Scuba diver dies after being found floating at Kurnell, NSW, Australia

[boulderjohn]

When diving a single tank, I will frequently have almost no air in the wing and enough air in the dry suit to keep me warm. If I am properly weighted, that is all I need for buoyancy. That means I really do use the suit primarily for buoyancy. It will not look like that first picture, though. You will barely tell there is a bubble in the suit. If I am tech diving and have no choice but to be overweighted in the early parts of the dive, then the dry suit will still just be inflated enough to keep me warm, and the extra air needed for buoyancy will be in the wing. Again, it will not look like the one in the picture. There is a lot of bubble going on there.

 

[Darnold9999]

I don't have any trouble imagining how she could go OOA in this situation. Have done it once myself. Searching for an ornate ghost pipefish, found one at 15 feet at the very end of the dive. Thought nothing of breathing my tank down to dregs getting a picture. Diving wet, in tropoical water easy to ascend when the reg started to breath hard. No problem, a risk, but a very minor one. She was hunting weedy sea dragons. Could have found one - thinking she had something more than 10 bar - decided to get some last pictures on the dregs of the tank in very shallow water. In this scenario someone without drysuit practical experience could easily go OOA not even considering the impact of OOA on the drysuit.

Still should have been able to swim up, but if she went from horizontal to vertical to ascend while OOA with a wide open shoulder dump valve she would have been in immediate trouble with the only way to resolve the issue to dump weights at depth.

Not saying this is what happened, but an easy situation to get yourself into if your diving context is tropical.

Diving a dry suit is not hard, however, there are lots of little gotchas that you don't learn until you dive one for a while. My gotcha was having most of my weight attached to the backplate harness. Seemed to make sense until I had to remove the rig at depth to disentangle myself as part of a solo course. Looked like a balloon attached to the rig. Could not get back into my gear and had to surface holding the rig in front of me. If this had happened at depth for real and I had to abandon the rig i would go up like a rocket. Now I have a balance of weight on a belt and the BC so if I have to separate from the rig I and it are roughly balanced.

It is one thing to swim around in a dry suit, something else to dive one safely.

 

[Ayisha]

...On both the first picture (bubble in the suit) and the last picture (bubble in the wing) the size of the bubble is quite substantial in my opinion. My first thought when I saw those two pictures is that if it were one of my students I would have fixed it.

That said, I'm curious how other drysuit divers respond to those pictures. I don't want to lead anyone to conclusions based only on my opinion of it.

The bubble in the drysuit in the first picture is huge. I have seen divers have an uncontrolled ascent with much less obvious inflation of their drysuits.

One buddy was adding air to her drysuit because she was cold, and starting ascending unexpectedly when we went a little shallower. I followed her up slightly, then she put her hand out as she kept rising, I grabbed it, dumped my wing and we both swam down hard. We had to grab onto the wreck and I could still barely hold her down until she managed her drysuit a few seconds later.

Another buddy was using both her drysuit and BCD for buoyancy, and somehow lost control of her drysuit and was rising. I grabbed her, dumped my wing, but only slowed us down until she finally got control. She had red bruises on her neck and shoulders after the dive for the next couple of days.

Both of those divers inflate their drysuits only enough to relieve the squeeze now and use the bcd primarily for buoyancy control.

 

[Jax]

Has anyone considered that PADI teaches to use your drysuit for buoyancy control?

 

[dumpsterDiver]

I don't have any trouble imagining how she could go OOA in this situation. Have done it once myself. Searching for an ornate ghost pipefish, found one at 15 feet at the very end of the dive. Thought nothing of breathing my tank down to dregs getting a picture. Diving wet, in tropoical water easy to ascend when the reg started to breath hard. No problem, a risk, but a very minor one. She was hunting weedy sea dragons. Could have found one - thinking she had something more than 10 bar - decided to get some last pictures on the dregs of the tank in very shallow water. In this scenario someone without drysuit practical experience could easily go OOA not even considering the impact of OOA on the drysuit.

Still should have been able to swim up, but if she went from horizontal to vertical to ascend while OOA with a wide open shoulder dump valve she would have been in immediate trouble with the only way to resolve the issue to dump weights at depth.

Not saying this is what happened, but an easy situation to get yourself into if your diving context is tropical.

Diving a dry suit is not hard, however, there are lots of little gotchas that you don't learn until you dive one for a while. My gotcha was having most of my weight attached to the backplate harness. Seemed to make sense until I had to remove the rig at depth to disentangle myself as part of a solo course. Looked like a balloon attached to the rig. Could not get back into my gear and had to surface holding the rig in front of me. If this had happened at depth for real and I had to abandon the rig i would go up like a rocket. Now I have a balance of weight on a belt and the BC so if I have to separate from the rig I and it are roughly balanced.

It is one thing to swim around in a dry suit, something else to dive one safely.

This is something that should be considered. If you are relatively deep and swimming moderately, you will be drawing somewhat hard on the regulator. You often will begin to feel resistance at the end of the inhalation, long before the tank is empty. Now the opposite is true as well. If you are shallow and you decided to stop on the bottom, to take a few macro shots and you are completely still and deliberately trying to sip your air (inhaling slowly and exhaling slowly so as not to scare your subject) - you CAN suck the tank to close to nothing without feeling it. If she was doing that, and was relying upon her faulty gauge to reserve 150 psi for the ascent from 20 feet (a number I am assuming, since nobody has provided it). It is easy to see how a diver could suck the tank to very low psi, already have the BC completely full and then try to inflate the suit. If that should fail or vent or something, you got no air to breath, no air to inflate suit and the only viable option would be to drop ballast.

I know people want to believe that scuba divers can function with nothing to breath for a full minute or two (like freedivers) but the reality of the situation is that you have only a few dozen seconds to function (at best) after a full exhalation.

 

[Cave Diver]

When I originally posted this bubby comment (post 237) my last sentence was something like too bad she didn't have a buddy like that....the kind I described that was always there when I turned around no matter how long I ignored him. That was the main point of the post not to blame someone I don't know. The last couple of years I've tried to be better about watching my buddy when I dive with one. This sad episode as caused me to want reinforced that effort, as it should for all of us that wander from our buddies. Quero's last teaching gift.

I think you're confusing actions. I've dove with photographers who ignore their buddy, who just drift along and stop and take pictures of this and that for several minutes at a time, then suddenly look around to see where they're at. Those aren't hard to keep up with. The way it was told to me, Marcia was more like a 5 year old in a toy store. There one minute, the next she was dashing off to look down some other aisle. I have also dove with people like this and it's exhausting trying to keep track of them.

Up until those final moments, her buddies did keep up with her. As soon as they noticed she'd swam off, yet again, they immediately started looking for her. They found in a matter of minutes. Short of tying her to them with a leash, I'm not sure how much more you expect from them.

 

[Dive Bug Bit Me]

The sad thing - this was her fourth dive of the trip.

That at means she made at least three dives without noticing her BCD couldn't float her rig, or realised but chose not to correct this.

She had thousands of dives. I know how I should float in the water when correctly weighted and have less than 20% of her dives. She must have been able to feel she was overweight, just from how she floated while on the surface. Again why did she not correct this before the fourth dive.

 

[boulderjohn]

Has anyone considered that PADI teaches to use your drysuit for buoyancy control?

PADI's current dry suit course teaches that what you do for buoyancy depends upon the situation and type of suit. Sometimes it can be done with just the suit for buoyancy, and sometimes you will use both the wing and the suit.

The book Dry Suit Diving: A Guide to Diving Dry by Barsky, Long, and Stinton advises new divers to use the suit for buoyancy as well. It says that with more experience, divers will use a combination. (The authors of this book are from DUI.)

 

[gypsyjim]

Quero's posts that week indicated an ongoing attempt to control buoyancy and trim, while also continually adjusting thermo protection and weights.

She mentions needing more weight.
After she said in one post that she had gotten the right balance, to maintain her buoyancy after her second dive, she also mentions wanting more thermo protection. This could easily translate into thinking she needed more weight.

As far as her buddies being able to spot her bubble errors, don't forget, as experienced as these divers are, at least two of them are not dry suit divers, and certainly would not have felt qualified to 'correct' such an advanced diver as Quero when she was using gear they were foreign to themselves.

 

[Diver0001]

Still should have been able to swim up, but if she went from horizontal to vertical to ascend while OOA with a wide open shoulder dump valve she would have been in immediate trouble with the only way to resolve the issue to dump weights at depth.

I find this theory plausible. The buddy told me that Marcia said she had the shoulder dump on "automatic" which I assume to mean that it was at least partially open. Given the possibility that she had quite a bit of air in the suit then going vertical (an obvious response to OOA) with an open shoulder valve would have caused her to lose some buoyancy as the suit emptied. If the tank were empty at that point there would have been no option to add more air to the suit and we can already see from picture #4 that the wing was nearly full already.

Dropping weights would have been the most obvious response but clearly that didn't happen.

R..

---------- Post added October 13th, 2013 at 08:30 PM ----------

Has anyone considered that PADI teaches to use your drysuit for buoyancy control?

That's a commonly stated misconception.

PADI's recommendation is actually "it depends". In some situations they *recommend* using the suit for buoyancy control and in some circumstances they recommend splitting it between the BCD and the suit. In the materials it states that it's often impractical to exclusively use the suit for buoyancy, particularly in the case of a neoprene suit that loses substantial amounts of buoyancy at deeper depths.

R..