100% Free flow at 135Ft and 41F water

[MasterGoa]

Hi all!

Just got back from my first dive incident and I wanted to share
it all with you guys...

Diving Tobermory, we went to the Forest City which is a slanted
wreck that hit an island and sank where it stood.

The Bow is at 65ft and the Stern is at 151 ft.

So I get down with my two buddies, I was following
the first buddy who had made over 100 dives to this site alone.

The second buddy which was a German fellow testing underwater
photo equipment, was on the left side of first buddy.

As we go down that beautiful wreck, we come to the huge
pear shaped boiler. Both of them go on the to the left side of the boiler
and I go right. We had dove 3 other shallower dives this week and had
grown accustomed to each other so we did not need to see each other every
time.

The boiler is at 122 ft, water is 47 F. As I continue to go down to the stern rail,
after which I was going to tourist back up the wreck (137ft) I start to feel
something weird with my 2nd stage. It is starting to free flow.

At this point, I turn around and the two other guys and at the starboard side of
the ship lower than I am by maybe 10 ft. I am still comfortable.

This is when I make mistake number 1. Thinking I am going to heat up my second
stage, a blow a long deep breath through it. I then goes 100% free flow and pushed
huge amounts of air in my mouth.

This is when I do mistake number 2. I panic. In my panic, I am still lucid.
So I know I cannot go straight to the surface, so I fin up the wreck profile
which is at about 45 degrees. I concentrate on breathing deeply so as
not to over extend my lungs going up. I check my air. 85ft down to 2000lb.

Normally this would not scare me at all, however there is no one near me and
a demonic air pump is pushing vast amounts of air *and* water into my lungs,
probably because I am now hyperventilating.

Then I make mistake number 3: I do not empty my vest as I go up.
So as soon as I let go of the wreck, I bolt to the surface.

At the surface, I am feeling very weird. I have huge gas buildup in my
stomach, and I through up mucus which the EMT guy, an avid diver
and manager of the hyperbaric chamber, later tells me is normal as water
go into my lungs. I have blood blotches in my eyes and a bump on my forhead
over my right eye. Total dive time was 6 minutes 30 seconds. I did 85ft to
surface in less than 30 seconds however...
The free flow stopped at about 10 ft, but I was too phased out to think
of anything at that point...

Tobermory Coast Guard comes up to pick me up from the dive site.
I am driven to a hospital as I am in good shape and not dizy or weak.

My vitals are great, the Coast Guard woman says she wishes she had
my post trauma vitals on her normal days I hike and bike a LOT so...

To the hospital I end up and everything is fine. My X-Rays show a grapefruit
mass of air in my stomach which provides ample burp and fart reserves.
I test this theory on the drive back to the dive shop. It is conclusive.

Coast Guard incident procedures calls for inspection of my equipment.

Few things are found:

HP hose leaks from 3000PSI to 2100PSI and then stops leaking.
My 2nd stages are too light in resistance. Everything else is great.

The is relevant how:

The air leak in the HP hose forced more air than normal through the first stage.
This cooled of the already cold situations. The lightness of the second stages made
free flow very easy. Needless to say a new HP hose was put on immediately.

After thoughts:

The main cause of this incident is not following my buddy in a situation
I had never lived before. He was VERY experienced and would have
flagged me down and signaled to take a breath and simply shake my
reg, out of mouth, in the water.

Also, I resisted using my buddy regulator as my fear was two
free flows instead of one... I will not know if it would have fixed
something but I will surely try when I am back in cold water.

I do not fear diving at all and will make a mid rage and shallow dives
tomorrow, just to put this behind me...

So:

Follow your buddy
Never totally trust your gear
Always keep you hand on the deflater when going up
BTW, I had still 1400psi in my tank, so I had ample time
to come up normally has I remembered to deflate my BCD going up.

So there, I will leave this like that for now, hope you all can learn
from my experience.

Pierre

 

[CDNScubaMoose]

Thanks for sharing - definitely a nerve racking expeirence for sure.

Not positive but I think you have the 1st and 2nd stages confused. I always thought the 1st stage was the stage that was connected directly to the tank and the 2nd stage was the one that you actually breathed off.

Interesting that you had this experience - 3 weeks ago I was up in Tobermory and had a very similar experience ... actually 2 of them. 2nd stage started to freeflow on the Forest City and stopped after 10-15 secs. 2nd dive of the day was on the Arabia where the freeflow didn't stop until I had ascended to about 50' or so.

Glad to hear you are safe though.

 

[shoredivr]

Hi Pierre:

Glad you're ok and thanks for the detailed posting. By HP hose do you actually mean the LP hose from your 1st stage to the reg in your mouth?

Wondering if you have a cold water environmental kit for you first stage, Tusa does make one of these.

"TUSA Platina Evolution RS-240 1st.Stage (R-200)

# Balanced diaphragm design: provides maximum performance over the full range of tank pressures
# Two H.P. ports and two L.P. ports: left-right symmetry promote easy hose routing
# Optional environmental kit: seals the unit for cold water diving."

Freeflow is one of the reasons I dive with either a slung AL 30 or with doubles...easier to switch regs, shut off the freeflow and make a slow ascent...

 

[stairman]

with those depths and water temps,I would invest in an h-valve and backup reg so you can isolate.

 

[TSandM]

I remember my freeflow experience -- It was very unnerving, and it didn't take place anywhere near as deep as you were, and it did take place with my buddies right next to me.

There are a number of big lessons here, I think. The biggest one is that, the deeper you are, the further away the big gas tank in the sky is, and the more important it is to have some kind of redundancy and a strategy for solving problems where you ARE. It gives me some idea of how fast you ascended, that you arrived at the surface with so much gas in your tank. My freeflow emptied my tank in about two minutes. You were very lucky this occurred so early in the dive; had it occurred when you were substantially more nitrogen loaded, you might have been very badly hurt.

A second big lesson is that buddies aren't buddies at all, if they aren't where you can get to them when you need something to breathe. I think many of us have been suckered by good visibiity and a sense of complacency about the dive, into opening up buddy separations that would prove highly undesirable in the event of a problem like yours.

A third lesson is a discovery about yourself . . . You didn't stay calm and think your way through your problem; you got rattled and forgot basic principles of buoyancy control. What this would make me spend some time thinking about is whether I should keep my dives a little shallower and less risky, until I'd done a bunch of practicing and felt more confident about being able to handle mishaps with a clear mind.

And that raises another question, which is how much of a role narcosis played in your inability to sort things out properly. I have a great respect for the power of narcosis to cloud the mind, and the inability of said mind to recognize how impaired it is. It's not that you can't dive when narced; it's precisely that your response to a novel situation that requires rapid, accurate thinking is not what it should be.

Rereading the original post, I am struck again by how amazingly lucky you were here. I don't think I would count on having the same good fortune a second time!

 

[sporket]

And learned I did. I try to never loose visual of my dive buddies. I typically dive poor vis so that means pretty close. This reaffirms why. Scuba is a safe sport until something goes wrong and no buddies around. Then, it quickly turns into a fatality, leaving people to speculate/wonder what happened. I'm very happy you made it out alive to tell the tell for others to learn from instead of random surfers wishing condolences to your family and loved ones.

 

[String]

This is a screaming advert for carrying a redundant air source on dives.

 

[ianr33]

This is a screaming advert for carrying a redundant air source on dives.

Totally agree 100%

Deep,cold,single tank is just asking for trouble. A quick search will turn up lots of similar incidents.

I dont see how the leaking HP hose could be a factor. The flowrate through a HP hose is tiny.

 

[DA Aquamaster]

Its nice to have a redundant air supply and it is nice to be able to shut your own valves off. A freeze flow can be quickly resolved with minimal gas loss if you can shut down the freeflowing reg and switch to a buddy's reg or a redundant gas source for a couple minutes.

I doubt a leaking HP hose would have much impact nor would easy breathing second stages - once the first stage freezes, they are going to freeflow to vent the excess pressure even if they are set to breathe like small rocks.

At 5 atmospheres of pressure a normal .6 SCFM SAC is 3 cu ft per minute and that 3 CFM is concentrated into a few breaths with much higher flow rates during those inhalations. Add onto that the addition of air into a BC at the same time, and you have a lot of adibatic cooling. If you are excited and over breathing the reg, a freeflow is even more likely.

 

[nereas]

Not all models and brands of regs are meant to go that deep and that cold.

I also have to wonder how long had it been since the last annual servicing?

You are right, that you should always stay close to your buddy, unless you are trained in solo diving, and also properly equipped for solo.

As DA-Aqua mentioned, a solo diver with twin tanks can normally switch to a backup reg and shut off the valve to the freeflowing one. This takes practice and the right gear, however.

Your guardian angel was sure watching over you that day! Very lucky.

I find it fascinating that some people can live through a certain ordeal and tell about it, while others are gone.