Full Face Mask check out

Today, Joe Kistel and I took off to Blue Grotto at 8am.

Joe is the founder of  TISIRI. My goal this trip is three fold. First, a checkout dive to see how I feel on my first dive after surgery. I felt great! Buoyancy was spot. I wore my usual, drysuit, Zeagle 911 BCD, slipstream fins, gators and 10 pounds of weight. I ended up being over-weighted. I couldn’t believe it. I was adding air to my BCD and my drysuit at 30 feet. Kewl. I can drop some weight from my belt! The second goal was to speak with Ed, the owner of Blue Grotto about putting together a video of Blue Grotto. Well, Ed and Judy are out of the country at the moment. The third was to test out the recently serviced OTS Masks and communications. Everything works great. We had some leakage of air around the sides of the mask, but with more checkouts, we’ll find whats right.

We performed a distance check on the transmitter/receivers and estimate the quality remained high enough to clearly hear the other at about 30 feet distance. fresh batteries were installed this morning.

Some of the difficulties I noticed were, I was not able to get the rubber nose stop to press up against my nose. This allows for a method to equalize air cavities by attempting to exhale out the nose, while the nose is pinched closed. I had to yawn to clear my ears and that was not a problem Where I had problems was in the sinus cavity. I felt that tiny pinch on the way down, so we aborted the decent and leveled off. As Joe put it, we threaded the needle.

After our get acclimated with the mask dive, Joe and I headed back to the platforms and I had Joe perform some skills, like removal and replacement of the full face mask. Joe performed perfectly. After about a 35 minute dive, we both ended up using approximately 2000 pounds of air.  We exit the water, cleanup and head out. I was home at 2:30.

Larry

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