DrMack
Registered
I'm an air hog. My wife has a consumption rate that is only half of my own. Grrr. I'm trying everything that old hands suggest. It's getting better. Two weeks ago in Fiji, Rainbow Reef. Amazing dive. 1st class dive operator. Crew handles every detail. Very expensive. Treat us like royalty. Set up our gear for us. Ready to dive. My wife uses a Suunto Eon Core and I have a Suunto D5. She has trouble with the connectivity to her pod so we go through the sync procedure and it clears up without a hitch. Our BCDs and tanks are next to each other on the bench. I check my D5 for air and it reads close to 200 bar (she prefers psi so hers is near 3000). Roll off and down we go. Incredible sights. All the things we dream of as divers. 30 minutes in and we compare our gas. I'm at 132 bar! Amazing. Have I finally cracked this consumption problem? She's at 1700 psi. Not even halfway. Wow! We're cookin'.
We like to be close. We take this buddy thing verrrrrry seriously. Most of the time we hold hands. 5 minutes later: I'm like, ooooo, that was a hard breath. Next one: nada, empty, no air, completely out. I tap her shoulder. She turns to me and I give her the "out of air" signal. It takes a second to sink in. I'm on her octo before she can present it, locking arms, just like in training. She tries to pull away but I have an iron grip on her arm, per the drill. Oh, this is real. No worries, I'm breathing. She looks at her supply, still half a tank (no surprise). So now we're in the drill and slowly up we go to a safety stop. Long 3 minutes but we hang in there. Finally up to the surface where I have to manually inflate my BCD.
On the boat we figure out what happened. Lesson to everyone who uses a wireless connection for gas supply. The crew had inadvertently put my reg (and pod) on her BCD and hers on mine. She had trouble with sync before the dive, remember? So we synced her computer to MY pod which unbeknownst to us was on HER tank. I could still read supply because when I checked, I was right next to her rig which had MY pod and I was still synced to it. Problem was, her pod was on my BCD synced to nobody. So when we took the plunge we were both synced to MY pod which was on HER tank. I was reading her gas all along thinking it was mine.
Won't do that again! Every pre-dive check now includes verification of the serial number of the pods that our two computers are synced to.
Another lesson learned: the buddy system developed for a reason. We have always practiced it and that practice paid off. It literally saved my life. So I'm all in. OK, it doesn't mean that you have to hold hands like we have always done, but it DOES mean that you need to be aware of how many fin strokes you may be from the alternate air source that will save your life. When you run out of air you will know only AFTER you exhale your tank's last breath. So think about how far you can swim AFTER you exhale before that next life saving breath becomes possible.
Not embarrassed nor ashamed. Hope everyone can learn from this.
We like to be close. We take this buddy thing verrrrrry seriously. Most of the time we hold hands. 5 minutes later: I'm like, ooooo, that was a hard breath. Next one: nada, empty, no air, completely out. I tap her shoulder. She turns to me and I give her the "out of air" signal. It takes a second to sink in. I'm on her octo before she can present it, locking arms, just like in training. She tries to pull away but I have an iron grip on her arm, per the drill. Oh, this is real. No worries, I'm breathing. She looks at her supply, still half a tank (no surprise). So now we're in the drill and slowly up we go to a safety stop. Long 3 minutes but we hang in there. Finally up to the surface where I have to manually inflate my BCD.
On the boat we figure out what happened. Lesson to everyone who uses a wireless connection for gas supply. The crew had inadvertently put my reg (and pod) on her BCD and hers on mine. She had trouble with sync before the dive, remember? So we synced her computer to MY pod which unbeknownst to us was on HER tank. I could still read supply because when I checked, I was right next to her rig which had MY pod and I was still synced to it. Problem was, her pod was on my BCD synced to nobody. So when we took the plunge we were both synced to MY pod which was on HER tank. I was reading her gas all along thinking it was mine.
Won't do that again! Every pre-dive check now includes verification of the serial number of the pods that our two computers are synced to.
Another lesson learned: the buddy system developed for a reason. We have always practiced it and that practice paid off. It literally saved my life. So I'm all in. OK, it doesn't mean that you have to hold hands like we have always done, but it DOES mean that you need to be aware of how many fin strokes you may be from the alternate air source that will save your life. When you run out of air you will know only AFTER you exhale your tank's last breath. So think about how far you can swim AFTER you exhale before that next life saving breath becomes possible.
Not embarrassed nor ashamed. Hope everyone can learn from this.