One of the points JP Bresser made during my recent redo cave course was to tell the students, "There is no need to panic when you hear a leak. Remember, it's MY gas that is being lost, not yours." He wanted to reassure the students so that they would move slowly and effectively, instead of rushing and creating problems. In addition, for safety purposes, it's probably better if it's the instructor's gas that is used, I think.
Interestingly, my instructor made the same point during my training. However, there were some unintended consequences associated with how well one student took that notion to heart.
On a planned "deco" dive in one of the classes my fellow student/buddy experienced an ACTUAL freeflow while shooting a bag from our first planned stop. He was incredibly confused about this freeflow... because he could see our instructor in front of us. For the life of him he couldn't figure out who was "simulating" this freeflow, never occurring to him that A.) It may be real, and B.) Either way... identify and shutdown the offending post.
Unfortunately, in his quest to answer the "who is doing that" question (rather than closing the offending post) he spun around to his left, and not seeing anyone spun around to the right. Still no one behind him. He just kept turning and swimming in circles to see who was simulating this freeflow. I say unfortunately, because in all that turning he wrapped the line from the bag he just shot (that was going up from 60ft) around his manifold, tanks, legs, etc... as well as wrapping the line from his ascending bag around the line from my bag (that was already at the surface). Once he went up to about 30ft he lost control of buoyancy (couldn't deal with free flow, drysuit, BCD, reel, and entanglement I guess) and went the rest of the way to the surface.
I gave him the "valve drill" hand signal... but I couldn't figure out the proper way to add "...because it's a REAL problem ****head!" to the signal.
The result was that he - and my reel - went to the surface. As for me... well, for some reason I switched my brain from "student in a course" mode to "DM'ing for a course" mode and followed him to the surface. Fortunately, this was a simulated deco dive in that we were diving EANx although running an air schedule... so we were still actually well within recreational NDL. He needed to repeat the dive of course (in fact I don't think he ever finished the class) as did I. (I failed because after getting to the surface and untangling my buddy I didn't pull out my wetnotes and go through the proper procedure for missed stops.)
During the debrief the student was incredulous with the instructor.. "But you said that the freeflows during the dive would be YOUR gas!"
:shocked2:
---------- Post added January 2nd, 2015 at 01:41 PM ----------
I can still hear my cave instructor's voice saying, "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."
We may have had the same one... although I suspect they ALL say that. (Because it's true.)