Twin F Vobster, Saturday 22 October
Saturday found me at Vobster with Frank and five students for a Twin F course.
This course had a different flavour to last weeks. As the students are looking solely for redundancy, rather then extending their depth or decompression liabilities, this week’s course was tailored to be less about and introduction to technical diving and more of a twinset trydive - letting those in the group who were unsure what size sets to buy try a few different ones.
It was quite a tiring day, five lots of gear to set up, five harnesses to fit etc. Five students would have been too many in the water in one go so Frank and I made four dives so each group could dive twice. They did really well, frog kicking like naturals and holding horrizontal trim whilst swimming. I think they had fun.
After dive 2 we could hear something bubbling away in my kit on the surface. Not seeing anything, I carried on but asked Frank to bubble check me at the start of the next dive… Nothing.
We carried on and I then heard it again - the noise was definately coming from my wing inflate. The last time this happened (on an old inflator) touching the inflator button briefly stopped it - so I did.
Big mistake!!!
It jammed on and before I could disconnect it I was on my way up. I managed to get it off eventually but by this time was near the surface and didn’t want to drop back down without any inflation. It took a while but I eventually got the inflator on again and dropped back down to Frank and the students who were in the process of surfacing. We all returned to the platform and fearful of it happening again I disconnected the wing inflator. Good job it didn’t happen the day before at 50 metres!
It had been a long day with 7 ascents and descents and frankly, whilst it had been fun - I’d had enough. A Gin and Tonic at the pub accompanied by chocolate was prescribed by Frank - perfect :o)
