While diving solo on a wreck of the B-17 I had a interesting experience. The wreck is 50 meters of shore in 70 meters of water. I was diving sidemount with 2 bottom gas tanks and 2 deco gases. First a group of 8 divers jumped in, after passing all the stages to them in the water I kitted up, made sure all regulators were working again, as well as no bubbling, closed the deco cylinders and went down.
20 minutes of bottom time later (terrible dive, 5 meter visibility) I was the last person on the wreck. Usually people swim the 50 meters to a wall on the bottom and then ascend to deco but I prefered to ascend on the rope and swim the distance after the switch to 50%. At this point I had around 100 bars of gas in both primary tanks.
The ascent went without problems to 50 meters after which my left first stage started free flowing a lot. I switched to the other one, closed the tank aaaand... got a big mouthful of water, the second stage on the other regulator started leaking water and free flowing. After weighing my options I stated breathing from the left one again while feathering the valve. I also increased my ascent rate to about 20 meters a minute and skipped half of the deco stops from 30 to 21 meter. I had to switch regulators on the way and breathed a bit from the leaky one. At this point I had around 30 bars in both primary tanks and around 25 minutes of deco with 50% and O2.
Upon reaching my 21 meter stop (and thinking finally) I took 2 breaths from the 50% reg upon which it also started to freeflow with no gas reaching the second stage.
After flipping Poseidon the bird (the greek god, not the regulator) I considered switching the O2 reg onto the 50% but decided that potentially having no working regulators was a lot scarier than breathing o2 too deep once I was out of bottom gass.
I decided to swim the distance to shore while decoing on the faulty regulators considering that in the worst case scenario I could take some deco gas from the divers decoing there. I must say that whatever people say about sidemount at least it makes the valves easier to operate.
After reaching 9 meters my left tank was just about empty, my right one was at 10 bars. Luckily I already tried to breath pure O2 at 12 meters ( in a safe monitored environment, don't get mad) so I was confident that after everything else went wrong at least I would not do the high ppo2 dance. My dive lasted 61 minutes with additional 10 minutes of o2 at 6ish meters instead of the planed 45.
As you can read I did not survive.
Upon closer inspection on the surface the bottom left regulator works fine, obviously it will be disassembled and rebuilt. the right second stage sprays a fine mist of water over my mouth when I breath it wet but stopped freeflowing, will also get rebuilt.
The 50% reg did not have a oring in it, which raises 2 questions. Either the oring somehow got extruded during the dive and went shooting out (is that even possible on a DIN reg?) or it managed to seal on the surface for over 3 hours and then stopped after 20 minutes of the dive without a oring (just how?) All regulators were serviced by a very capable technician less then 3 months ago and had 50 or so dives on them in the meantime.
Some days ago I commented that the chance of a regulator failure in the Adriatic is so low I don't even consider it. Considering such a low chance after 3 regulators failed on me statistically I can dive a single first stage for the rest of my life.
20 minutes of bottom time later (terrible dive, 5 meter visibility) I was the last person on the wreck. Usually people swim the 50 meters to a wall on the bottom and then ascend to deco but I prefered to ascend on the rope and swim the distance after the switch to 50%. At this point I had around 100 bars of gas in both primary tanks.
The ascent went without problems to 50 meters after which my left first stage started free flowing a lot. I switched to the other one, closed the tank aaaand... got a big mouthful of water, the second stage on the other regulator started leaking water and free flowing. After weighing my options I stated breathing from the left one again while feathering the valve. I also increased my ascent rate to about 20 meters a minute and skipped half of the deco stops from 30 to 21 meter. I had to switch regulators on the way and breathed a bit from the leaky one. At this point I had around 30 bars in both primary tanks and around 25 minutes of deco with 50% and O2.
Upon reaching my 21 meter stop (and thinking finally) I took 2 breaths from the 50% reg upon which it also started to freeflow with no gas reaching the second stage.
After flipping Poseidon the bird (the greek god, not the regulator) I considered switching the O2 reg onto the 50% but decided that potentially having no working regulators was a lot scarier than breathing o2 too deep once I was out of bottom gass.
I decided to swim the distance to shore while decoing on the faulty regulators considering that in the worst case scenario I could take some deco gas from the divers decoing there. I must say that whatever people say about sidemount at least it makes the valves easier to operate.
After reaching 9 meters my left tank was just about empty, my right one was at 10 bars. Luckily I already tried to breath pure O2 at 12 meters ( in a safe monitored environment, don't get mad) so I was confident that after everything else went wrong at least I would not do the high ppo2 dance. My dive lasted 61 minutes with additional 10 minutes of o2 at 6ish meters instead of the planed 45.
As you can read I did not survive.
Upon closer inspection on the surface the bottom left regulator works fine, obviously it will be disassembled and rebuilt. the right second stage sprays a fine mist of water over my mouth when I breath it wet but stopped freeflowing, will also get rebuilt.
The 50% reg did not have a oring in it, which raises 2 questions. Either the oring somehow got extruded during the dive and went shooting out (is that even possible on a DIN reg?) or it managed to seal on the surface for over 3 hours and then stopped after 20 minutes of the dive without a oring (just how?) All regulators were serviced by a very capable technician less then 3 months ago and had 50 or so dives on them in the meantime.
Some days ago I commented that the chance of a regulator failure in the Adriatic is so low I don't even consider it. Considering such a low chance after 3 regulators failed on me statistically I can dive a single first stage for the rest of my life.
