Break rhenium in toilet (6)

The worst time to have a heart attack is during a game of charades.
-- Demetri Martin, These Are Jokes
The night before last, we had another pool session with my scuba club. Sylvain and I both went to play - him among other things to try out the new underwater digital camera housing he got for Christmas, and me to try out how much weight I ought to wear with my summer suit and decreased poundage.

In truth, both these things can be done relatively quickly, so we tend to do some practice drills in the water as well. We both practice removing and rapplying our masks (and clearing the water from them), and in the past when Sly has not had a cold, we have tried doing a little "buddy breathing" - sharing a single air source between two users.

You could argue that buddy breathing is an unnecessary skill to know since each diver has two separate air sources, and since the failure of any air source would be reason to terminate a dive, but the last drill that each of us does is even more impractical.

To do the drill, I gop to the bottom of the pool and remove my fins, vest and tank, weights and mask, and then swim up to the surface without any gear. After a moment to orient myself, I swim back down and put it all back on underwater. This sounds simple enough, but I manage to make it quite a chore since I am positively buoyant (floaty) with my neoprene on, as is all my gear except the belt and the mask. This means that when I swim down, I must hold on to the belt with one hand to stop myself from floating back the the surface, then apply my mask and other gear without letting the belt go. Alternately, I can put the belt on and I will stay down, but without the weight of the belt weighing them down, I have to keep track of my other gear floating away.

I also managed to have one of the weights slip off my belt is I tried to put it on with one hand. That didn't help.

Although I don't expet to ever have to redo this in the open water, I like the mental challenge aspect of it - dealing with unexpected equipment snafus underwater, problem solving and so forth. On the positive side, I am pretty comfortable with my breathing. If there's a negative side, I may actually be too comfortable - realizing that the air supply I was using was wrapped around my head, I let it float away to the left before and started reaching around behind me for my other supply in its usual place to my right with nothing in my mouth. It would have been smarter to find the other regulator before letting the first one go. But that's why we practice stuff like this in the pool.

Sly managed to record it all with his camera.