Just curious ... what would you do if your buddy was ahead of you going in ... and now on the side of the line leading further into the cave? I imagine it depends on circumstances ... but what would you consider viable options?
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
Ok, I had this one. We were in a river cave with a team of four, big cave but rarely dove due to normally black water conditions. This was a rare opportunity with good vis, and the line is really old and fragile. I'm # 3, my friend is behind me. We go under a duck under and I'm continuing down the passage, great vis at this point but I'm fighting the rebreather with all the drastic depth changes, and my drysuit power inflater is leaking into the suit and I have to connect and disconnect it every time I go down. Thankfully, I dive with this particular friend a lot and if I don't see the spill of his light behind me, I immediately start looking. Sure enough, he's not there, I flag everyone down, go look under the ledge and he's up on the ceiling, holding both ends of the crumbling line. I oafishly touched it with my fin and it disintegrated. After a fix, we decided that was enough (Doh!) and called it.
I've got a thing about making sure the people in front of me are keeping track of whether I'm still there and I will often cover my light when I'm diving with someone for the first time and see if they turn around and look. If they don't look, I'll start moving it back and forth slowly, and if that doesn't work I'll flash them for real.
On the compass thing, I agree that it wouldn't be much use. When it's really zero vis, your 1000 watt LED looks like a dim orange spot when you hold it up to your mask.
I say it all the time and I know Kevin will agree with me here, there are a ton of lines in the first 500 feet of JB and you'd better have a whole bag of clothespins, a pile of jump spools and a lot of patience to learn it all cold. Work in progress here.
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