Technical and cave diving has always seemed to be such a distant goal for us. I can remember the feeling I had when starting to discover Global Underwater Explorers back in 2013 while living in Houston. I was in awe of the divers that I would watch in videos. They just made it look so easy and fun. They had… Read more »
Class started on Sunday the 18th at EE, with Meredith Tanguay as our instructor. We did the normal morning lectures followed by some gear inspection. There are some slight gear changes for cave diving that we hadn’t done prior to class, but Mer got us all fixed up. Really not much changes but you will see once you take the… Read more »
Shortly after Tina got her tech upgrade, I scheduled a weekend with Mer and also got mine. It’s still very much a challenge for me to have the type of precision in the water needed for the upgrade, but we have been practicing a lot and I was ready as ever. The day I went for mine was following a work/training trip to… Read more »
We find ourselves at the end of another year. Where does the time go? Since becoming a diver in 2010; this year, above all the previous years has been the craziest. It’s also a year that we didn’t get to do much fun diving despite having been in the water a lot. The training and gear changes have basically… Read more »
The whole week felt like a total blur at this point. Tina and I had mixed emotions about starting the final day of GUE Fundamentals. We learned so much in such a short amount of time, and we had made many new friends, it was definitely sad to know we had to leave soon. None-the-less we still had one more day of diving. The last… Read more »
Both Tina and I were feeling pretty confident and I was definitely on a high note from the day before. My body was sore and my brain was reaching capacity but we had done at least a good enough job at Blue Grotto the previous days, to go to Manitee Springs/Catfish Hotel and work on more skills there. We all… Read more »
Much like our dive profile from the previous day; our third day of Fundamentals was going to have some ups and downs, and some awesome ah ha’s. Mer met us at the Dive house for video review early in the morning and we definitely had some cringe worthy moments. However Mer did a great job showing us that we… Read more »
We woke up early and got some cereal that Tina was smart enough to bring with us from Texas. Mer and Stretch were going to meet us at the dive house to go over land drills. She told us to have our BC’s, lights and regs available for drills so that we could do the drills at the dive house to… Read more »
Finally they day had arrived. We were about to start our GUE training and we were both beyond excited but also pretty nervous. Mer had told us that the first day’s schedule would be lecture in the morning then head over to Ginnie Springs for the swim test. We needed to be at EE at 9am. The dreaded swim test… Read more »
The week before our trip to Florida was a total blur. I was busy at work with a big project and Tina was making last minute preparations getting the house ready for us to be gone for 7 days. We also were finally able to start doing our homework. The homework is due just a few days before the class and you’re required to… Read more »
It was around the beginning of March before I think Tina actually realized the magnitude of the swim test for GUE. She had read the requirements way ahead of time but it wasn’t until she attempted to swim laps non stop that it became apparent how difficult it would be for her. However I started to see big improvements in her technique… Read more »
Tina and I had been contemplating doing a GUE Fundamentals or “Fundies” as it’s been known, for quite some time. We actually had contacted Meredith Tanguay sometime in spring of 2014 and tried to get a Fundies class scheduled for December during Tina’s break from teaching. Fortunately we decided to hold off for a number of reasons. A big reason… Read more »