Alaskan Scuba Dude
Banned
There is no need to cut the anchor line. Place the line through a float, and splice the rope around a snap hook.
Diving from 16 foot fishing boat
- Thread starter rfwoodvt
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I dived off my own 18’ center console fishing boat many times.
Make sure you set that anchor securely and consider aborting if the current is stiff. You’re not supposed to tie off your reel to the anchor line but when diving solo off my boat I always did in case the anchor pulled free I’d know it immediately from the tug I’d get on the line.
Once I pulled the anchor to reset it somewhere else on the wreck and found myself being pulled at a good clip from a surface current that wasn’t present at depth.
I tucked the anchor under my arm and enjoyed the ride for a bit but realized it wasn’t such a great idea. If I lost my hold on the anchor, or drifted towards or even into another boat..it wouldn’t have ended well.
And yes as others have said, hide the key,cellphone, etc. And let someone know where you’re going,
Don’t forget to put the bilge pump on auto.
Make sure you set that anchor securely and consider aborting if the current is stiff. You’re not supposed to tie off your reel to the anchor line but when diving solo off my boat I always did in case the anchor pulled free I’d know it immediately from the tug I’d get on the line.
Once I pulled the anchor to reset it somewhere else on the wreck and found myself being pulled at a good clip from a surface current that wasn’t present at depth.
I tucked the anchor under my arm and enjoyed the ride for a bit but realized it wasn’t such a great idea. If I lost my hold on the anchor, or drifted towards or even into another boat..it wouldn’t have ended well.
And yes as others have said, hide the key,cellphone, etc. And let someone know where you’re going,
Don’t forget to put the bilge pump on auto.
Adobo
Contributor
I’ve seen a variety of opinions and advice on your thread - some very good, others, well…
Diving from your boat and leaving it unattended in the ocean is one of those things that seem like a good idea but only when assuming that everything goes fine. However, as soon as you have one predictable problem, you are boned.
Just thinking off the top of my head:
- If you leave the boat anchored, that means you need to ascend from the anchor line. Do you have the skills and training to get back to the anchorline on an ocean dive? Anytime it becomes mandatory for you to ascend from a specific spot, it is basically an overhead dive. Because if you do not ascend on the anchorline, with any current at all, you are guaranteed to surface down current from your boat.
- Related to above, any kind of emergency (out of gas or any other thing that compels you to abort the dive) leaves you with the choice of, do we prioritize getting to the surface as expediently as possible or do we prioritize surfacing somewhere where we are guaranteed to be able to reach the boat? Interesting choice for a diver with only open water training.
- If there is an emergency and you somehow manage to get back to the boat, if one diver needs assistance getting back on the boat, will his buddy be able to get the stricken diver back on the boat by himself?
- Related to the above, if there is a stricken diver and somehow you are able to get the diver on the boat, you basically have to stay put since you cannot both drive the boat and provide aid to a stricken diver at the same time. Hopefully, comms on the boat are reliable and have redundancy.
I am sure there are many other items I am forgetting but I think you get the point. BTW, that list above only assumes one thing going wrong. It doesn’t even talk about two things going wrong (with the exception of comms failing while you have a stricken diver on the boat).
So you may think, ok, well, let me leave some willing volunteer on the boat while I dive with my buddy. Some food for thought:
- One person can only look in one direction at a time. Basically, they have about 180degrees of visibility. Or, while they are tending to something else on the boat, there are those moments in time where they are not scanning the area for an indication of an aborted dive.
- Also, this now means that you have the option of ascending away from the anchor line because the assumption is that you have the ability to signal the surface that you ended your dive early, away from the anchor line. Are you proficient at deploying an SMB? How about your dive buddy? Can you guys do it while managing an out of gas emergency? After all, an OOG diver is one very good reason to abort the dive and ascend away from the anchor line.
- This last one never occurred to me until it happened to some friends of mine. They were “live boating” it, completed the dive as scheduled, deployed an SMB and drifted as they completed their ascent. The usual process was that the person on the boat would see the SMB would keep an eye for the SMB and follow it as the divers drifted. Upon surfacing, the divers saw no sign of the boat. As they waited, one of the divers asked, “how do we know the one failure here isn’t the captain?” Meaning, what if the reason the boat is nowhere the divers expected is because something happened to the captain? Something like a medical emergency that left the captain incapacitated? In this case, the issue was the SMB was never seen by the captain. Perhaps related to the fact that one person can only see in one direction at a specific time. Eventually, when the captain did not see the divers as scheduled, he started a search grid and after an hour or so, located the divers.
I know this is a long reply already but I just wanted to share a true story which I think is relevant. One time, coming back from a long charter, as we were nearing the harbor, we spotted two divers on the surface. They had no dive flag or buoy and were way too far to have swam from the shore or to be able to swim back to shore. Way way too far. So captain pulled up to the divers and we pulled the divers into our boat. Apparently, these two guys dove from an unattended boat, surfaced downstream of their boat and were unable to get back. Thankfully, they found out the hard way about what can happen when you dive from an unattended boat on a day and in an area where they were spotted by another vessel.
Adobo
Contributor
Still Kicking
Contributor
Excellent points and certainly issues that divers should fully consider if they are diving off a small boat. There are ways to mitigate these issues with careful planning, additional equipment and protocols for emergency management (as addressed higher up in this thread).
The risks might be reduced but they can't be completely eliminated. But if we are unwilling to accept any risk at all we wouldn't be diving in the first place. Heck, we wouldn't even get on the freeway to drive to the harbor (statistically the most dangerous part of any dive trip).
Adobo
Contributor
The idea isn't to zero out risk. The idea is to get familiar with what the predictable risks are and decide which risks are acceptable without any contingencies vs risks that need to be mitigated before getting in the water.
I do agree about the the statistics - driving to the dive site adds a lot of risk. I know that is the case for me when I drive to and from Monterey, CA. However, every year, we have several dive related fatalities in Monterey. So just because one has gotten to the dive site, it doesn't mean it will be smooth sailing until it is time to drive home.
Gone for diving
Contributor
We dive in a river with decent currents, and opens up into a lake, and can be a bit wavy,
Usually our buddy that drives likes fishing
So he goes fishing for a hr,
When we surface we have a sausage, but it can be hard to see depending on waves an distance drifted... so we carry a small Family radio in an otter box that we can call him up.... works quite well.
He says flashlights are easier to spot, than the sausage... its usually towards the evening that we do that dive,
Usually our buddy that drives likes fishing
So he goes fishing for a hr,
When we surface we have a sausage, but it can be hard to see depending on waves an distance drifted... so we carry a small Family radio in an otter box that we can call him up.... works quite well.
He says flashlights are easier to spot, than the sausage... its usually towards the evening that we do that dive,
Still Kicking
Contributor
We are on the same page
On the flip side of the risks, there are a lot of dives i do that would just not be feasible from a charter boat for one reason of another. To me, the freedom of being in charge and doing my own thing is priceless and I accept a higher level of risk that comes with that (mitigated in every way i can think of within reason).
Totally agree with this..... there will always be "What IF's" .... rouge wave sinks the boat, boat tender dies of a heart attack, meteor strike sinks the boat, whale becomes entangled in the marker line and swims away, , locusts, etc.....
If you have the room and a qualified person to handle the boat while your down then live boat is the way to go for sure.... We have a couple of shallow wrecks up here (100ft or less) that we frequent often. Wife doesn't do cold water anymore so she handles the boat.... and I wouldn't trust anyone more than her. If surface conditions suck than we bag the dive and go elsewhere or back home.
We just have a 5 gal bucket with about 150 feet of WHITE ½ in braided anchor rode with a quick clip to a large orange mooring ball on one end and a quick clip to a 10lb downrigger ball on the other end. I also use that same large mooring ball as an anchor puller so I can pull up the anchor with boat power rather than hand power. So it's dual purpose.
Once I'm at my "numbers" and am tracking the structure on sonar I keep the bow into the current if any or into the wind and when I'm feeling confident that I'm hovering in the right spot I yell out "bombs away" to whoever is manning and deploying the marker line. The 10 lb DR ball goes pretty much straight down to the bottom and the mooring ball goes over the side. Now we "hopefully" have the site properly marked and a live boat.
I usually go down first to confirm the wreck. Wife drops me 25 or 30 yards up current or upwind if no obvious current. I descend with the line as a guide but not "pulling" on it. If the DR ball is in or on the wreck I'll move it out into the sand along side for easier retrieval later. Then clip on a strobe to the marker line about 5-10 feet up. Once I feel like we're good to go then I have a bright yellow rubber duck that's in my BC pocket and I'll let it go to the surface. The duck is about the size of a baseball on the surface and about the size of a golf ball at 100ft. Once wife sees the duck then she splashes any other divers uphill from the float and they come on down with the instructions to use the downline as a guide and not to pull up on it. Wife then goes and gets the duck with the net and then watches bubbles and protects the site from yahoos. I can say with certainty is that my wife at the helm protects her divers like a tiger mom protecting her cubs!
Some....but not all, other items that at least for me are important:
1) When moving the 10lb DR ball out into the sand, be smart about your buoyancy and don't let go of that 10lb'r until you are are fully prepared to suddenly be without those 10 lbs. Go way negative before the drop and then adjust after the drop.
2) Vis can be really crappy up here sometimes. If its less than 5 -10 feet on the bottom than it's probably best to just keep the duck and surface to let the others know it's just not a good day for this dive. If there is no duck or me on the surface within 10 minutes after my initial descent, then it is assumed that there may be an issue and depending who may be onboard they may descend to evaluate and assist. This is all discussed pre-dive.
3) If you get down to the DR ball and there is no wreck or structure in sight, just sand, and the vis is less than 10 ft, then there's a pretty good chance that it is close by... If that happens to me I pull out a strobe and clip it to the down line near the DR ball. Then I will take a North compass heading, do 10 fin kicks then a reciprocal for 10 kicks to bring me back to the DR ball.. If no joy then I will repeat that process..... E, S, W. If after all that there is still no joy, then there is no duck released and I still have the line to control my ascent and any stops.
4) Depending on depth, standard agreed max dive times apply…. Everyone carry's an SMB and audible surface device.... Wife and I use DiveAlerts but also have manual whistles.
5) For the wreck marker line I really like the WHITE ½ in braided line. It's easier to see, easier to hold onto and less likely to become a fouling issue than paracord or wreck reel line.
6) Even though I would never want to lose my anchor, and do have a float for it……I ALWAYS have an option for an emergency cut and run. A sheathed titanium dive knife lives on my bow rail and surprisingly has held up very with little rust at all. I do spray it down with WD a couple times a year. Never had to use it...but it's there.
7) Having a diver recall option is a good idea.... Ours is simply a hammer banged in successive sets of three on the offshore bracket of our aluminum boat. Never had to use it yet.....but that's the plan anyway and it's discussed pre-dive...
8) Timing is pretty much everything up here. Currents, vis and surface conditions can change rapidly and unexpectedly.
9) Once back at the boat I find it easiest to pull my weight pockets and set them on the bracket and then doff my gear and tie it off for retrieval after I'm back onboard. We use the pot puller lifting the kits up and then pivot over and onto the deck...
Sorry about the long post but I like thinking and talking about this stuff.... There's always going to be more "what-if's" advise and suggestions.... and that's why I like to follow threads like this.
I'm also excited about installing a new ladder system to my bracket and hope to pick that up from the welder next Friday!
Cheers!!!
Gone for diving
Contributor
Love your boat,
One day I would like to get welded aluminum boat like that...
One day I would like to get welded aluminum boat like that...
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