Most Challenging Skills?

[AB8CD]

Cave Diving obviously requires a proper mindset as well as specific skills which we all (hopefully) seek to maintain and improve. While everything has been asked before on this Forum, I would like to see a discussion of what skills were the most challenging for individual members.

I was comfortable in lights-out drills and after training, diving in tight, silty, areas that require mental and physical control to problem solve. But I remember my scariest moment was when Ela (of Cave Heaven) told me after several days of training that she would not give me my card if I did not backfin to her satisfaction. To this day she holds a special place in my heart, but she scared the **** out of me that day!

I still work on my backfinning almost every time I'm in the water just in case she's around a corner!

[OFG-1]

Most challenging skill, you ask?? Convincing your wife that you really need more diving equipment.

[AB8CD]

Most challenging skill, you ask?? Convincing your wife that you really need more diving equipment.

I said "most challenging" ... not impossible!

[Jim Wyatt]

Typically I see the most challenging skills to be: (1) Running and retrieving a reel properly in a high flow cave. (2) Gas sharing exit in zero vis, and (3) Locating the lost line in a blacked out mask.

[phillip1]

back fining and actually moving backwards at a reasonable speed, not kind of moving backwards, is pretty hard to do, hurts my knee too, but is a very useful skill.

[AB8CD]

I was kind of hoping people would share their personal challenges...

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[LCF]

Well, when I took Cavern and Intro, my biggest challenge was staying rightside up. And no, I'm not kidding -- every time we did a lights-out drill, I'd end up upside down and not knowing it! I had to come up with a whole set of cues to tell me what orientation I had in the water, so that I could pass the class.

At the Cave 1 level, the skills weren't a problem, but decision-making was.

At Cave 2, I got my butt kicked by trying to manage line and/or failure scenarios in high flow. You haven't lived until you're sharing gas with somebody and the flow catches you wrong and you end up rolling over and over each other up the bottom of the cave (not).

[phillip1]

At first I found reel work the most challenging, choosing were to make tie offs, choosing appropriate trajectories and avoiding line traps. It now seems really simple to me, but at first the whole well laid line principles were a bit hard to grasp.

[Diverlee]

No mask.

[Tegg]

Running the line properly for getting out of a cave in zero vis... This is especially true in sidemount passages where there are "sweet spots". There was a couple of times where I was in river caves where the vis went to literally ZERO because of a clay ceiling milking with my bubbles and I had not run the line "as carefully" as I should. Needless to say my exit was impeded a great deal causing some pucker factor. Obviously, I did get out, but I am MUCH more careful about running the line for zero vis following then I used to be (survey is easier with straight shots, but zero vis exits are much nicer with a nicely routed line)