Since I bailed on the camping part, I woke up early on Sunday (Sep 17) and made the 40-minute drive up to Lake Castaic. I found a cluster of tents that I assumed was ADP, but no one was moving around. A quick phone call to one of my fellow students revealed that I was in the firefighter’s camp (a staging area for the nearby Day Fire), and needed to drive a little further to reach ADPers, down at the water’s edge.

We started the day with a lecture from Dave Bunch on diving in zero visibility, knot tying, lift bags, etc; then we were split into groups of 4 and sent out to do 4 different tasks in the lake. For each task, a different one of us was the “group leader,” calling all the shots.

I’ll say upfront, that was the hardest part of the day – dealing with bossing each other around. I don’t think we were the only group that uncovered some interesting personality traits!

Somehow, though, we managed to succeed (or almost succeed) at our tasks.

Dive 1:

Three floats were set up in a triangle, with a transect line strung along two sides at about 12 feet. We were to head out to the first float, take a reading on the third float, then descend and follow the line from the first float over to the second and third, while measuring distance in kicks. The transect line ended at float 3, and we spent a few minutes doing some quickie math on our slates to estimate the fin kicks back to the first float – then we headed off in the appropriate compass direction.

And here is where we sucked. Four people in a line heading the same direction – it’s just really, really hard, even when you’re holding on to a buddy line. Perhaps especially when you’re holding on to a buddy line, because it’s easy for someone to pull the wrong direction and get you off track. One person is monitoring their compass and “leading,” but if people start going even slightly different speeds the leader can wind up no longer out in front. Bob, as one of the fastest swimmers, was the designated compass leader, but there was so much cross-talk between the four of us that we wound up going quite a bit off to one side.

Eventually the divemasters, who’d followed our bubbles, came down to tell us to give up – we surfaced about 20 feet away from our target. Not too far if you’re navigating in 20 foot visibility, but for zero-vis we were way off course. We had a second try and didn’t do any better. In fact, the navigating-in-a-line turned out to be the bane of our day: each drill started and ended with a navigation from the beach to the starting float (on snorkel, with your face in the water) and then back at the end (underwater). The only times we nailed our target were when we were allowed to split into buddy groups (2 people are easier to keep in line than 4).

Dive 2

The second station was a lift bag exercise. “Lift bag” is a slight misnomer here; we were actually dealing with big 50 gallon drums that were chained to sections of pipe, which weighed several hundred pounds. Four of these contraptions were set up on a platform at the bottom, and we took turns in buddy pairs lifting and re-sinking them.

Things that were hard about this task:

• Finding the damn things in the first place, in the 0-to-6-inch visibility
• Communicating with one’s buddy via buddy line
• Getting air into the drums through a tiny hole in the bottom
• Knowing when to get the heck out of the way as they shoot to the surface
• Getting them back down in an orderly fashion. (We didn’t – they dropped so fast we totally let go, and they landed across the other three and had to be re-adjusted. In zero vis.)

The easy part of this dive was navigating back to the shore, as we did it in pairs rather than all 4 at once.

Dive 3

This was our best dive – and ironically, we didn’t have much of a plan ahead of time. At this station, there were pieces of wood, saws and hammers, and staples. Our job was to create four “marker floats,” squares of wood with a staple hammered in that could be attached to a line later. We had a complicated plan for who would saw, who would hammer, who would get tools out of the bag, and who would hold onto things, but we wound up mixing it up a little when we hit the bottom, passing things off to each other as necessary. We did stick with the one-person-sawing idea, which worked really well. We had all four marker floats “built” in a matter of minutes, and navigated off towards our starting point.

Dive 4

I was so ready to be done by the time we got to the last station – and so were the divemasters in charge there. A sweep line was tied off to the dock, and we were supposed to run a search pattern from there to find where three mortars were lying on a platform. The DMs gave us the rather large hint that the sweep line was “just long enough,” saving us time inching out the line; we went straight to the mortars and got to work.

“Work” was measuring the mortars so we could later calculate volume and weight. One diver pulled rulers out of the bag and handed them off; one measured dimensions of the mortars; one wrote down the measurements. My job was to hold onto the sweep line (don’t laugh) to make sure we’d be able to get back to our starting point. We did, and this time navigated back to the shore dead-on for a change. I guess we’d gotten too tired to fight each other in the line…

After the Dives

I was one of the divers who headed out to collect the dive floats which had been marking off the area. I hit my own float first and hauled up the anchor – not too hard, since my anchor/chain assembly is fairly light, but it was a long way down. I pulled up a good 70 feet of line, which had to be spooled up as I went.

Then I decided to go for another float, since I was already out there. As soon as I started lifting, I wondered if I was making a big mistake – this thing was HEAVY. I was barely staying afloat as I pulled it up, and couldn’t be bothered to spool the line as I went. I finally hauled out an enormous anchor and obscenely long length of chain. I guess the float’s owner expects to dive in heavy currents a lot? I made my way back to shore, spooling line as I went.

But that still wasn’t enough exercise: now it was time for the relay race. The ADP relay is a little funky: people take turns racing out to a float and back on full SCUBA gear (face in the water, breathing through your snorkel), skin gear (same), and swimming (no gear). I got drafted to join the opposite team since they were a little short, and volunteered for a swim.

By the time I was up, we were half a lap behind, but I narrowed the gap considerably. It’s funny – I certainly don’t look like I’d be able to swim all that fast. But somehow I pull it off.

The team I was on won by a few lengths – the final lap came down to two instructors on skin gear, pulling on each other’s fins as they took turns passing each other. Hilarious.