It’s rainy and windy on shore, and the water has a lot of energy in it. White capping waves will close the harbors through which the drift divers work. So there’s no getting in the water today.
When we went to th ebeach, the red flags were out for splishing and splashing, as well.
The woman running things at the dive shop is trying to help us figure out plans. They made us do a checkout “dive” in their pool. Gave me a tank with 500 psi and made me do things like mask recovery, regulator recovery and buoyancy control. Who cares? You’re in the water, even if it is a pool, even if it is just for a few minutes. The dive master was fine. He demoed what he wanted you to do and then point to each person with a grandiose gesture like a game show model. His technique for regulator recovery cracked me up.
This is a pretty simple technique. And, obviously, should you lose your reg, you want to be able to get that back, so it is an important technique. He threw away his regulator behind him, and then demonstrated his method. He folded his hands to his face, as if he was going to sleep and rolled to his right. He fully extended his right arm, reached back, tapped the bottom of his tank, tapped his thigh, and then curled his arm forward. The hose was inside his elbow and as he moved his hand forward the regulator slipped right into his hand.
The general style is effective, particularly where he works. There’s a lot of current in Cozumel and your regulator could get behind you if it somehow falls out of your mouth. A foolproof way of getting it back efficiently, then, would be key. It’s also an over-designed technique, and I wonder how many people have lost their regulator, made the sleeping motion, and so on.
Later, my lovely bride laughed at me. She said I didn’t do half of what the guy did. I also did it with my eyes closed, for some reason. You don’t even have to do half of that guy’s style, though.
I was taught two techniques for regulator retrieval. If it gets behind you, you just … roll to your right and look down. Or, equally sophisticated, you reach your right hand behind your head, find the first stage (where the hoses connect to the cylinder) and just pull that hose forward. How many times I’ve had to do either of those in 30+ years of diving? Zero.
You keep your regulator in your mouth.
I haven’t done a checkout dive … in this century.
But you do it with good cheer. Though I do want to know how old that guy is. Obviously he knows what he’s doing. He’s clearly the professional, and I respect that. I’ve also been diving longer than he’s been alive.
I might have dive gear older than that guy.
That’s just a function of getting old, though, I’m sure.
Anyway, no diving today. Sometimes it looked like this.
Most of the time, it did not. So we rested and read and tried to plan out what we could about dives for the rest of the week. The issue is that you’re beholden to harbor masters, whose decisions are purely based on the data that comes to them, and so they are beholden to the weather.
Everything was closed last week, too. Don’t come to Mexico in June.
We did see one of the great treats of the sea this evening.
Tomorrow, we’ll dive the Cenotes.
