A sun Sentinel Reporter Tells of his near miss.

[ekremer]

Sun Sentinel reporter Steve Waters averts diving disaster

I saw this today on the Sun Sentinels homepage, and figured it would be interesting to discuss here.


The short of it (can we quote stories, or part of stories after here? I know there have been some recent incidents on other forums)
The reporter Steve Waters, was diving in Boca Raton FL, for lobster, and apparently his buddy was doing some spearing. Unable to inflate his BC, and so over weighted you could not swim his rig even a little bit off the bottom he had to have his buddy swim him to the surface, and preform a rescue.

I could not imagine being so over weighted now that I could not swim my rig to the surface if my BC malfunctioned.. What are all your thoughts.

 

[suzette]

I think it sounds like he should have dropped his weights and done a safe ascent. I don't see any life threatening event here and his description sounds like typical newspaper melodrama to me. For the amount of time he says he's been diving, this should have been a non-event and if it seemed like that big of a deal, he should get himself some additional training. Also, I know that lead is costly but:

"When we got to the surface, he told me to take off my weight belt because I would have to tread water. Instead of dropping my weights to the bottom, Whitworth held on to the extra 15 pounds"'

Why?

I understand the gist of the article is "stick close to your buddy" and all that, but I hope he deconstructed the incident and learned a bit about self rescue from it as well.

 

[fdarden]

Sun Sentinel is my local newspaper. This is typical of their reporting style. Reach your own conclusions, but I read this story a couple of days ago, and thought the same thing that some of you all did. Slow news day. They never report all the facts or details in my opinion, so I would be cautious to draw any conclusions about what actually happened on the water out there, especially since it was one of their own..

 

[jar546]

It is a good story to remind people about the importance of a dive buddy. It is also a good article to remind people how the simplest action of dropping a weight belt is forgotten in an emergency situation. I commend his honesty but wish he would have mentioned the fact that NOT dropping his weight belt was a mistake.

 

[BKP]

If you're diving steel doubles, you can be seriously negative, which is why a double bladder, or lift bag for redundancy is mandatory.
However, assuming they were doing standard AL80 singles, I don't understand why he couldn't swim his rig up, unless he was seriously over-weighted. And, if that's all it was, unthreading/ditching some of that weight, while sitting on the bottom, shouldn't have been too much of a task for someone diving 15 years.

 

[inventor]

Does the article say he was breathing oxygen?:shocked2:

Can't understand not ditching the weights. Are there arrangements of equipment that will not allow ditching? Dump the whole rig and share air if so, would be my guess.