Preparing for the Bahamas

My preparation for the Bahamas trip has been a bit of a debarcle once again.

Dive Camp was great. The Lazy Seals booked a bach by Lake Taupo for 9 days in early January. About half a dozen of us dived every day and learned new skills from each other. The weather held up for us; the sun shone and the lake was calm. I do tend to panic a bit at depth and have decided that this is something I really need to work through this year as if I am going to achieve great depths I want to be fairly comfortable down there. To this point I have been relying on pure determination and the fact that I have a good breath hold. I have not yet had any troubles with equalisation or felt a great deal of pressure on my chest. My focus was on relaxing at depth, not on achieving any great depth or worrying too much about technique or fancy equipment. I did a few nice slow dives with hangs at -40m just with mask, snorkle and bi-fins, and quite a few -20m dives safetying others. It was becoming more comfortable. It was intended to be a good warm up for the summer.

Since then I've managed a couple of dives in the Wellington harbour which is limited to -15m. The weather and lack of enough buddies to keep it safe has been working against me once again this summer.

I have been doing a lot of dry lung stretching and simulation of depth as well as I can in the pool; A lot of negatives and some sprints. I have figured out that my sense of panic at depth stems from a few areas that I have been focussing in on as best I can:

• inexperience – this is problematic when you don't have suitable dive sites or buddies or enough time off work.
• inability to relax while moving rapidly/sprinting – after years of pool work I can easily relax when everything is slow and consistent, but have found that as soon as I speed it up I become tense. I have been doing some dynamic sprint work to teach myself to relax, not contract and maintain consistency at the pace I have to use to overcome the buoyancy issues related to deep diving.
• Generally not feeling like I have enough air in my lungs created by the pressure at depth – I have been doing some FRC and negative dynamics in the pool, closely monitored by my buddies of course. My focus during these was again on relaxing, keeping a consistent stroke and not having contractions.

Apart from this, I felt like my general fitness was getting back to where it should be, and I was starting to achieve in my long dynamics again.

I guess time will tell if these simulations are actually helpful or not.