Another golf ball diver dead - Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida

[Lilhubb9]

Marie13, the Teric has configurable tonal and haptic alarms to alert you to low air as well

 

[Vicko]

You don't use diving computers in dives like these, they don't last long.
Not sure how often you guys breathed down your tanks to 0, but even with a modern balanced well maintained regulator in shalow water you have at least 20-30 hard breaths before you run out of air completely, it's impossible to breath down to 0 without noticing.

 

[Nemrod]

You don't use diving computers in dives like these, they don't last long.
Not sure how often you guys breathed down your tanks to 0, but even with a modern balanced well maintained regulator in shalow water you have at least 20-30 hard breaths before you run out of air completely, it's impossible to breath down to 0 without noticing.

In about 1982 I went to absolute 0 psi and never noticed a thing. Preoccupied with towing the buoy drift diving in Fort Lauderdale trying to keep one particular diver in check who insisted on going up current. I was on a Tekna T2100 and a Mark V. Maybe it gave one or two hard breaths . But all I remember is the nothing last breath!

For dark water diving I did and would still today use a J valve, sometimes IDs with each a J valve. I would adjust the cut in pressure to 500 or 600 psi instead of 300 psi. Computers, spgs, depth gages and all of that is nothing short of useless in dark water and absolute zero visibility. Proper procedure is to routinely check the J rod. Pony bottles and ID doubles, maybe but fumbling in zero viz trying to shift regs is not fun and there are entanglement hazards like drowned trees and brush not to mention monofilament and whatever, keeping your kit absolute clean and free of danglies and clips and multiple regulators hanging about and all that is essential. Mud diving at it's finest. Water so thick you can walk on it, good stuff!

James

 

[Manatee Diver]

Imagine a simple device attached in between the hose and pressure gauge that will sound an alarm when the pressure falls down to 500 Psi. The diver presses the "snooze" button and ends his dive.

Aqualung makes something like that for the military. It starts bubbling at a set pressure. No electronics too.

Other options include NERDs, the Scubapro HUD computer, a Teric with vibrate, and probably other options too. But those are all expensive.

 

[Still Kicking]

There's no need to overthink this kind of diving. It's 20' or less. I did most of my golf course work (not ball collecting) on full face mask surface supply but there were times when it was helpful to use a tank. The reg would give you fair warning when it got below 200 psi and even if you ignored it to the point where you got no air (not recommended) you could easily ascend on one breath.

Pony bottles are cumbersome and a serious entanglement hazard (bigger problem IMO) and no one is spending hundreds of dollars+ on air integrated computers when they are making a few cents on a golf ball. Yeah i know some claim they make millions but i call BS.

I once seriously thought about a hard hat to keep water out of my ears and avoid the horrendous ear infections but i came up with more cost effective solutions. Ulimately i quit because it wasn't worth it to dive in toxic soup.

 

[Bowers]

All a J-valve does is start your out-of-air crisis 300-600psi sooner than it would have happened without it.

You feel resistance, you pull a rod and like magic you have enough air to surface safely. That does not meet my criteria for starting a crisis early…. But if it makes you happy to know, I personally dive sidemount for complete redundancy when im solo. I was just pointing out that the concept of a warning when low on air with a single tank has already been in use for decades.

 

[DandyDon]

US Department of Labor cites Florida company for 12 serious violations after 26-year-old diver drowns in pond on Ponte Vedra Beach golf course | U.S. Department of Labor

www.dol.gov

 

[kelemvor]

Sure... See it here:

Internally it is a MK5, so no problem finding parts such as seat and O-rings, even nowadays.
But it has three problems:
1) you cannot install the Scubapro universal DIN Conversion kit
2) The yoke is "thin"; rated for old tanks at 2500 PSI. It is not rated for modern tanks at 3000 PSI or 232 bars.
3) It only has one LP port with no sound: so you need a "multi-swivel" for attaching to this port both the hose for the BCD and the octopus (at the time this unit was being manufactured, in the seventies, no one was using an octopus on their twin tanks, we used to employ two fully independent regs, and the BCD was attached to the "other" first stage).
Here the multiport swivel:

I have one of those, with the swivel for a gauge. It works just fine, except as you noted the yoke is only 2500psi. My understanding is that there was a version of the honker with an upgraded yoke - but that's not what I've got.

 

[John the Pom]

At shallow depth, say under 20 feet, do potential lung over expansion and nitrogen bubble problems still exist?

I've seen this question asked a few times on different threads here and it always worries me. On my OW course (back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) this was one point that was really hammered into us - that lung expansion injuries from breathing compressed air were a particular hazard of diving in shallow water.

Since our first training dives were done in a swimming pool, the instructor made sure we really understood this point before letting us get wet.

 

[DandyDon]

At shallow depth, say under 20 feet, do potential lung over expansion and nitrogen bubble problems still exist?

I think you mean no deeper than 20 feet. Lung injuries from breathing compressed gas are the most dangerous in shallow depths in that if you don't exhale on the ascent, the gas in your lungs expands significantly. From 33 feet to the surface, it can double in volume.

Nitrogen should not be a risk at 20 feet. In the link above, OSHA found the operation to simply be sloppy in their work ignoring safety protocols.