5 Tips For Wall Diving For Beginner Scuba Divers - Grand Cayman.

Morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Divers Ready. My name's James, coming to you once again from the beautiful divers paradise of Grand Cayman. This morning is an extra special morning because me and my buddy Menno are actually loading up our dive gear into the rental car and we're going to drive to a different part of the island and surprise two of my ex-students who I haven't seen for six years, I want to say, and they don't know that I'm on island. I've kept radio silence on Facebook, I haven't checked in anywhere on here, that stuff, so they don't know I'm here. Every year these guys come to Grand Cayman and every year they invite me and I've never been able to join them, so it's actually really funny that this trip coincided with them being here and I thought about telling them in advance and I thought no, I'm going to leave it and make it a surprise. So these are ex-students of mine, Steve and Robin, both of them fantastic divers now. Robin was very nervous as she was going through her open water course but was so strong in overcoming her hesitations. So yeah, yesterday we called up the diver operator that always dive with and booked us, I was on the same boat as them. Way too early man. It's like, it's like 5 30. Rental cars, R2 Gorilla frames, plus two sets of dive gear, plus my camera gear is more than this little Kia was designed to do. You gonna rain all morning or what? Nah, just a little Nearly missed the turn. We're driving up to the north side of the island to surprise my friends Robin and Steve and the north side of Grand Cayman means that we're going to be diving the north wall so that's got me thinking about big wall diving and later in this video I'm going to be sharing with you guys my five tips if you're approaching your first ever big wall dive, so stay tuned for Very important, this is the home of Cayman Elvis over here. Cayman Elvis? Cayman Elvis is always a good friend here. What? Why am I just hearing about Cayman Elvis now? What kind of tour guide are you? That should have been James, forget the diving, number one, Cayman Elvis and now proceed to tell me about Cayman Elvis. I know nothing about him because I haven't seen him yet. What? I know it's bad, I'm ashamed. Why wasn't that the first thing you did when you got to the island? I'm really looking forward to seeing like big wall. Move chicken, I'm out of the way, coming through Oh and you Mr. Crab, Jesus. How are you? Good, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Are you with Manu? Yeah You know him? I just saw the names, I was just told the names. Yes, yeah yeah cool, yeah yeah so it's kind of a funny story, a couple of guys that dive with you every year, Steve and So they were open water students of mine like five, six years ago. Oh nice, oh so you're surprising them today. Yeah, okay. Good morning guys, just making video footage. Welcome. Good morning. How are you doing? Good to see you guys, come on aboard. Hi, good morning guys. Go ahead, son of a, what's going on? Oh my gosh, holy crap, how are you? Gotcha, you just made my day brother, gotcha. Oh man, so good to see you. Wanna go for a dive? Yeah, let's do it. Wow, it's been five years. Yes, five years. This month you certified us. How about that? Gotcha, gotcha. So this is my buddy Menno. Hey guys. You like that? Let's do it. He literally said to me, I forgot to tell you, James said keep your hands in, and she says to me yesterday, so James be proud of me, I'm keeping my hands in. I've seen the photos, I've seen the photos. I do, I do, I do. So cool, so cool. This is awesome. Yeah, this is fantastic. Yeah, that's awesome. The plan worked, James, the plan worked. Yeah, our stuff is already there. It was quite an awesome day for me. Not the surprising Steve and Robin part, obviously that was hilarious, but the thing that made me most proud was being able to watch them in the water after 80 or 90 dives, after I taught their open water course, and see what confident and capable divers they've become. Nobody can ever be a perfect diver after four open water dives during your course. That's not the instructor's job. The instructor's job is to get you through the course and make you safe. Your job then is to go out and gain experience, and that's exactly what Steve and Robin have done, and seeing them in the water now, it just made me so proud and really, really happy. I want to make a separate video on the North Wall of Grand Cayman as a dive site itself, but let's talk about wall dives in general. So what makes wall diving so attractive for me is number one, the topography, just awesome, huge scape, the North Wall of Grand Cayman here, you start at like 60 feet, and it drops all the way down thousands and thousands of feet. So when you're out there, you've got this huge wall that you're facing, and just the scale and scope makes you feel very small, and it's very humbling. Add to that the canyons and all the crevasses that feature in the wall make it a really interesting dive from a videoing point of view. Plus you get excellent coral formations because they're fed by currents, which means the corals grow really big and really healthy, and that's awesome to see. And another plus factor for wall diving is the navigation is really easy because all you've got to do is keep the wall on one side of you going one way, and keep the wall on the other side coming back, turn around, and there you go. But I do want to give you five factors to consider before you start doing big wall diving. So factor number one, as with any dive, but especially with wall dives, keep an eye on your depth, and of course your depth affects your no decompression limit, and it affects your gas consumption. Now the reason you want to keep an eye, especially for wall dives, is because it can be quite disorientating. If you're looking down, and you're just seeing blue water that gradually fades to dark blue water that fades to black water, you can lose a sense of where you are with your depth. And if you're following a topographical feature of the wall, keep in mind that that could be on an angle. So if you're just following it, you could actually be going down, down, down, down, down, using your gas faster, burning through your no decompression time faster. So keep an eye on your depth. Factor number two, expect and be ready for current. If you've got a huge wall at depth, and the tidal action of the ocean, it's going to be moving water, and it's going to have to push it one way or the other. And, as with any dive with current, always start your dive going into the current, and then you've got the current with you on your return. Factor number three, as with any dive, but especially for wall dives, you want to do the deepest part of your dive first. So pick which parts you want to do, drop down, swim into the current, then come up the wall, and be shallower coming back. It's going to help your decompression profile, it's going to help your gas consumption, and you'll have the current coming back. So the second half of the dive will be easier than the first half of the dive. Factor number four, when doing big wall diving, is keep your distance from the wall. And I say this for a number of reasons. Most importantly, so you don't damage coral, because the coral is moving out there in the current, and often they grow to quite a size. You don't want to get wrapped up in it, so stay back for that reason. But also, just so you do have that sense of scale. If you come off of the wall, and look at the wall as a whole picture, you know, you're really going to get that wow effect, like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. So keep your distance back from the actual wall itself. And factor number five is keep an half an eye out in the big blue. Don't be transfixed by just staring at the wall, because you might miss something truly epic swimming by out in the ocean. That could be anything from a pod of dolphins, to whales, to shark. Do keep half an eye out on the big blue, don't be caught wall watching. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button, and click the little bell icon, and that way you'll never miss any of our content. Ladies and gentlemen, that wraps up this video on wall diving. I hope you enjoyed it. It was so great seeing Steve and Robert again. Until next time, my name's James, this is Divers Ready from Grand Cayman. Now go out there and smash some dives on some big walls. Dive safe, dive often. I do think that every Caribbean island has an Elvis impersonator, though. Well, you should. It's like, you know, Barbados Elvis. It's a cornerstone of our civilization, to have an Elvis. It is. You can't go to a developed country and have an Elvis around you. Yeah. That got you guys good. Yeah, totally. I was just like, the right thing, but not here. Yeah, you were like, that guy looks exactly like James.