Friday, September 05, 2008
Two more vids....
The wreck of the Rebel & the M/V Tracy from Tim Owens on Vimeo.
Reef dive in S. Florida; Sunkist w/ SHFHQ...... from Tim Owens on Vimeo.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Friday, May 09, 2008
The long dry spell....
Shortly before my last posting.., I had received positive confirmation of a PFO... Here's an article about them....
Let's rewind... I've been bent... Despite doing everything right, and having no failures, I have a history of DCS... Specifically type II decompression sickness, which indicates neurological imparement. Over the past 5 years I had three major episodes all manifesting with identical symptoms and diagnosis, cerebreal arterial gas embolism, or C-AGE. This manifested in me like a stroke, with initially predominately left side paralysis, and progressing in two instances full paralysis. In all occasions symptoms rapidly diminished once on Oxygen, and in two of the incidents I eventually took a ride in a decompression chamber with full recovery and return to diving.
So.., on Valentine's Day, 2008 (talk about irony), I had the PFO closed. I checked into the hospital early in the morning, by noon I was in a room recovering. Around 5pm I was up walking around and hungry as heck. The next morning I was discharged, and resting at a local motel in Lakeland. I drove back to Ft. Lauderdale the next day and was back to my normal cardio routine the next day.
Over the next 2.5 months, no diving for me, to allow the implant to embed itself into the heart walls and seal off the holes...
Visited the doc on 4/21 for a follow TTE w/ bubble study and I received the ok to return to diving.... that weekend, my normal dive buddy, Brian, and a few other folks from Scubaboard headed south to the Keys for a healthy dose of wrecks... We had a blast returning to the Bibb, Duane, Speigel Grove, and the Eagle...
Let's rewind... I've been bent... Despite doing everything right, and having no failures, I have a history of DCS... Specifically type II decompression sickness, which indicates neurological imparement. Over the past 5 years I had three major episodes all manifesting with identical symptoms and diagnosis, cerebreal arterial gas embolism, or C-AGE. This manifested in me like a stroke, with initially predominately left side paralysis, and progressing in two instances full paralysis. In all occasions symptoms rapidly diminished once on Oxygen, and in two of the incidents I eventually took a ride in a decompression chamber with full recovery and return to diving.
So.., on Valentine's Day, 2008 (talk about irony), I had the PFO closed. I checked into the hospital early in the morning, by noon I was in a room recovering. Around 5pm I was up walking around and hungry as heck. The next morning I was discharged, and resting at a local motel in Lakeland. I drove back to Ft. Lauderdale the next day and was back to my normal cardio routine the next day.
Over the next 2.5 months, no diving for me, to allow the implant to embed itself into the heart walls and seal off the holes...
Visited the doc on 4/21 for a follow TTE w/ bubble study and I received the ok to return to diving.... that weekend, my normal dive buddy, Brian, and a few other folks from Scubaboard headed south to the Keys for a healthy dose of wrecks... We had a blast returning to the Bibb, Duane, Speigel Grove, and the Eagle...
Photos courtesy of Kelly and Scott McDuff from Reef Photo...
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
A brave new world.... one step at a time...
You know, I'm from Cincinnati... and just like Mark Twain is thought to have said "When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times."
When I did my initial OW training I thought rebreathers were immediately in my future, eyeing the Draeger Dolphin or Azimuth and seeing the possibilities of unlimited (well, within reason) dive times, once I found SCR's had a practical depth limitation they fell to the back of my mind. When I got into tech diving, one of my instructors instilled a bit of fear uncertainty and doubt relating to the electronic aspect of this new generation of CCR diving and I began thinking about some of the manual options from Jetsam. Technology drifted to the back burner and I was content with open circuit and it suited my diving well.
A little over a year ago two of my buddies made the move to rebreathers. In addition, over the past year or two, a number of the more respected and seasoned divers in our circles have also made the move. They selected what seems to be the unit of choice amongst the tech diving crowd the Megalodon from InnerSpace Systems Corp. The unit screams modularity and ruggedness and provides for a slew of mounting, tank and scrubber options. In keeping with my tech training mindset, the unit does not include integrated deco. (And APECS 3.0 is still in the works for the forseeable future).
So, for the last year, I've been diving with my rebreather buddies and the experience taught me alot about rebreathers, the meg, and helped to demistify some of that FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). I do ALOT of diving and due to some medical issues (PFO), my diving has been tilting more conservative in nature slinging deco gases on NDL profiles. Throughout this time, ISC also released a manual version of their unit, the COPIS, the gas addition mechanics like a KISS but the derlin and aluminum construction of the normal meg unit. I ran into a respected Meg instructor on a local tech dive on the Hydro Atlantic and chatted a bit. I had thought, like the KISS (or so their literature originally claimed), the COPIS might not be suitable for wreck/cave penetration, one of my increasingly favorite pastimes. Apparently I was mistaken..., with a small addition - the HUD for redundant display, the COPIS IS suitable for what I was looking at...
Don't let anyone try and justify the purchase of a rebreather based on straight economics. Unless your diving deep wrecks and caves on a weekly basis and have helium payments to AIRGAS via Direct Deposit from every paycheck it likely won't be THE issue. So, I took inventory of my ever expanding dive locker and started running the finances. I had 4 sets of cave doubles, a set of AL80's, 4 single steels, 3 AL80's and 3 AL40's. For me, the decision was based on the following factors; options for introducing conservatism into the dive, weight, and logistics. I live in a 2nd floor apartment, and make multiple trips to my local dive shop (Easily the best fill station in North America; Fill Express) and it just wore me down hauling so much steel back and forth, up and down, just to prep for a weekend of diving.
I sold almost all the steels which got me near the half way mark on a stripped COPIS. I had regs, wings, backplate. The AL tanks would find new life as bailout bottles. My truck was paid off and over a few months I could see the nest egg necessary for this to come together. At this point, my buddy throws me a curveball... He picks up a VR3 on eBay and finds the seller is looking to part off his entire dive locker... haskels, compressors, and a heavily used meg. Over a week or so of discussions about the pros and cons, the opportunity to get into rebreathers at a savings swayed me from my COPIS mindset to full blown APECS.
I picked up the unit early december and lined up training w/ the same instructor who trained my buddies, Jill Heinerth. Living in Florida, there are a number of instructor options. At the level I am looking to progress, I wanted to draw upon a vast pool of experience relevant to my diving aspirations. Jill's reputation and experience in the overhead put her at the top of my list. I sent off a few emails, received rapid responses and lined up training dates at the annual NACD seminar, which had the added benefit of the first CCR summit and tons of rebreather discussions in and around High Springs. I also ran into a few others characters from previous trips and we caught up about their rebreather experiences. Having a vast network of buddies who also made the switch was reassuring.
I spent the month cleaning regulators, tweaking, tuning, rebuilding, fitting hose lenths to my liking... By the time class arrived, my private learning experience turned into a 4 student fiesta... Definately helped by exposing me to some other divers and their experiences, practices and learning from their failure scenerios!
Day one we started at Jill's for some quick paperwork and lecture overview. Jill kept the laptop, so we didn't get to experience 'Death By PowerPoint', and let the slides guide her lecture and discussion, taking quite a few tangents as questions came up. In the afternoon we took off to the garage/workshop for unit overview and 'head' discussions/dissection... It was at this point I found my #2 sensor offline (Installed 2/07). A quick check of the wiring and pulling the cell onto a meter, reading 1.5mV, we declared it dead-dead... Fortunately I had two spares on hand and swapped it in. Another students brand new head decided to cut out, Jill pulled out the meter and verified power was flowing and decided to call ISC, who rapidly preped a new head for overnight shipment and Jill loaned her rig to the student for the next days dives. We finished off the afternoon getting accustomed with the pre-dive checksheet, which we would soon learn to love....
Day two we completed the check sheet and performed calibration. We then went inside for a quick skills DVD as we discovered the intricies of how non-compliant mammals manipulate an artificial environment, and all sorts of other adjectives pulled from military manuals... :) Returned to the garage and headed over to Ginnie Springs for a day of fun in the spring run. This was our first water time with the unit as we swam back and forth between Little Devil's and the Eye. We tuned weight, did agressive swims, loop flush, DSV Recover, swim flying manual, simulated deco in the eye, boom drill, and then finished the day with the flood drill. Feeling good, we headed back to the garage and performed the daily post-dive teardown and disinfect under the guidance of the checksheet.
Day three started as normal, I had to replace a battery and we prepped the units. We headed to Blue Grotto for some real diving, and it all went to hell as a number of OW classes were in full swing. We got into buddy teams, Mike and Rob paired up, and Lesley are I dove together. The plan was simple. Head to the platform, get stable and make a circuit through the cavern following Jill. I tell you, my trim was horrible, I was vertical most of the time and swimming very heavy trying to manipulate the drysuit, wing and loop. To make matters even worse, my ADV was a little dodgy and felt like it wasn't firing 'on demand' and sometimes I had to manually trigger... whoops - more volume, up I go, bounce up and down. We're following Jill down into the darkness, turn circle at the bottom and head up. I'm in the rear and we get to a plateau, I catch up to the light beam in front of me and realize I've been following Mike... Where's my buddy? I glace left, right, up, back, forward, no sign of Lesley. I look off into the distance thinking a 21W HID has to be visible - nada. I signal Jill, indicating question - buddy... She glances around and signals to call the dive. A minute or so later Lesley swims in from the side and rejoins the group and we proceed to receive an OW 101 tounge lashing on buddy and team awareness. The game has changed and some of the items we used in OC are no longer applicable, like listening for bubbles. We run the same curcuit with different folks leading the path down and around, slowly and surely getting better with each iteration, Jill changes up the dives by having us perform different tasks, changing setpoints, switching to bailout, and performing a bailout ascent. We then went back down for some drills and proceeded with a bailout rodeo as Jill had us unclip our bailout and drop it on the platform, and cycling through everyone elses bottles in turn, finally reattaching our own. We wrapped up and had a solem drive back to the garage for post-dive as a few of us felt like selling our rigs....
Day four we made the hour drive south to Hal Watt's famous 40 Fathom Grotto. Jill had us each prep a dive plan for 120' for 30 minutes at a setpoint of 1.2 & an OC plan for our bailout. Given my previous DCS history, my plan ended up being the most conservative, v-planner +4, and I got the honor of leading the first dive. We headed down to the initial platforms, got stabilized and then decended into the abyss arriving at the bottom a few cars, boats and satellite dish came into view. We poked around for a few minutes, and then proceeded along the wall of the grotto. Almost on cue at 30 minutes, we arrived back where we started and begain our ascent. During the course of the dive, the buttons on my VR3 jammed up, and it was set to 1.0, fortunately since we planned on tables, I also had a simple bottom timer. As luck would have it, even at the lower setpoint of 1.0 the VR3 cleared just as we were ascending.
We did a fairly good job sticking together, our initial ascent to 50' was WAY slow and our run time drifted by 3 minutes, not bad in the grand scheme of things. However during most of the ascent and anytime under stress I found myself going head up our of trim. I'm likely still a tad bit heavy, and need to relocate some weight higher on the rig. Afterwards we broke for a bite to eat and went back for a skills dive. Jill pulled out the drill cards, and we were faced w/ "Eyes Blurry", "Set 0.7 fly 1.2 manual", "Solenoid stuck open", "Out of Dil - take any action necessary". Once Jill was satisfied with our responses we ascended for the debrief and long ride back to the garage....
Day five we headed back to 40 Fathom Grotto and did a repeat of the deco dive, this time Lesley led and we were maintaining setpoint manually the entire dive. The team did better sticking together, and I made a concerted effort to focus on my trim, keeping my head down and holding stops in a horizontal position - much improvement over the day at Blue Grotto. After decoing out we proceeded to the shallow platform and one by one Jill had us take off our masks and swim the line to the motorcycle, we all passed this final drill with flying colors and ascended. When then reviewed the exam, and finished up the final paperwork as newly minted Megalodon divers...
A hearty thanks to the team; Lesley, Mike and Rob and our instructor Jill.
A new world awaits...
When I did my initial OW training I thought rebreathers were immediately in my future, eyeing the Draeger Dolphin or Azimuth and seeing the possibilities of unlimited (well, within reason) dive times, once I found SCR's had a practical depth limitation they fell to the back of my mind. When I got into tech diving, one of my instructors instilled a bit of fear uncertainty and doubt relating to the electronic aspect of this new generation of CCR diving and I began thinking about some of the manual options from Jetsam. Technology drifted to the back burner and I was content with open circuit and it suited my diving well.
A little over a year ago two of my buddies made the move to rebreathers. In addition, over the past year or two, a number of the more respected and seasoned divers in our circles have also made the move. They selected what seems to be the unit of choice amongst the tech diving crowd the Megalodon from InnerSpace Systems Corp. The unit screams modularity and ruggedness and provides for a slew of mounting, tank and scrubber options. In keeping with my tech training mindset, the unit does not include integrated deco. (And APECS 3.0 is still in the works for the forseeable future).
So, for the last year, I've been diving with my rebreather buddies and the experience taught me alot about rebreathers, the meg, and helped to demistify some of that FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). I do ALOT of diving and due to some medical issues (PFO), my diving has been tilting more conservative in nature slinging deco gases on NDL profiles. Throughout this time, ISC also released a manual version of their unit, the COPIS, the gas addition mechanics like a KISS but the derlin and aluminum construction of the normal meg unit. I ran into a respected Meg instructor on a local tech dive on the Hydro Atlantic and chatted a bit. I had thought, like the KISS (or so their literature originally claimed), the COPIS might not be suitable for wreck/cave penetration, one of my increasingly favorite pastimes. Apparently I was mistaken..., with a small addition - the HUD for redundant display, the COPIS IS suitable for what I was looking at...
Don't let anyone try and justify the purchase of a rebreather based on straight economics. Unless your diving deep wrecks and caves on a weekly basis and have helium payments to AIRGAS via Direct Deposit from every paycheck it likely won't be THE issue. So, I took inventory of my ever expanding dive locker and started running the finances. I had 4 sets of cave doubles, a set of AL80's, 4 single steels, 3 AL80's and 3 AL40's. For me, the decision was based on the following factors; options for introducing conservatism into the dive, weight, and logistics. I live in a 2nd floor apartment, and make multiple trips to my local dive shop (Easily the best fill station in North America; Fill Express) and it just wore me down hauling so much steel back and forth, up and down, just to prep for a weekend of diving.
I sold almost all the steels which got me near the half way mark on a stripped COPIS. I had regs, wings, backplate. The AL tanks would find new life as bailout bottles. My truck was paid off and over a few months I could see the nest egg necessary for this to come together. At this point, my buddy throws me a curveball... He picks up a VR3 on eBay and finds the seller is looking to part off his entire dive locker... haskels, compressors, and a heavily used meg. Over a week or so of discussions about the pros and cons, the opportunity to get into rebreathers at a savings swayed me from my COPIS mindset to full blown APECS.
I picked up the unit early december and lined up training w/ the same instructor who trained my buddies, Jill Heinerth. Living in Florida, there are a number of instructor options. At the level I am looking to progress, I wanted to draw upon a vast pool of experience relevant to my diving aspirations. Jill's reputation and experience in the overhead put her at the top of my list. I sent off a few emails, received rapid responses and lined up training dates at the annual NACD seminar, which had the added benefit of the first CCR summit and tons of rebreather discussions in and around High Springs. I also ran into a few others characters from previous trips and we caught up about their rebreather experiences. Having a vast network of buddies who also made the switch was reassuring.
I spent the month cleaning regulators, tweaking, tuning, rebuilding, fitting hose lenths to my liking... By the time class arrived, my private learning experience turned into a 4 student fiesta... Definately helped by exposing me to some other divers and their experiences, practices and learning from their failure scenerios!
Day one we started at Jill's for some quick paperwork and lecture overview. Jill kept the laptop, so we didn't get to experience 'Death By PowerPoint', and let the slides guide her lecture and discussion, taking quite a few tangents as questions came up. In the afternoon we took off to the garage/workshop for unit overview and 'head' discussions/dissection... It was at this point I found my #2 sensor offline (Installed 2/07). A quick check of the wiring and pulling the cell onto a meter, reading 1.5mV, we declared it dead-dead... Fortunately I had two spares on hand and swapped it in. Another students brand new head decided to cut out, Jill pulled out the meter and verified power was flowing and decided to call ISC, who rapidly preped a new head for overnight shipment and Jill loaned her rig to the student for the next days dives. We finished off the afternoon getting accustomed with the pre-dive checksheet, which we would soon learn to love....
Day two we completed the check sheet and performed calibration. We then went inside for a quick skills DVD as we discovered the intricies of how non-compliant mammals manipulate an artificial environment, and all sorts of other adjectives pulled from military manuals... :) Returned to the garage and headed over to Ginnie Springs for a day of fun in the spring run. This was our first water time with the unit as we swam back and forth between Little Devil's and the Eye. We tuned weight, did agressive swims, loop flush, DSV Recover, swim flying manual, simulated deco in the eye, boom drill, and then finished the day with the flood drill. Feeling good, we headed back to the garage and performed the daily post-dive teardown and disinfect under the guidance of the checksheet.
Day three started as normal, I had to replace a battery and we prepped the units. We headed to Blue Grotto for some real diving, and it all went to hell as a number of OW classes were in full swing. We got into buddy teams, Mike and Rob paired up, and Lesley are I dove together. The plan was simple. Head to the platform, get stable and make a circuit through the cavern following Jill. I tell you, my trim was horrible, I was vertical most of the time and swimming very heavy trying to manipulate the drysuit, wing and loop. To make matters even worse, my ADV was a little dodgy and felt like it wasn't firing 'on demand' and sometimes I had to manually trigger... whoops - more volume, up I go, bounce up and down. We're following Jill down into the darkness, turn circle at the bottom and head up. I'm in the rear and we get to a plateau, I catch up to the light beam in front of me and realize I've been following Mike... Where's my buddy? I glace left, right, up, back, forward, no sign of Lesley. I look off into the distance thinking a 21W HID has to be visible - nada. I signal Jill, indicating question - buddy... She glances around and signals to call the dive. A minute or so later Lesley swims in from the side and rejoins the group and we proceed to receive an OW 101 tounge lashing on buddy and team awareness. The game has changed and some of the items we used in OC are no longer applicable, like listening for bubbles. We run the same curcuit with different folks leading the path down and around, slowly and surely getting better with each iteration, Jill changes up the dives by having us perform different tasks, changing setpoints, switching to bailout, and performing a bailout ascent. We then went back down for some drills and proceeded with a bailout rodeo as Jill had us unclip our bailout and drop it on the platform, and cycling through everyone elses bottles in turn, finally reattaching our own. We wrapped up and had a solem drive back to the garage for post-dive as a few of us felt like selling our rigs....
Day four we made the hour drive south to Hal Watt's famous 40 Fathom Grotto. Jill had us each prep a dive plan for 120' for 30 minutes at a setpoint of 1.2 & an OC plan for our bailout. Given my previous DCS history, my plan ended up being the most conservative, v-planner +4, and I got the honor of leading the first dive. We headed down to the initial platforms, got stabilized and then decended into the abyss arriving at the bottom a few cars, boats and satellite dish came into view. We poked around for a few minutes, and then proceeded along the wall of the grotto. Almost on cue at 30 minutes, we arrived back where we started and begain our ascent. During the course of the dive, the buttons on my VR3 jammed up, and it was set to 1.0, fortunately since we planned on tables, I also had a simple bottom timer. As luck would have it, even at the lower setpoint of 1.0 the VR3 cleared just as we were ascending.
We did a fairly good job sticking together, our initial ascent to 50' was WAY slow and our run time drifted by 3 minutes, not bad in the grand scheme of things. However during most of the ascent and anytime under stress I found myself going head up our of trim. I'm likely still a tad bit heavy, and need to relocate some weight higher on the rig. Afterwards we broke for a bite to eat and went back for a skills dive. Jill pulled out the drill cards, and we were faced w/ "Eyes Blurry", "Set 0.7 fly 1.2 manual", "Solenoid stuck open", "Out of Dil - take any action necessary". Once Jill was satisfied with our responses we ascended for the debrief and long ride back to the garage....
Day five we headed back to 40 Fathom Grotto and did a repeat of the deco dive, this time Lesley led and we were maintaining setpoint manually the entire dive. The team did better sticking together, and I made a concerted effort to focus on my trim, keeping my head down and holding stops in a horizontal position - much improvement over the day at Blue Grotto. After decoing out we proceeded to the shallow platform and one by one Jill had us take off our masks and swim the line to the motorcycle, we all passed this final drill with flying colors and ascended. When then reviewed the exam, and finished up the final paperwork as newly minted Megalodon divers...
A hearty thanks to the team; Lesley, Mike and Rob and our instructor Jill.
A new world awaits...
Monday, January 07, 2008
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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