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Me diving

Thursday, February 15, 2007

GUE Fundamentals, Day 3

We met for another 3hr classroom session to go over all things equipment. We talked about the tradeoffs and selection concerns for each piece of equipment from tanks and backplates down to SMBs and spools. We spent awhile talking about proper backplate positioning and each made some non-negligible adjustments to move the plates down. In the process of doing this, it was discovered that in his zeal and haste of webbing my harness, Rob had put the chest d-rings on upside-down, which was probably inhibiting clipping-off. Doh! It didn't really occur to us that they weren't symmetric. Unfortunately, this involved unwebbing most of his harness to fix.

We then set up our own rigs and went over them with a fine tooth comb. By and large, we passed muster, though there were a few suspect knots and half-assed bungee contraptions that were fixed or tossed. Beto also showed us a new knot to use depending on how we want the tied bolt-snap to behave (whether it should move around, or rather stay in a fixed position but swivel). We also each changed some of our hoses around to vastly improve the hose routing around the 1st stage.

It was a long night with a lot of useful information, but it was fun. I mean, who doesn't love playing with gear?! For homework, I had to redo some knots, because I admitted to Beto that Rob had tied all of my knots for me and I'd never actually tied a knot :)

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