Darwin Awards of Diving

[InTheDrink]

Yes, I understand that there are different strategies to dealing with such a scenario. But reg remove and replace wasn't that outlandish that long ago from other posts I've read.

My main point in any case is - don't (not you personally) be a jerk just cos you see someone trying something that you mightn't fully undertstand and that they mightn't be getting right first off the bat. Sounds very teenage snickering/playground bullying/groupthink to me.

J

 

[RJP]

"...you see someone trying something that you mightn't fully undertstand and that they mightn't be getting right first off the bat."

Reminds me of something a cave instructor said once:

"The good news is, if you do this wrong...you'll only do it once."

 

[InTheDrink]

from the post I mentioned earlier....

The only time I ever saw an O-ring failure under water, it was with a DIN valve.

Perhaps a description of the affair will be helpful in terms of what can be done.

It happened to the DM early on a dive in Cozumel. (I know it is usually yoke there, but not with Adora.) He was suddenly in a huge mass of bubbles. I was the closest to him, and he already had his BCD (Transpac) off when I got there. I helped him hold it in place while he worked. He first shut off his air. Seeing this and showing more foresight than you might otherwise attribute to me, I decided he might need another air source, so produced my alternate for his use. (He only took one breath while doing what follows--he clearly expected not to need my air at all.) He took his first stage off, saw that the O-ring had extruded, put it back into place, and replaced the reg on the valve. He turned on the air and resumed breathing.

He put the BCD back on, checked his air supply, and paused a while in thought. He finally decided he did not have enough air to complete the dive in a safe manner, and he returned to the surface to get a new tank while we hung out below. He returned in a couple of minutes and we went on with the dive.

would this seem equally amusing???

J

 

[InTheDrink]

Reminds me of something a cave instructor said once:

"The good news is, if you do this wrong...you'll only do it once."

which is why people practice in controlled environments like pools and quarries, smug idiotic onlookers or not.

 

[captain]

I'm paraphrasing a quote I saw once, "Stupidity ought to be painful".

Sometimes it is, but unfortunately it is sometimes painful to someone other than the stupid one.

 

[Teamcasa]

I guess before I ridiculed the guy much, I'd want to know the circumstances. What was he doing when the error occurred?

My computer went into error mode, beeping to warn me about ascending too fast and missing my deco stop, on our last dive trip. It did this on the first dive of the day, before I'd even managed to descend to 20'.

We tried to get the computer to reset later, by which time it said that I'd descended to around 300' and stayed down for 999 minutes. That would be a real good trick to accomplish in a bay with a maximum depth of about 35 feet, and on a single tank of regular air.

If someone didn't know the story, and just saw me turning it into the LDS, they might have thought I'd made a very dumb decision and blown off the deco stop after a deep dive.

By the way, even a week later, the LDS still couldn't get the comp to reset. Looks like there's a new computer in my future.

But only one at a time. I'm neither dumb enough nor rich enough to run around with a whole bag of computers.

The guy had just been diving for a few months, first computer - 3 dives - all at the local Casino dive park. He was using his brand new twin 120's and bragged about how long he could stay at 80'.

 

[Teamcasa]

I'm paraphrasing a quote I saw once, "Stupidity ought to be painful".

 

[Guy Alcala]

I guess before I ridiculed the guy much, I'd want to know the circumstances. What was he doing when the error occurred?

My computer went into error mode, beeping to warn me about ascending too fast and missing my deco stop, on our last dive trip. It did this on the first dive of the day, before I'd even managed to descend to 20'.

We tried to get the computer to reset later, by which time it said that I'd descended to around 300' and stayed down for 999 minutes. That would be a real good trick to accomplish in a bay with a maximum depth of about 35 feet, and on a single tank of regular air.

If someone didn't know the story, and just saw me turning it into the LDS, they might have thought I'd made a very dumb decision and blown off the deco stop after a deep dive.

By the way, even a week later, the LDS still couldn't get the comp to reset. Looks like there's a new computer in my future.

But only one at a time. I'm neither dumb enough nor rich enough to run around with a whole bag of computers.

Was that a Suunto Gekko by any chance? There seems to have been a whole batch of Gekkos that made it into rental departments and retail a couple of years back, which had serious reliability problems. I had one do just what you said, except it was reading like that in the shop when I hooked up the reg to test it; ISTR it was giving me 330 minutes of dive time, and 999 of total ascent time. Told the shop owner that I'd really prefer another reg/computer, if he didn't mind. He wound up replacing all his rental computer consoles with Oceanics, because Suunto wasn't standing behind what was obviously a faulty product batch; he was having problems with most of them.

Had another Gekko, rented from a different shop, refuse to submerge a month or so later. Everything was fine on the shore and on the surface swim, went through the initialization sequence perfectly. It just refused to recognize the fact that I'd submerged at any point in the dive. Fortunately I was doing familiar dives where I knew the profiles and times, so no biggee (and had my depth gauge and watch with me, and the table NDLs written on my wrist slate). Had the woman I'd rented the unit from parked next to me when I returned from the first dive, so I told her about it and had no trouble getting a refund; she told me they'd been having problems with many of their Gekkos.

Guy

 

[Hoomi]

The guy had just been diving for a few months, first computer - 3 dives - all at the local Casino dive park. He was using his brand new twin 120's and bragged about how long he could stay at 80'.

That does make the situation much clearer. I guess I can understand the ego satisfaction of staying down at 80' a long time, but part of the reason for having a computer in the first place is providing a means to keep track of safety limits, including not ascending too quickly from being down at 80' for an extra long dive.

Duh. Even a noob like me should know that.

It did occur to me a few minutes ago that people using multiple computers to sidestep the error mode are more or less buying into the commercial medicine mentality. So long as you can eliminate or cover the symptoms, you can ignore the problem. Rather than deal with the actual cause, just deal with the annoying results. After all, we're doing our best in this culture to embrace the philosophy that ignorance is bliss.

 

[rstofer]

Because he expected it to not be full of water.

You know, I'm not sure how DVT would react. I have never used one of these first stages. Interesting idea... I'm sure there would be a little water but maybe not very much.

Richard