Since achieving only a recreational pass at GUE Fundamentals in April I have been meeting up with people from the GUE UK Facebook group over the summer at Vobster for skills’n’drills (and thrills and spills!) with a view to upgrading to a technical pass. Looking back over the logs, this amounted to 14 dives and 585 minutes in the water practicing, in addition to all the other diving I was doing which would have generally helped with in-water comfort. Finally a couple of us felt we were ready so we booked a day with GUE instructor James Sanderson aka Badger.

The format of the day was to spend the morning as a coaching session, with video feedback in the surface interval, then the actual evaluation in the afternoon. I am glad we did it this way rather than jumping straight into the evaluation as I had a couple of things to brush up; my backkick had gotten a bit sloppy, and having just gotten back from the Red Sea I was quite unprepared to do mask-off drills in water of 12℃ and lost buoyancy control 😦 Fortunately I was able to knock both these problems on the head in time for the afternoon, where we took it in turns running a gas-sharing ascent from depth with stops every 3 metres, deploying a DSMB on the way, in addition to valve drills and simulated lost-mask exits, and dealing with a casualty on the surface (basically a repeat of the last dive of the full course). This went swimmingly and I achieved the technical pass I have been coveting 😀 Unfortunately it didn’t go so well for my teammate; he was having an off-day as usually his skills are better than mine. He just couldn’t get into trim, which meant neither valve drills nor backkick would work. I will help him practice more and it will come in due course.

A few videos that helped me to prepare were this DSMB deployment, this s-drill and this valve drill. And remember: slow is smooth and smooth is fast. My advice for anyone who stumbles across this who is also trying for an upgrade, is first just to practice getting into the trim position and remaining still, not doing anything. When you can do this for a minute, start adding in simple skills, like 1 and 2 of the Basic 5, and flow check. Work your way up to the full 5 and a valve drill, and finally DSMB deployment. All the while try to maintain team awareness. Don’t worry about any skills before you have “the platform”, you will just waste valuable practice time.

This all took place at Stoney Cove, the first time I had been there, and hopefully the last. Compared to Vobster I was somewhat underwhelmed:

• No kitting-up benches, which is especially a pain using a twinset, several people had brought folding DIY benches, which was a very good idea
• No Nitrox, only air. Not such a big deal for shallow skills dives, but it meant I couldn’t get a fill afterwards, I like to keep my gear ready to dive at all times. Right now I have about 100 bar of “EANx25” in my twinset. What am I supposed to do with that?
• Air fills cost more than Vobster, £7 for a twinset versus about £5.
• No indoor facilities to review video, we used the back of Badger’s car
• Closed at 3pm, tho’ to be fair they let us stay in the water a little longer
• It costs more in entry fee than Vobster, and they even charge members to reserve parking!
• Vobster’s catering is better too
• It has a reputation for things getting stolen if left unattended even for a moment, that was just one more thing to worry about which was distracting.

Basically if you go there, be completely self-sufficient as if you were diving in the middle of nowhere, because you might as well be. Other than that it was a very successful day, it was good to meet Badger, and I look forward to diving with him some more. Plans are now afoot for Tech 1…