanced P-Valve Duckbill’ »

This is a bit of an intro to all the different ways things can go wrong in GUE Tech/Cave courses focusing on backgas-situations only. Deco bottles and stages are out of the scope of this write-up for now. The failure scenarios really are fairly limited and there’s only a few different responses that need to be learned and a few different things that need to be watched for. The ‘tricks’ that instructors will pull are actually fairly straight-forwards based on the limited equipment they have available in the scenario and what resources need to be left over for the team to not actually drown in reality.

Note, of course, that merely by writing up these ‘secrets’ I have no illusions that it will undermine the ability of GUE instructors to instruct. The hard part is being able to track what is going on underwater and remember who has which resources and to be able to respond to what is thrown at the team. If you’ve forgotten which divers have failed valves then you are almost certain to wind up making a mistake. The situational awareness is the hard part.

Continue reading ‘Failure Management’ »

I was asked a question the other night about what I’ve been experimenting with in helping new divers get up to the level where they go into a GUE Fundamentals course and be successful at it. This a few thoughts on stuff to help divers focus on before the course. I’m going to start all the way from a new diver with just Basic Open Water cert that is diving a jacket BC and split fins. If you’ve got a diver who already knows some of the basics you may be able to skip over some of the beginning items.
Continue reading ‘Mentoring new divers before GUE Fundamentals’ »

Quick note: the BtS heating vest is looking like an incredibly good investment.

I updated my previous post with information about the heating vest.

I’d recommend getting one for anyone who is starting to do 60-minute dives in the sound, and expect that heating vests will shift over time from being a ‘luxury’ item to being as essential as a 18W-to-24W HID light in the sound.

The interaction of heating vests with decompression is still an unknown so hypoxic-mix technical divers should probably do their own research about ongassing/offgassing and the use-it-only-for-deco ideas.