- Messages
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Sure, not nearly as easily, but a lot of vacation divers I've been on the boat with hardly know what they're doing. Especially on valet boats that do everything for you. I had to book a trip through Carnival at AKR in Roatan a few years ago and it was miserable - divers were all over the place, one guy switched his fins to his hands halfway through the dive, my buddy disappeared and ended up with the wrong divemaster... it was so bad that the DM just assumed everybody was an idiot and "helpfully" unclipped my fin for me as I was (the last person) getting back on the boat, and had just unclipped the other side, causing me to lose a strap. Yeah, anybody paying attention should notice that their tank is closed, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of these divers didn't until they hit the water with an empty BC.Not nearly as easily.
If your valve is closed all the way, you can't go more than one breath without noticing. You'll feel it right away and be forced to fix it right away, still on the surface, before descending. Just so long as you're not badly overweighted with a deflated BC.
If it's only open a quarter turn, things feel normal till you're on your reserve air - and then you can't breathe, with up to a hundred feet above your head and plenty of pressure on your gauge.
I know which way is left and which way is right. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that instructors need to tell students to turn back 1/4 turn. I was told not to, but also told that it doesn't make a difference either way as long as you open the tank. I just do it because, like I said, old habits die hard. In the link, he suggests that if your acetylene tank leaks because you opened it too hard, you don't get to weld. As a chemist, I work with pressurized tanks containing anything from "inert" argon to HCl or Ammonia. Believe me, even in your hood, if those latter two lose a valve and leak, you're gonna have a bad day. Even argon, if it's bad enough, can displace oxygen in the room.
And before anybody thinks I had terrible instructors, they were all great, except one who just couldn't adapt to some people's learning style and kept yelling at my wife. My OW checkout, there were 10 students, 4 instructors, 2 divemasters, and a divemaster candidate. They watched us like hawks. (Hawksbill turtles?) We trained in a quarry where you couldn't see anything but green blobs and it was 57 degrees. My first night dive in Cozumel was a cakewalk.
I've never taken off my gear while underwater since training. But that quarry I mentioned? Full of fishing line and other entanglement hazards. I wouldn't dive it without two cutting devices and the ability to squirm out of my BC if necessary. I've seen DMs in Cozumel pop the gear off and back on again while hunting lion fish. Having a neutrally buoyant BC/tank/reg and being weighted on the body makes this easy.