A few weeks ago, Rahul did his SDI Solo Diver course with us in Amed. So far, so good – it’s almost a course like many others. This is what lead to this tale of two dives.
During the course, we discuss the boundaries of your comfort zone, decision making and judgement calls. In the water, we practice dealing with adverse situations. Those may be caused by equipment failure, change in conditions or simply by the feeling that ‘something’s not right’.
On the day
On this particular day, we were still in the thick of rain season which means the weather can change from one moment to the next. You can see the effect of that in these two pictures.
Contrary to many people’s impression, rain season does not mean rain all the time. What it does quite often mean here, is an hour or so of impressively strong tropical rain. This can be confined to a very small area, making it a case of standing under the wrong cloud, more or less. And that’s what happened on this day …
We’d chosen a dive site renowned for its calm, predictable conditions, one often used for open water training. And that’s what the first dive of the day looked like. Looking up towards the surface, above Rahul’s silhouette, fish are schooling. A moored local fishing boat floats just a few metres above with the sun peeking through.
Considering that navigation is one of the major parts of the course, this is almost too easy.
Natural navigation references are easy to spot and follow – which is a good idea for any site considered for solo diving. But, from a teaching perspective, sometimes trickier is better. This way you can train hard in order to dive easy afterwards.
On the second dive, things looked more like some of you may have seen in spectacular cave diving pictures. A distinct reddish cloud moved in (picture at the top of this post). Well, it’s not a cave. What you see is run-off from a ‘river’ channeling rain water from the mountains into the sea.
Within minutes, it started raining so much that the river ran over the mound of rocks slowing its entry to the sea. This dive was a problem-solving dive, as it happens. The idea is to throw problems at Rahul which he has to solve on his own.
Now Rahul had a real problem and real-time decisions to make. Considering what was about to happen to the visibility there really was only one choice: call the dive and end it safely.
What we learned
As Solo Diver courses go, this made for a lively debrief. It covered comfort zone, experience, assessing environmental conditions and more. All of these are considerations on every (tech) dive. However, when solo diving they need to be approached from an even more conservative angle.
Most divers would define their comfort zone more narrowly on a solo dive compared to a team dive. This influences their dive planning. Solo diving is also not sanctioned for dives requiring decompression stops. But even so – maybe solo diving to 30 m is not a good idea, whereas checking out macro life in 10 m is.
Experience in the case above would include having trained and dived in zero visibility conditions. If they are, they are likely to be more comfortable dealing with decreasing visibility.
What about equipment – do you have a torch? In this case, torches were there, but a cloud of fine sediment will soon render them almost useless.
And, last but not least, it’s arguably never more important to assess environmental conditions and make a decision on whether to dive than when you are thinking of heading out on your own.
All of those are only a small part of the course. Rahul did graduate on the following day! For those wondering about suitable equipment, Rahul chose to complete his Solo Diver course in a single tank and a S40 stage tank. Other options include sidemount or twinsets / doubles.