Went diving with my usual buddy today and when we got to the site there were two rebreather pilots getting ready to dive.
They were there before we arrived (probably a short time) and were getting their gear ready to go.
I arrived with my buddy and we slapped our twin OC sets together and got in the water ... it took us.... I don't know... maybe 1/2 hour or so from parking the car to being in the water. We were (I was) on a schedule today and not wasting any time. At that point the other guys were almost ready to go. They had their scooters in the water and their stages set to go etc.
We talked to them (they were very friendly and the atmosphere was very amicable). It was very relaxed and comfortable to be there in contrast to encounters that we have had in the past with why my buddy calls "growling tek bears", many of whom, alas, in the Netherlands, with a certain training background.
Oddly, even though we have been doing these dives for 14 years (or at least, I have), there are still newbie tek divers around who won't even talk to us because we don't have the right brand of lights or the right brand of flippers.... but ok... that's a discussion for a different thread and I think everyone knows the issues... xD
Our plan was to visit a particular wreck. Navigation to the wreck is exceedingly tricky (to say the least), especially if you swim it, which is what we were doing. You have to swim for 20 min over a featureless bottom in 3m visibility and "land" on a target 20m long and 5m wide. There are few people in the Netherlands who know how to get there at all, let alone every time in limited visibility and swimming from shore.
They were going to the same wreck as we were but only to touch base because it is a good jumping off point to a wreck a little further up. My buddy and I do that wreck in the summer as well but because we don't have scooters we have to swim there and usually have 30-odd minutes of deco by the time we leave the bottom and it involves a mid-water swim back of 20-25 min to avoid it becoming a massive dive.
They, of course, were doing it with scooters and rebreathers and expected to get there and back with no deco at all, even in the cold......Yes, I was a little envious.
So.... the dive.....
My buddy and I got in the water first and swam to the 1st wreck. We got there today in 16 min. that was actually very quick for us, it usually takes us 19 min. We spent 10 min on the wreck and started climbing our way back up to the shallows. When we left the wreck we had a modest deco obligation (for us) and we managed to clear most of it by the time we got back to 6m.
As were were leaving the wreck we could hear the scooter divers starting their dive. We actually considered staying deep for a bit longer to wait for them to catch up to us but the dive would have been too long, so we left.
When we got to the surface one of the rebreather divers was already there...... he had lost his buddy....
And that was the epiphany. If you are scootering with 4 or 5km/h in 3m of visibility and you lose your attention for even a second then you can lose your buddy. In a few seconds you can be 20m apart and if you are on rebreathers as well then you can't even hear each other to try reconnecting.
One of the two explained this (losing buddy contact) as "standard operating procedure". He said that he lost his buddy in this case within the first 60 seconds of the dive.
That's very interesting to me because while my buddy and I needed to swim 15-20 min to our target (with extreme accuracy) and had to work off 10 or 15 min of deco on the way back, their dive, despite having gone into the water with +/- $15,000 worth of gear, lasted 1 min and ended with a buddy separation.
R..
They were there before we arrived (probably a short time) and were getting their gear ready to go.
I arrived with my buddy and we slapped our twin OC sets together and got in the water ... it took us.... I don't know... maybe 1/2 hour or so from parking the car to being in the water. We were (I was) on a schedule today and not wasting any time. At that point the other guys were almost ready to go. They had their scooters in the water and their stages set to go etc.
We talked to them (they were very friendly and the atmosphere was very amicable). It was very relaxed and comfortable to be there in contrast to encounters that we have had in the past with why my buddy calls "growling tek bears", many of whom, alas, in the Netherlands, with a certain training background.
Oddly, even though we have been doing these dives for 14 years (or at least, I have), there are still newbie tek divers around who won't even talk to us because we don't have the right brand of lights or the right brand of flippers.... but ok... that's a discussion for a different thread and I think everyone knows the issues... xD
Our plan was to visit a particular wreck. Navigation to the wreck is exceedingly tricky (to say the least), especially if you swim it, which is what we were doing. You have to swim for 20 min over a featureless bottom in 3m visibility and "land" on a target 20m long and 5m wide. There are few people in the Netherlands who know how to get there at all, let alone every time in limited visibility and swimming from shore.
They were going to the same wreck as we were but only to touch base because it is a good jumping off point to a wreck a little further up. My buddy and I do that wreck in the summer as well but because we don't have scooters we have to swim there and usually have 30-odd minutes of deco by the time we leave the bottom and it involves a mid-water swim back of 20-25 min to avoid it becoming a massive dive.
They, of course, were doing it with scooters and rebreathers and expected to get there and back with no deco at all, even in the cold......Yes, I was a little envious.
So.... the dive.....
My buddy and I got in the water first and swam to the 1st wreck. We got there today in 16 min. that was actually very quick for us, it usually takes us 19 min. We spent 10 min on the wreck and started climbing our way back up to the shallows. When we left the wreck we had a modest deco obligation (for us) and we managed to clear most of it by the time we got back to 6m.
As were were leaving the wreck we could hear the scooter divers starting their dive. We actually considered staying deep for a bit longer to wait for them to catch up to us but the dive would have been too long, so we left.
When we got to the surface one of the rebreather divers was already there...... he had lost his buddy....
And that was the epiphany. If you are scootering with 4 or 5km/h in 3m of visibility and you lose your attention for even a second then you can lose your buddy. In a few seconds you can be 20m apart and if you are on rebreathers as well then you can't even hear each other to try reconnecting.
One of the two explained this (losing buddy contact) as "standard operating procedure". He said that he lost his buddy in this case within the first 60 seconds of the dive.
That's very interesting to me because while my buddy and I needed to swim 15-20 min to our target (with extreme accuracy) and had to work off 10 or 15 min of deco on the way back, their dive, despite having gone into the water with +/- $15,000 worth of gear, lasted 1 min and ended with a buddy separation.
R..
