Aging and diving.
In the next few weeks I would like to talk about the subject of aging and diving. Now that I’m within a couple years of 70 I have started to look back on my diving career and I have noticed some things that I never would have seen when I was younger. I would like to share them with you on this journey. So sit back, get a fresh cup of coffee and enjoy.
Here’s a little history on my start to this journey. In the early 1960s there was a weekly TV show on called “Sea Hunt,”, the main character was named Mike Nelson (Lloyd Bridges) who retired from the U.S. Navy as a munitions or demolition diver. He worked as a marine diver for the California marine laboratory. He would take on many contracts, government and private. He was also a scuba diving instructor for the California diving club, for a 12 year old boy from Georgia. It was a fascinating world.
So that’s where I got the scuba diving bug from. My parents thought I was crazy. I had a paper route and I sold the Grit newspaper too. I saved up the $50 I needed to take my first diving class at the YMCA. It was a 6 month long class two nights a week from 5 to 10 p.m. You ask why did it take six months – well, the equipment was primitive by today’s standards and we had to learn how to make our own scuba harness that held the tank to our backs using 2-inch wide stiff nylon straps. We also had to make our weight belts out of the same material. There were no dive shops that had BCs – just mask, fins, snorkels and tanks – 72 cubit feet steel tanks.
The only classroom lessons where very basic physics of pressurized gas and some talk of never hold your breath always breathe kind of stuff. About 90% of the lessons were in the pool. You need to know that the regulators we used where a double hose, meaning there was no real second stage regulator. The two hoses came together in a mouthpiece, on one side of the mouthpiece had a one-way valve that would send the exhaust out of the top of the first stage connected to the tank, the other side of the mouthpiece was where the air would flow continuously as you breathe. It was not an on-demand valve that the modern regulators would have.
In the pool part of the class we would work on one skill each pool session until it was second nature and natural for us to do with out thinking about it.
Some of the skills came easy but there where a few of them that where a high degree of difficulty.
Remember I said we used 72’s, we would literally drain every last breath from them during each class and most classes we each used two tanks.
The tank valve on the tanks back then had what was called a “J” valve. It had a stainless steel rod about 3/16ths in diameter with a hoop in the end and would follow the tank down the right side and the top of the rod was connected to a lever on the side of the valve.
If it was filled correctly then when the tank pressure was 500psi it would have a spring loaded pin bock the air hole and you pull the stainless steel rod down to rotate the pin away from the hole to give you air to get back to the surface.
More to follow next week.
Russell Miller #59999
