Take any basic task you do, walking, running, even eating... now do it with your eyes closed. Whole different experience isn't it... did you feel the nerves? Especially if you try running, normally you'll run or walk at a casual pace, you won't think about where you put your feet, or what you're doing with your hands. You may even be talking with someone or listening to them. But with your eyes closed you are very careful where you put your feet, your hands are generally feeling around in front of you or around you and typically you want it quiet so you can hear whats going on around you and focus. Now if you were smart about it, you went slow, I had a young man at my house in the summer who learned this lesson the hard way by running with his eyes closed, misjudged his location and ran into a fence, face first.... split his tongue in two (looked like a snake) and chipped teeth... that's one trip to the ER neither he nor his mother will soon forget...lol. So why is it so much harder to do our day to day activities with our eyes closed? It's because our eyes are like the scanner on your computer, it's how the information gets to the brain, sure you can type it all, or use a mouse to click one character at a time, but to put a whole page of information, or several, into a computer quickly the best most accurate route is a scanner. Take eating, you eat without really thinking about it, (this also leads to why more than 60 - 80 % of the population of North America is obese, but that's another blog), you hold your fork in your one hand, knife in the other, cut your food, pick it up, place it in your mouth... simple. With your eyes closed, you need to really focus to make sure you know where your food is, the placement of your fork, how big a piece are you cutting, finding that piece, picking it up and then carrying it to your mouth... all these tasks... SOOOO much harder with your eyes closed.
Why all this talk about eyes closed.... because Tuesday I was fortunate enough to join Dennis Chow and a fellow student for our classroom portion of our Night Dive certification. Now this is not my first night dive, for the story about that adventure see It's Dark... Very, Very Dark...., but for this I will not just be doing one night dive as before, I will be doing three over the course of this weekend, one Friday and two on Saturday night. Each of these three dives will have skills that must be demonstrated including Navigation (yeah my favorite....lol), Buoyancy, Orientation, etc. Alone most of these skills are no issue and many of them are very natural after you have completed a number of dives. BUT... much like basic stuff on the surface with your eyes closed, doing all these skills at night on a dive is much harder than in the day. Under the water at night you only see what your light touches, and unlike in the open air, light does not travel very far under water, leaving you with a very narrow field of vision. At night, much like daytime activities with your eyes closed, you spend much of your time "feeling" for your gear as opposed to looking for it. You need to know where your light, b/u light, compass, knife, BCD inflator, Drysuit inflator, gauges, etc all is, and be able to get it by touch and not by sight. This adds an interesting dynamic and further emphasizes that you must be familiar with your gear, and must streamline your equipment as much as possible. Now by streamlining, I do not mean under any circumstances that you want to avoid back-up items or safety equipment, etc, but until one is comfortable with night dives, it's probably a good idea to leave the cameras at home...lol. With streamlining, you want to eliminate gear that you should not be taking with you (stick to your dive plan), if you're training for night, dive your night dive, don't load up on camera or video equipment. Try not to have endless amounts of clips and cords all jumbled together, on the surface or even on some day dives you may be able to look to see which item is which and where cords attach, but in the dark, keep things simple and easy to remember, clip your main light in one location, easy to reach and control, simple enough to turn on with one hand and easy to recover should it be dropped (ie, clipped where you can follow the cord to pull back to your hand.) Your b/u (and you must have at least one) needs to, again, be somewhere easy to locate, especially in the dark as this is used if your main goes out, but is secured where it is not dangling in the way or wrapping around other items and equally if not more important, not dragging where it will disturb, disrupt or injure any sea life. Make sure your compass can be easily reached and used and that you can access your gauges and/or dive computer easily and read them all in the dark. For me this has taken some practice, so despite looking like an idiot, I have geared up a couple times and hidden in a dark room to make sure I can find my compass, reach my lights, and control my computer... so far so good. We'll see what Friday night brings and I'll let you know all about the adventures that await me in the dark, when once again I get "In Over My Head..."
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