Who Uses their SMB and Deploys it At Depth Before Ascending to the surface

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Hearing loss ... yes, some. Deaf? Certainly not.

Don't overstate, Dan ... I've been wearing a hood while diving for the past 12 years ... averaging about 275 dives per year while wearing one. And I've never experienced "deaf".

Water conducts sound extremely well ... and while (as I said previously) you can probably hear better without one, you don't lose your hearing because you're wearing a hood.

I can hear well enough to know when my buddy's speaking or humming into their reg ... and can certainly hear a boat coming from a fairly long distance away. And at my age, my hearing's not as acute as it used to be.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)
OK....I may be "overstating" :D .... to be more exact, there is a very significant "ATTENUATION" to the sound you will hear through the hood, and there are going to be some frequencies that are much more attenuated than others--which also means that your ability to recognize and use a Doppler Shift with a boat overhead, is at a major disadvantage to YOU without the hood.

I see divers with hoods on all the time, that just can not be reached by yelling sounds or boat sounds underwater--these same divers do react when they are not wearing their hoods....
On the other hand, there are some divers that don't really use their hearing effectively underwater--almost stop using it.....and that is another story :-)
 
Hmm... maybe there is a product idea there.

An underwater microphone attached to a rumbler for the hearing impaired.
 
Dan ... how often do you, personally, wear a hood?

... Bob (Grateful Diver)
 
Dan ... how often do you, personally, wear a hood?

... Bob (Grateful Diver)
Rarely....I don't like the silencing of the ocean sounds, or boats....If it get's really cold....like when we get inversions and water temps in the 50's, I am in a hood....Same on a tech dive, as the cold water can be in a bottom current, even in summer.

On 95% of my dives I don't get "thermally challenged" without a hood on, so it stays in my gear bag. :-)

---------- Post added July 20th, 2013 at 11:01 AM ----------

Hmm... maybe there is a product idea there.

An underwater microphone attached to a rumbler for the hearing impaired.
My Aquatica Underwater housing for my Canon 5D has a hydraphone in it....which conceptually would be easy enough to adapt to a hood....could even amplify the sounds of the ocean :-)
 
Off the topic (pissing contest) about hearing, I personally find ascents with an smb/spool much less stressful and more fun than coming up an anchor line. In fact, if the current isn't impossible I will do so and stay within 20-50 ft of the anchor line on the majority of my dives.
 
I wear a hood quite often and the only time I have any difficulty hearing is when I am out of the water. Once in the water my hearing is just fine. I can communicate or hear subtle sounds easily. Hearing a boat is no different than without a hood in my experience.

Back on track, I was originally taught to finish my final 10' ascent with my hand out streatched and over my head to allow boats to see me as I surfaced. it did not take very long or more than one close call for me to figure out that this was definitely not sufficeint for my long life and well being. I got a small surface marker and inflated it at my safety stop before ascending if I did not have a dive flag or anchor line.

Jump a few years forward to now, and I carry 2 SMB's and 2 reels on every dive. I will not surface without something above me to warn others. I still will not surface if I hear a boat that is not there waiting for me (you can tell).
 
I think one of the biggest take aways for me here is to confirm when and where to deploy an SMB with the boat captain/DM's.

BTW, I do have some trouble hearing in a hood so I compromised insulation for a little more sound my burning small holes into my hood at the ears.

Edit. I agree with Dsix36, the sound distortion is more noticeable at the surface but thats when I especially want to hear if someone is trying to tell me something...
 
Rarely....I don't like the silencing of the ocean sounds, or boats....If it get's really cold....like when we get inversions and water temps in the 50's, I am in a hood....Same on a tech dive, as the cold water can be in a bottom current, even in summer.

On 95% of my dives I don't get "thermally challenged" without a hood on, so it stays in my gear bag. :-)

That's what I thought.

Humans are amazingly adaptable critters. For example, I remember the first time I dived in 10-foot vis. My reaction was "holy crap, I can't dive in this ... I can't see a thing".

A hundred or so dives later, having dived in vis like that or worse several times, I came to realize I could see quite a lot. I just had to learn how to look.

Same applies to hearing with a hood on. You don't normally use one, and therefore are used to a certain acceptable audio threshold. Anything less than that is "practically deaf". It's not, really ... it's just that you haven't adapted to using your sense of hearing in those conditions. For those of us who do it all the time, that lower threshold is normal. We don't stop using our hearing ... we've just learned how to use it at a different acceptable threshold. I can easily tell whether a boat's moving toward or away from my location, based not just on pitch but also volume. Of course, I can't tell from what direction it's coming ... but that's true whether or not I'm wearing a hood ... humans just aren't built for the greater speed at which sound travels underwater.

The concept of adaptability applies to a great deal of what we do underwater ... which goes back to the perennial topic of how we think about diving based on the conditions we primarily dive in. We tend to apply what we experience ... and all too often assume that everyone else should too. It lies at the heart of the majority of differences of opinion on these ScubaBoard discussions ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)
 
Hoods leave a diver deaf underwater.....if you have to dive in cold water, then you need to know you are diving without one of your senesce--you are handicppped.
I don't dive this way in Florida or the caribean, or Fiji...

I always hear whether or not there is boat traffic....the fact that this woman heard nothing, is absolutely consistent with what we see from hooded divers here.

If I or my group is not towing a dive flag ( which is the norm here in Palm Beach--towed flag or towed torpedo for us with flag) , and we know we are coming up well away from the other dive groups, one of us will shoot a bag....my point is that this is not done with any expectation that it will be effective in warding off boats. The expectation is, and must be, that there will be a boat coming right at you on the surface, if you hear any boats at all---and that the smb is being ignored.
So you do a nice long safety/deco stop at 10 feet--and when you feel you have the safety margin in plenty of stop time, you deflate, and kick hard to the surface, ready to perform an emergency return to 10 feet or deeper if some jerk is heading your way. If it is safe, you can wave your buddies up to the surface, and if you are concerned about bubbles from this fast surfacing, you have only been up about 15 seconds to 25 seconds total as your friends hit the surface--so you could drop yourself back down to 10 or 15 feet if you have a concern about hyper saturation. You could hang there for 5 to 10 more minutes if you needed. Keep in mind I have been doing this in my Palm Beach diving since the early 80's, and the danger has always been boaters--not bubbles.

To one other poster in this thread....we have very few sailboats out over the reefs--maybe 1 for every thousand fishing boats/speed boats. And yes, I have had a big sailboat go over head, and I saw it--rather than heard it, on my 360 degree spin. It was a shock, but fortunately the visibility was about 80 feet that day, and I saw it with time to spare in jackknifing and getting down below his keel/centerboard, whatever it was.
That was one time, in 3 decades--for the sail boat issue :-)

The towed torpedo with a flag is by far my best defense from boaters, and best way to help my own charterboat protect us by easily tracking us. Here is one example....though I like mine alot more than this one( cona't find it this moment online) Omersub Atoll Float

On descent, you let this out with a nice reel, and if you want to stop on the bottom, you have a hook on the reel, and can hook off on a rock or cranny.

The flag is regulation height, and the torpedo is rigged (by me) to be towed so as to float flat on the surface with the line pulling down on it, and it does so with essentially no drag at all, when compared to a standard flag float( which is very high drag). In perspective, if you toss a flag float off the back of the boat going 25 mph, it could easily rip right out of your hands, and will be very hard to hang on to....the torpedo would just fly along the surface, with very little effort in holding it.

Unfortunately, as NWGD points out and you allude to yourself, your advice is specific only to the conditions YOU dive in. You might not have to wear a hood, you might dive where all boats are powered by i/c motors (that may change in the next few years) therefore your advice is only applicable where you dive. It also ignores the possibility that your divers are to a greater or lesser extent deaf. I have a customer who is profoundly deaf and that can cause safety issues.

I still think that a correctly deployed SMB or dSMB (there seems to be some confusion about terminology) is a better option than relying on a bubble-inducing race to the surface when it sounds quiet. The sad case of the Dutch woman in the Galapagos narrated elsewhere on this forum would have been avoided had someone in the group simply deployed a dSMB during the safety stop.
 
Unfortunately, as NWGD points out and you allude to yourself, your advice is specific only to the conditions YOU dive in. You might not have to wear a hood, you might dive where all boats are powered by i/c motors (that may change in the next few years) therefore your advice is only applicable where you dive. It also ignores the possibility that your divers are to a greater or lesser extent deaf. I have a customer who is profoundly deaf and that can cause safety issues.

I still think that a correctly deployed SMB or dSMB (there seems to be some confusion about terminology) is a better option than relying on a bubble-inducing race to the surface when it sounds quiet. The sad case of the Dutch woman in the Galapagos narrated elsewhere on this forum would have been avoided had someone in the group simply deployed a dSMB during the safety stop.

I should apologize for trying to move my ideas on Florida based diving, to other areas.
If you don't dive South Florida, please disregard my advice.

For S. Florida Divers......
I have been diving for over 40 years in this area, and bubbles have never been an issue of concern for me---I do the correct profiles for my physiology, and it is practically hard wired in for ascent and deco shape.
While bubbling is of little concern to me, due to my dive planning and proceedures, I seeboats on the surface as the true killers we have to worry about...Boats are the REAL GREAT WHITE SHARKS that divers should be afraid of.... The complacency of assuming that a SMB on the surface will be seen and avoided by a boat traveling at 25 mph, is an invitation to Darwinian Selection :-)
 

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