If you do try to control the buoyancy of a buddy pair while donating in an air share please stay negative to compensate for the other person to be slightly positive so that if they lose their grip and become separated they will go up and not down.
American woman dead - Bell Island, Newfoundland
- Thread starter DandyDon
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One of the lessons here might be that sharing air in an emergency situation (e.g., with a panicky diver) when wearing drysuits is not quite the same as we were taught when we did our open water certs in wetsuits. We were all (?) taught to get face-to-face, vertical, eye contact, with the donor securely holding onto the recipient's harness or BC, and slowly ascend. If you do this (i.e., get vertical) in most drysuits, then both the donor's and the recipient's drysuits will dump air and lose buoyancy and induce squeeze!!
rx7diver
rx7diver
FishWatcher747
Contributor
Off topic, but thigh pockets on your suits. Alternatively, or in addition: Expandable cargo pouch for sidemount configuration - XDEEP
Sorry, I wasn’t there, but the surviving diver is one of my best friends and my dive buddy of decades. I have trusted her with my life on many occasions, on challenging technical dives. She does not want to participate directly in this thread (she is still dealing with this in therapy), but she is aware of what has been written here. After speaking with her tonight, I feel that I should respond and clarify some points - she has approved this post.
Promoting the idea that the victim would have survived if not for her buddy’s intervention is more than just Monday morning quarterbacking. It is misrepresenting what happened and I believe that it teaches the wrong lesson. It’s inappropriate to quote the words of someone spoken in the immediate aftermath of such a trauma as some sort of measured conclusion. Second guessing your decision making in a life and death situation, and suffering from imposter syndrome is a normal reaction - it has happened to me in surgery. I would expect any skilled and qualified diver to do the same.
So when she questioned her decision to try to stabilize the victim at depth and said “maybe I should have done something different”, please know that this was said as the tragedy was unfolding and as she was in tears, watching an unsuccessful attempt at resuscitation, not during a legal deposition.
The surviving buddy tells me that the event happened at around 70 feet, late in the dive (NDL about 3 minutes), exiting the cargo hold of the PLM-27, 10 feet from the anchor line. The victim had 250 PSI in her tank at the time of the incident. She was initially able to breathe off the pony bottle, which was turned on for the whole dive when carried and donated (common protocol for a CCR bailout bottle, although both divers were on open circuit on this dive). The surviving buddy and I actually did a rescue together of an overweighted dry suit diver a few years ago, so I know that she knows her stuff.
Yes “bent is better than dead”. But it’s never that simple a decision in real time, and that also doesn’t mean that the correct response to every underwater problem is to just make the victim positive and cork them to the surface. Stabilizing a panicked diver and bringing them to the surface in a controlled fashion isn’t just about DCS (although that’s also a consideration late in the dive with significant inert gas loading). Letting the victim do an uncontrolled ascent doesn’t guarantee survival either - it potentially puts a panicked and overweighted diver on the surface alone. Even if you make that hard call to put yourself at risk and ascend rapidly with them, it’s easy to get separated. Plenty of people have drowned after surfacing.
I know that people here are just trying to learn, and I’m sorry if this comes off as combative. There is plenty to learn here. I just want people to understand that “bolt for the surface with an open airway” isn’t always the best option. With very rare exceptions, I would try to get a victim breathing from a gas source at depth as a first step.
Finally, thanks to @rjack321 for your efforts to save this diver, and for your contributions here. While I disagree with your last conclusion, I know that this is a complicated situation with a heavy “fog of war”.
Promoting the idea that the victim would have survived if not for her buddy’s intervention is more than just Monday morning quarterbacking. It is misrepresenting what happened and I believe that it teaches the wrong lesson. It’s inappropriate to quote the words of someone spoken in the immediate aftermath of such a trauma as some sort of measured conclusion. Second guessing your decision making in a life and death situation, and suffering from imposter syndrome is a normal reaction - it has happened to me in surgery. I would expect any skilled and qualified diver to do the same.
So when she questioned her decision to try to stabilize the victim at depth and said “maybe I should have done something different”, please know that this was said as the tragedy was unfolding and as she was in tears, watching an unsuccessful attempt at resuscitation, not during a legal deposition.
The surviving buddy tells me that the event happened at around 70 feet, late in the dive (NDL about 3 minutes), exiting the cargo hold of the PLM-27, 10 feet from the anchor line. The victim had 250 PSI in her tank at the time of the incident. She was initially able to breathe off the pony bottle, which was turned on for the whole dive when carried and donated (common protocol for a CCR bailout bottle, although both divers were on open circuit on this dive). The surviving buddy and I actually did a rescue together of an overweighted dry suit diver a few years ago, so I know that she knows her stuff.
Yes “bent is better than dead”. But it’s never that simple a decision in real time, and that also doesn’t mean that the correct response to every underwater problem is to just make the victim positive and cork them to the surface. Stabilizing a panicked diver and bringing them to the surface in a controlled fashion isn’t just about DCS (although that’s also a consideration late in the dive with significant inert gas loading). Letting the victim do an uncontrolled ascent doesn’t guarantee survival either - it potentially puts a panicked and overweighted diver on the surface alone. Even if you make that hard call to put yourself at risk and ascend rapidly with them, it’s easy to get separated. Plenty of people have drowned after surfacing.
I know that people here are just trying to learn, and I’m sorry if this comes off as combative. There is plenty to learn here. I just want people to understand that “bolt for the surface with an open airway” isn’t always the best option. With very rare exceptions, I would try to get a victim breathing from a gas source at depth as a first step.
Finally, thanks to @rjack321 for your efforts to save this diver, and for your contributions here. While I disagree with your last conclusion, I know that this is a complicated situation with a heavy “fog of war”.
For drysuit diving with a properly balanced rig it's common to have a mix of ditchable weight on a belt or pouches and non-ditchable weight like with a steel backplate. You really only need enough ditchable weight to get positively buoyant if your BC fails at the beginning of a dive with full tanks.
In cold water some divers will intentionally dive a few pounds overweighed just so that they can add extra gas to the drysuit and stay warm. I'm not necessarily recommended this approach but if you do it then that extra weight must be ditchable.
SlugLife
Contributor
Hindsight analysis is fine, so long as it's understood to be hindsight analysis with it's biases, drawbacks, and limitations. An action which perhaps is successful in one scenario, may fail in a nearly identical scenario. The idea generally being to focus on how to avoid similar incidents, similar mistakes, improve redundancies, or improve training.
Unless a rescuer does something overtly dangerous and unreasonable, or has the role of instructor, I'd generally treat most "rescue divers" as being someone who was caught off-guard and did the best they could in a stressful unexpected situation, and leave any hint of blame-game out of it.
Because to be blunt, I don't envy anyone who has been in the position of rescuing another diver. And by the time one needs someone else to rescue them, they're at another diver's mercy who may or may-not be able to assist. I'm not blaming the injured/dead/affected either of course, but rather that's a huge reason why I'm a major advocate of a heavy focus on redundancies and self-rescue whenever possible, and your buddy is only an additional redundancy on top of that.
I am so very glad that you wrote this!
Further, I'm surprised that amongst the speculation, no one or barely anyone had twigged to it before your post.
I can't imagine how your friend must be feeling. Her actions, as she recalls them, were in line with how we should be assisting our buddy in similar circumstances. To have anyone even hint otherwise, is just so wrong.
Everyone, please remember that your words are read by friends, family and in this case, the surviving buddy.
If you are not familiar with the terms of service of the Accident and Incidents subforum, please read them now, as well as the stickies!
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