On June 18th Chris Stevens and I started our 6 hour trip down to St Keverne for a semi closed circuit rebreather course using the Drager Rays we had recently purchased. Most of the first day involved getting to know the kit, i.e. how to assemble, check, test and maintain.

Gary Fox of Dive Action was our instructor and was very helpfull and easy to get along with. Later that afternoon we headed to the beach for a dive. We both had trouble with buoyancy as we found that we needed about 8kgs of extra lead. We did all the usual skills practice as well as a few specific to the rebreather. At the end of the day we returned to the dive centre, stripped down our kit and cleaned it off and left it to dry. The breathing hose was disinfected and rinsed as well.

On the Saturday we headed to Falmouth and spent the day diving from Cornish Pussy, Gary’s 33m cat, we were very cramped with two of us and Gary’s kit, . We did our first two dives on the wreck of the Stanwood where we continued doing exercises as well as having some good dives. We then headed to another wreck, Epsilon were Cris and I were allowed to dive by ourselves.

What was to be our last day of training was taken up with the theory test in the morning and another dive in the afternoon, we encountered rays and dogfish/catsharks as well as a John Dory fish. Our last exercise was deploying a DSMB which was no problem and on returning to the dive centre we had our papers marked and we had both passed.

Thanks to Chris for organising the training.