Every now and again Murphy gives me a little tap on the shoulder. Last night was like that so I'll just post about it.
Without going into a lot of detail my buddy and I were engaged in kind of advanced dive that included making stops every few metres on the way to the surface from a certain depth. During this, my buddy started stopping at different depths than I was. I kept telling him to go shallower and he started telling me that I was too shallow. A quick comparison of our gauges showed us that there was a 3 metre (10ft) difference in what his gauges were showing for depth and what mine were showing.
Murphy was teaching us a lesson. We only had two sets of gauges (I had left my dive watch in the car -- duh) and one of them, or maybe both of them, was definately wrong. On a normal dive this is problematic, but we were well over our NDL's and it was little more than problematic. We needed to know for sure which gauges were right.
We solved the problem in this case by letting up a buoy. I have little knots tied in the line on my reel every 5 metres so I could let the string run between my fingers as the buoy was going up and count the number of knots. But that's kind of beside the point.
The point here is that we were somehow lucky that we were engaged in a decompression dive because it made the problem immediately obvious. If we had just been puddlestomping the problem could have gone undetected, maybe for several dives in a row. Given that my buddy's computer was showing too shallow, it would have even been possible for him to get into deco without knowing it.
It's not unheard of for computers to malfunction like this. So learn from my lesson. Make it a habit on every dive to compare depths with your buddy when you have reached your target depth.
R..
Without going into a lot of detail my buddy and I were engaged in kind of advanced dive that included making stops every few metres on the way to the surface from a certain depth. During this, my buddy started stopping at different depths than I was. I kept telling him to go shallower and he started telling me that I was too shallow. A quick comparison of our gauges showed us that there was a 3 metre (10ft) difference in what his gauges were showing for depth and what mine were showing.
Murphy was teaching us a lesson. We only had two sets of gauges (I had left my dive watch in the car -- duh) and one of them, or maybe both of them, was definately wrong. On a normal dive this is problematic, but we were well over our NDL's and it was little more than problematic. We needed to know for sure which gauges were right.
We solved the problem in this case by letting up a buoy. I have little knots tied in the line on my reel every 5 metres so I could let the string run between my fingers as the buoy was going up and count the number of knots. But that's kind of beside the point.
The point here is that we were somehow lucky that we were engaged in a decompression dive because it made the problem immediately obvious. If we had just been puddlestomping the problem could have gone undetected, maybe for several dives in a row. Given that my buddy's computer was showing too shallow, it would have even been possible for him to get into deco without knowing it.
It's not unheard of for computers to malfunction like this. So learn from my lesson. Make it a habit on every dive to compare depths with your buddy when you have reached your target depth.
R..
