Break has ended! Back to water...

Ahhh... Finally the doctors gave me an "OK" to dive again after a seven months break. It's time to hit the pool again for some practicing. Yes, pool because I missed the AOWD-training last fall and because of that were unable to participate in ice-diving -course and because of that I am not allowed to dive under ice. Well, next winter, hopefully...

I went through some basics before hitting the swimming hall and prepared a small list of tasks to practice on the first dive after a long break.

The list is in Finnish, but here's the translation

1. Buddy check
2. Empty mask
3. Mask off -> Breath without mask -> Put mask back on
4. Swimming on the bottom without mask -> Put mask back on
5. Fin pivot
6. Pivot
7. Too much air in the drysuit legs -> Reacting
8. Breathing from freeflowing regulator
9. Out of air -> Give air to buddy -> Swimming for 15 meters -> Surfacing
10. Detaching/attaching the air-input (BCD and drysuit)

I was pretty surprised because I managed to clear all the mask tasks with bride and glory. They were pretty hard for me on the OWD-course. For some reason it was difficult for me to breath from regulator without mask on, but now it worked out just fine.
I couldn't pivot last fall and I can't now... Wondering if I'll ever master it. It's frustrating to drag feet and after getting them up my nose is down/too much air in legs. BLAH! A large amount of air wasted at the same time.

Thanks to my anonymous friend for hitting the pool with me! You know who you are...

Pool stats... 52 minutes under water, maximum depth 4 meters and 20.8 liters per minute air usage.

Sidemount diving?

During the break... As I had "tons and tons" of time,  I started to wander around Youtube, forums etc and discovered sidemount -diving.
I Immediately fell in love in it because it looked so sleek and even more after I read it gives your back some more movement and therefore doesn't stress it as much as single/double tank would do.
Gear is the easy part in this as I already have two 12 liter / 232 bars steel cylinders which should be really nice for SM-diving and I only need to get an SM-BCD and another first-stage (I can use regulator and octo in the beginning).
Course is the hard part because as far as I know, there's only one SM-instructor in Finland, Jukka Lallukka from Cavediving.fi and I suppose he's got something else to do than teach one guy SM-diving basics...