Optima CCR Training

First and foremost I need to appologize to Cleatus, I haven't been updating my blog as often as I should, but I haven't been diving much since it's winter. For about four years now I have been travelling down to Northern Florida to dive over Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. I did my open water certification dives in Ginne Springs, I did my cavern and basic cave dives in Madison Blue, Cow, Tory, and Peacock systems.

This time I was there for rebreather training (take this with a grain of salt it is the internet you know Rebreathers). I chose the Dive Rite Optima as my rebreather. There are plenty of others on the market, but my local dive shop and most of my CCR dive buddies dive it. Most importantly it did what I wanted it to do and I'm a Dive Rite fanboy. I was slated to take my training from John Jones, down in Lake City, FL. We started out with 2 hours in his pool learning the basics. Setup, safety checks, getting comfortable on the loop, and emergency procedures and bailouts. The next day we went to Troy Springs State Park. I've been there many times before helping out with open water classes. We spent a good three or four hours diving, doing drills and having fun.

Day three involved 3 hours on the loop as they say, in Orange Grove, part of the Peacock cave system. I got in my two deep dives to 100 ft, of course doing drills the whole way, and getting way overloaded with tasks, running reels...etc.

It was a whole lot of fun, basically learning how to dive all over again. I still have a lot of work to do perfecting skills and just having some fun dives and getting some time on the unit. To me it was money well spent, and I can't wait until this long Outer Banks winter is over so I can get into the ocean with it.

Here are some pics. Sorry, no underwater pictures this time. I had my hands full as it was. The cows and goats didn't dive, they were neighbors of Amigo's dive shop, where we got all our gas fills.

Enjoy...