Second class professional diver course - part 6

The warmer weather has arrived, the snow has fallen but that hasn’t stopped us from today’s tasks. How does it feel to hold a colleague’s life on one valve? How does it feel to be attacked by a lobster and be able to test a prototype of an interesting device? You’ll see all this and more in today’s episode…

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We start, unusually, not with a dive but with learning how to use a decompression chamber. According to all the procedures we were supposed to compress it to the right depth, then decompress it while maintaining the decompression stops. The fun was great as long as the chamber was empty.

The second part of the task was to safely compress and decompress your colleague. From this point on, the position became quiet and focused. Contrary to appearances, the most concentrated was not the diver in the chamber but the one operating it.

We “dived” in a 9m chamber with two stops at 6m and 3m. Thanks to the professionalism of the instructors and of course ours, everyone was safely and healthily compressed and stretched and nobody even got itchy.

While we were training in the decompression chamber, our Polish instructor Jacek Serwa had the unique opportunity to test a prototype machine for extracting fuel from wrecks. A dummy fuel tank was placed on the bottom, into which the diver was supposed to drill, then seal the hole and using this device extract the fuel. Everything went perfectly, the constructors of this device, who carefully followed the diver’s every move, were very pleased. Our next task was to pass the final thirty. In order to obtain a class II diver’s certificate, we had to pass three thirty and two times forty-five plus.

Today it was definitely warmer underwater than on the surface, although the visibility up to 15 metres deteriorated significantly. Usually sea animals don’t pay attention to divers, but this time I think we disturbed a big angry lobster, which wanted to get into a pincer fight with us.

More shoals of fish appeared. A pleasant dive…but with a slightly longer decompression, according to the 33/35 table…i.e. two stops at 6m – 5 min and at 3m – 15 min, which extended the stay in the water considerably. Despite sitting in the basket for over twenty minutes we were still better off than the tenders holding the umbilical today…in the falling snow and frost, which was not as great but more noticeable due to the heavy cloud cover than all week when the sun was shining.

The final part of today’s class was a lecture and practice in removing the helmet from a diver with suspected spinal injury. We had a lot of fun taking the helmet off subsequent ‘victims’. We hope that we will never need these skills.

Magda and Matthew

Source: podwodna.net