One Year On!

I wrote this and posted it on a general diving forum; so I kept it general so non-CCR divers could read it. Stuart asked me to post it here as well, so here you go.

Get a cup of tea this is a bit long


26th September 2005

Well today I am supposed to be at the bottom of the sea crawling around a 70m wreck with Padowan (Simon) but the team decided that conditions were not best suited to the 4 hour out boat ride; so it was canned. ? A bugger that, as today is the first anniversary of me getting my mitts on the YBOD. Despite horror stories of lime green counter lungs and a wonderful touched up photograph my £3175 three month old (new July 2004) unit turned out to be ‘bog off’ yellow rather than ‘puke’ green.


So 12 months on and day with not much planned, I did a quick mental review of my decision to go CCR. Andy P had originally planted the seed in my head but all the time I was getting cheap & convenient garage fill Trimix, I couldn’t see the point. Then one day Garage Fill Man lets me know he will not be filling stages any more in order to cut down on runs to get 02 J fills. Then a couple of weeks later he announced he was actually fed up with filling twin sets as well. Why? Because he is going CCR and down sizing his filling operation.

So having joined the real world for full price, Helium and 100 mile drives for gas, I decided it was time to consider CCR and a few decanting bottles as the way forward. Two or three trips to Tonbridge for gas were all I needed to convince my self.

About bloody time said Andy P, who being 90 miles away couldn’t benefit from Garage Fill Man; so we went shopping. I wanted a KISS as I liked the idea of an electronics free unit. Electronics and I never seem to get on well together, add water and it seemed a recipe for disaster. However, Andy P wanted the YBOD as he felt ECCR was the only way and preferred to purchase off a UK based outfit like APD. I set him a deadline to find two good units for around 3k. If he failed to meet the deadline then we were placing orders for KISS units. Amazingly (and I have to admit a tad disappointingly) he came good and a few weeks later we were looking lovingly at our new toys.

Four days later and we were doing the TDI course Mod 1. At this point I started to develop a deep loathing for the YBOD, it was big, very heavy, crap in the water, an absolute pig to keep any sort of decent buoyancy control in and the harness was so crap it beggared belief. Oh and it gave me back ache from trying to stay horizontal and arse-hole ache from it being clenched tight all the time expecting imminent Polaris incidents and for the YBOD to feed me non life-supporting gas at any second.

On day one of the course it tried to kill Andy P when he kinked the main o ring on assembly and allowed C02 to bypass the scrubber, during the whole pool session. My overriding impression after this was that I was going to die because I forgot to put an O ring in the right place. What a stupid reason to die.

Apart form that, it was great!

In fact that’s b******s! There was nothing great about it. It was totally crap and I hated it. I spent most of the training course giving Andy P “I’ll get you for this” looks and he spent a lot of time saying “Sorry!”

Training over and we went off to Stony Cove for a deeper dive. Having struggled with buoyancy in the 4m to 8m of Wraysbury, it was a welcome surprise that once down to 25m most of the buoyancy issues vanished. It was so much easier to fly the unit down there; I almost felt like a proper diver again. The name of the game was keeping it all negative from about 15m up. SMBs and reels became buoyancy aids and super slow negative ascents hanging on the reel the norm.

Several more plays in puddles and then we set off for out first sea dive on the 2nd November. This was to be the first and last dive without a HUD (Head Up Display unit.) Literally on the way home from this dive, I popped into mum and dads house and drilled the necessary 16mm hole in the head to fit the connector. The HUD gave me real time readouts on all my three life-support cells without having to check my hand sets. Now I could just dive and not faf with kit unless red flashing lights alerted me to a problem.


My other issue was with TDI rather than with the unit. Mod 1 qualified me to do dives to 40m on air diluent. For want of an argument air dives. Seeing as I was decompression procedures qualified, I could also do deco. All well and good but in the UK I don’t think diving past 25m without Helium to be all that safe and I definitely don’t consider 40m to be a good idea. As a result, I flouted the rules and flew a weak Trimix from day one. If I was going to have a problem at 35m I wanted a 20m clear head or less whilst trying to sort it out.

Deco kept to a minimum and depths kept to 30-40m we slowly but surely got back into proper diving. I persevered with the standard harness, just to see if it would grow on me but I still hated it with a passion. The poorly located D rings that folded flat and hid under the counter lungs were my number one pet hate. Number two was that I couldn’t get the medium harness to clamp the unit to my portly 15 stone, 42” frame. I HATE floppy dive kit and the dammed thing just flopped everywhere. The harness had to go.

Christmas came and we flew out to the Red Sea to rack in some serious hours. This was a god send and many lessons were learnt. By now buoyancy was not really a big deal anymore and controlled free ascents were becoming the norm. Good job too as we really started to push it in the 40-60m range; unfortunately on air as they wouldn’t let us have Trimix even though we were OC qualified. But this was the Red Sea and over there the warm clear water makes everything so much less stressful than the UK where we went poking about in line and net covered wrecks.



By now I am starting to enjoy the diving but I am still looking back longingly to the simplicity and minimalism of OC diving. Mind you my rose tinted glasses weren’t so tinted that I had forgotten the cost of running OC and the limitations of the puny little cylinders.

Back in the UK and its typical winter crap weather so were freezing our arses off in puddles again in a pointless and thankless attempt to hit the required100 hours before you can do the Mod 3 Trimix Course. This turned out to be a bit of a non event. Where as Mod 1 was a revelation cutting new ground all the way in pretty much all areas of my diving, Mod3 was a boring rehash of Mod1 with stage and decompression planning skills thrown in that were frankly wasting my time. The manual was the same as the OC course and the exam was the same exam I sat for OC, even with totally irrelevant questions in it on gas consumption.

Voicing my concerns led to a barrage of instructors telling me how hard it would have been on their course but frankly I felt they were guiding the lily. Adding a load of non syllabus tough drills and skills to a course to stress & push the diver doesn’t really impress me but it might be fun to do.
Having completed Mod 3 it was time to consolidate skills and we once more headed out to the Red Sea where we could get the depth in a low stress environment and play with Trimix on proper dives. The trip did not go according to plan and in the end despite a 90m and a 105m dive; I felt we had learned more about flying the unit in penetration dives than we had about deep diving skills. More unit issues and minor glitches/ ‘brown trouser moments’ added to our experience data base and I learned the true limitations of team bailout. I also had the benefit of CCR diving hammered home with the puny £130 bill for lime and gas for the week compared to the £400+ for the single OC diver on the boat.


After two seasons of diving with Andy P as a Trimix buddy, without either of us once letting the other down or failing to deal with a problem during a dive, Andrew and I were now regularly suffering communication breakdowns and getting angry about each others diving. For me our diving relationship was at an all time low. I am sure looking back, this was because we were too busy thinking about our own issues with the unit and not enough thinking about our buddies.

Fortunately things were about to change. Andrew bought us both wet slates to communicate with and I booked us both on a trip to dive the Zenobia. Nine weeks and a couple of fairly crap UK dives after the Red Sea trip, we were on a plane out to Cyprus. Something had clicked with diving the unit and it all seemed easier now. I had binned the c**p harness and gone back to my much loved Custom Divers rig. Loads of fettling and position changing had grown into something I could live with and whilst not perfect it was heading in the right direction.

The whole atmosphere of the Zenobia trip was fantastic. The Yorkshire Divers gang headed up by the massive personalities of Digger, Juz and Howard the Dude were just pure class. Dive Tec worked their balls off to make it all happen and Mark Powell and Blanaid put the icing on the cake. Andrew and I had a great trip with some great dives and we proved another of the great benefits of CCR. Having got slightly lost on the upper car deck, there was a moment of panic followed by a shrug of the shoulders and a thought of “F**k it! I have at least 5 hours before I need to start worrying”.

Andy P used his slate to its full after getting stuck during a penetration dive writing on it “What’s the f**king sign for ‘I am stuck you c**t’?” Which was perhaps born out of the frustration of me videoing him and laughing my head off. Once again we were on CCR with virtually unlimited time so there was no panic no drama in fact it was just a bit of a laugh being wedged in a shipwreck unable to move at 35m.



Since the Zenobia trip Andrew and I have logged a pathetic 5 dives together. The pressure of work for Andrew has been too much and he has had to can virtually every planned trip since then. Those that weren’t canned by him were canned by the weather and tomorrow’s dives fall into that category as well.

I have ended up doing solo dives or buddying up with mainly OC divers and a few other newbie CCR bods as well. The unit through all this has worked fine. Little or no problems to report of any significance and most of the real grief has come from the VR3 cable or the HUD cable and their respective connections to the unit. Diving in the UK is back up to full OC speed with two hour plus dives in the 50-70m range being the norm and skills are up to an acceptable level (for me at least) with only my personal interpretation of excellence to strive for.

So what do I think of it so far?

Well it has gone from rubbish to being not bad. I hesitate to say ‘good’ but I am constantly reminded of the economy of gas, diving a CCR and the flexibility of diving a perfect Nitrox mix, no mater what the depth and as a result I can feel the word 'good' on the tip of my tongue. So what’s holding me back?

Well the obvious transportation issues springs immediately to mind; it’s a bit like having to take your twin set away with you every where you go. Its big, heavy way, over baggage allowance, there are problems with customs and just to top it off every time you stick a travel tag on the unit you wonder if you will ever see your £3,000 – 5,000 toy again and if you do ‘will it still work?’

However, whilst the logistics are a major issue with oversees travel, the reverse is true in the UK. Weekend trips and multi-day trips are easy. No gas fill issues, a bit of kit and two stages that will last two 70m dives, two 3 ltr tanks of O2 and a simple whip and 300 bar decanting tank and you can do a whole weeks mix diving and get all your kit and all your gas to and from the site in a small hatch back. Fantastic!

No, for me the big downer is the feeling of being encumbered by the front mounted counterlungs and the big hose on the mouth piece. This restricts movement, blocks fields of vision and makes you have the profile and drag of a bus in the water. This is what really annoys me about CCR. Some say that the rear mounted KISS lungs or the streamlining of the Meg would overcome these problems but they have other issues themselves, so I am sure one would just counter the other. Would I go back to OC diving?

Err no. It just doesn’t make sense for deep Trimix. CCR is the right tool for the job in terms of safety and economy. Whilst the issues of cave profiles forcing many buoyancy changes during a penetration may make CCR a PITA, for some cave dives, I don’t see this being a big issue in wreck diving. It is by far the safest way to do wreck penetration and caves where the profile is less up and down.

Most of the scary safety issues of CCR diving are just hype in my view. There is the overwhelming reality that it can put you to sleep and you can be a ‘Dive God’ of the highest order and still die, but apart from that minor issue I don’t think its any more or less dangerous than deep Trimix on OC. You have to balance the risk of a CO2 hit against the risk of running out of gas OC and make your choice. Keith Morris died for reasons unknown using a CCR and he was widely regarded as a ‘Dive God’ but then John Bennett died for reasons unknown doing a 50m OC Trimix dive and he was no slouch either.

Most of the diving issues with CCR are no worse than OC. You kind of forget just how long it took to feel totally comfortable in a dry suit with twin set and deco stages on but in reality I reckon about a year (100 dives) to feel good and a life time trying to perfect it is about right for that as well.

With the recent UK price hike in O2 and Helium, the economy issues are making more and more sense. OK the front end is massive but if you’re doing regular mix diving it soon starts to even out. I see no need for the single day 30m divers who do the occasional 50m dive to go on to CCR. In my opinion OC is far less hassle and it would take way too long for the gas benefits to out weigh the investment. However for the mixed gas diver who is doing 30 or more 50m+ dives a year or the diver doing regular multi-day trips, it’s the practical solution to the problems.

If you’re into 70m+ diving it opens up a whole new world of bottom time. CCR divers recently in Ireland were running 30mins at 95m+; a dive that on OC would have required twin 15s or 18s and 15ltr decompression tanks. They did the dive on the unit with team and staged bailout. Then for the really brave or insane (depending on your point of view) there are divers like Joe Davin doing 100m+ on just the unit with no attempt at bailout options. He says “If it breaks I die that’s my choice”. Seeing as I stand no earthly chance of catching up with the hours Joe has put in on the Inspiration and the fact he has dives some of the worlds most extreme caves and wrecks it’s difficult to say he is wrong.

So after 12 months on the unit, my conclusion is it was the right thing to do. My confidence with diving the unit has grown through practice. My fear of the unit has diminished through understanding and my enjoyment in diving the unit has grown through experience.

So just about the right time for it to bite me in the arse then

ATB

Mark Chase

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