TRIMIX 1 COURSE REPORT
ARGENTARIO, ITALY
by Roberto Battisti
If you want to drive a Ferrari, you should be an F1 pilot.”
This is the refrain that our instructor, Andrea Cappa, repeated
almost daily during this Trimix 1 course, meaning that at this
level everything must be perfect.
I’ll try to demonstrate, with the day-by-day report that follows,
in what way that refrain revealed itself as a holy truth.
Day 1 – The Punch
After a morning spent illustrating the course guidelines and
performing a dry run session about the exercises to be done in
the afternoon, here we are ready to start the in-water part of the
course.
A warm-up with s-drill and valve drill with stages is not exactly a walk in a park, nor is the ascent from 30’/9m with 2 gas
switches that followed. But all things considered, at this point
things were not going so badly.
The “punch” came only a few minutes later, during the so
called “critical skills dive, also known as a simulated failure
dive.” A number of problems of every kind cleverly created by
the instructor caused us total confusion, which obliged Andrea
to call the dive. I won’t describe the details of what happened:
it’s enough to say that although frustrating for us it was necessary in order to understand our main mistake was to have faced
the dive not as a team but as a group of “solo divers.”
Then, an attempt at passing and handling multiple bottle produced anything but brilliant results, and the last two exercises
had to be repeated the following day.
The swimming test was the last gift of the day. And of course,
the evening was spent in video debriefing.