TRAINING DAY 8: NAVIGATING UNDER A TOWEL

Today was fun (...even though we were reviewing some serious emergency situations). We started in the classroom reviewing drills we'd do in the water, including how to use the marine VHF radios and safety sausages (brightly-colored, inflatable buoy columns) we'll always have with us underwater. We all got a little competitive during the emergency drills, which kept everyone's attention piqued. 

In the first drill, we practiced navigating with a compass. To make sure we weren't cheating, the instructors put towels over our heads (Mission 31 monogrammed towels, of course), so we had to "blindly" rely on only our compass heading to get where we wanted to go. I'm sure this looked ridiculous to anyone who passed by, but we're all now great at navigating! 

Mission 31 towel. It's white on navy; classy!

We also drilled a worst case scenario in which both divers are disoriented and lost their masks. Our goal was to return safely to the habitat. To do this, we attached our secondary reel of rope to a stationary point on the seafloor and used the line to swim in a circle (in a constant radius) around the stationary point looking for one of the neon excursion lines that led back to the habitat (all without masks). Initially the drill was complicated; but practicing it first on land really helped. In the water, Liz and I nailed it. Liz described in her Girls's Rule blog post: "It was a good feeling to be on the same page as my dive buddy Grace, especially considering we are about to spend over 20,000 minutes underwater together! I have a feeling that by the end of the Mission, Grace and I will be able to read each other's minds underwater." 

Billy Snook, a member of the Mission 31 production team, filmed us underwater today with a Nokia (one of our sponsors) Lumia 1020 camera. Thanks to Billy and Nokia for the photos and video clips bleow!  

Here's a video of today's underwater training 

and here's some sea life we saw today

and photos from the boat

Fellow aquanaut Adam and me, taking a selfie on a Lumia phone from our mission sponsor Nokia.

The boat was full today, including aquanauts, camera crew, and Navy support divers. In this photo, from left to right: Liz (aquanaut), Billy (camera), Andy (aquanaut), and Marc (camera).