Fundies as this course is known has been written up and reported on many times now, you can read about it on many websites including yorkshire-divers and direxplorers.
Fundies is well documented and its easy to see what it consists of over at GUE.com
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What are the biggest differences between GUE and other diver training agencies?
Well most of you will know about these but some of my friends may not even have heard of GUE, so here are the headlines…
- Dive in teams of three not Buddy teams of two.
- Air is not a GUE Diving gas.
- Smokers may not hold GUE Certification.
- Mandated equipment configuration.
So here we go….this is my own abridged blog from my experience.
April 18-21st GUE Fundamentals Location: Somerset (Vobster Quay) Instructor: Clare Gledhill
This is not a Macho course, its a fun training course which has high standards to gain accreditation.
You are shown new ways of doing skills that you can learn via other agencies or via other methods, sometimes I think Tech courses are written up as if they are all macho i.e “I was given an out of gas and a primary light failure, life depends on blah blah” well in my opinion Fundies is nothing like that, here is just one small example..
During other training I have had my gas turned off and my mask taken off me unexpectedly when doing dives.
During GUE Fundamentals the instructor or support diver didn’t touch any of my life support kit ever, they pointed at me and gave me they signal to donate gas or to turn my torch off and even when having to do the no mask swim, I took my mask off myself, my buddy led me by holding onto to me (real technical divers call this touch contact) and the instructor stayed close by us in case anything should go wrong, so you see the emphasis is on fundamentals and safety.
Is that what I thought before I went along, no way, I was scared senseless of being beasted by these underwater dive God’s.
I learned lots that weekend thanks to Alistair and Clare and the one thing above all else I learned was that
The most important piece of kit a GUE diver takes in the water is his buddies or in GUE speak, “the team”.
- Pool session incorporating a swim test and back kick, helicopter turn instruction
- Four training dives
- Approx ten hours of lectures
- Approx five hours of academic exercises
- Approx 3 hours of video review & feedback
- Experience Dive
- Debrief
Skill Demonstrations
I met Jim, Mack, Dave, Alistair and Clare thanks to everybody for making this a brilliant course, well ran and good friendly people even the Vobster Underwater Wraith*…..
We learned that rule six may be to look good at all times but rule seven is never to look structured in a council swimming pool.
Post dive video assessments are brilliant, they really do show you when you got it right and when you got it oh ever so badly wrong.
I found it hard to maintain the high standard of buoyancy control and I found it impossible to perform the valve drill, it probably wasn’t a good a idea in retrospect turning up to a training course wearing a drysuit with drygloves that I had only used for two little fun dives, however at least the suit and me got a good work out.
After Dave and I completed our experience dive we even had a chance to have one extra chill out dive with no fear of the VUW coming near us.
So in all I managed a Total of six FUNDIvES and well to be honest, I managed to scrape a Provisional pass (Not needing any further instruction just lots of practice & a re-evaluation dive).
I basically failed to maintain the correct levels of buoyancy and I also failed miserable to do my Valve Shutdown drills, lets face it in all honesty who else is mad enough to go on a training course wearing a suit they have only just got and only managed to dive twice prior to the course…….
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The Backick is interesting and will be a nice skill to master and I have started putting it into practice although I have found I tend to go upwards and backwards causing a silt cloud.
*Vobster Underwater Wraith – is some sort of ghost like diver that has a red overlay on a DUI suit and sweeps in unseen and unfelt to switch off primary lights.
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