scubadude79
Contributor
We all know that one of the best parts of scuba diving is all the cool gear we get to play with. There is definitely a time and place for using all this neat stuff, but probably not all of it at once!
I was on my first Advanced Open Water training dive of the weekend and we had already established whom our buddies would be. My buddy was a person that I had been diving with before so we were familiar and comfortable diving together. As many of you know or will soon find out, the AOW training deals a lot with additional task loading activities which are fun and potentially stressing.
My buddy and I had been in the process of acquiring lots of new cool gear and we were both rather excited to use the gear. We were both trained to always be familiar with your gear before diving with it, and only dive with what you need for that specific dive. I had taking the time to get acquainted with my new gear so when the time came I would be comfortable and ready to use it efficiently. My buddy however did not, and he thought it would be ok to do that in the water and worse during training. I had only my basic required gear for a cold water dive and my compass as this was the navigation dive and I did not see exactly what my buddy had in his BC as he was preparing for the dive.
After we did our buddy check and swam out to the buoy, my buddy kept on complaining that he felt as though he was rolling in the water. We stopped and I helped him check his weights for proper balance and in the effort I found out that he had pretty much packed all of his new gear in one pocket. This caused a major balance and buoyancy issue that was causing his rolling in the water.
Due to the constant rolling, balancing of equipment, and my observation of extreme agitation, I decided to take a break at the surface with my buddy and allow him to relax so we didn't need to call the dive. He kept on fighting with his gear and I did not see any sign of him calming down so I was about to call the dive when suddenly I noticed that his automatic surface sausage inflated. That really caused more anger and then put him into a near panic state due to the stress which then caused his mask strap to break off of his head and sink. The gear he had in his right pocket was one large and one small flashlight, his compass which was needed, a surface sausage, and a large dive knife. In his opposite pocket, he had a pair of 5mm gloves which he had not put on yet which were very buoyant.
I kept my distance and talked him down from panic and told him that we were not going to dive now and it was ok for us to just relax and figure out a better way to fix what was going on.
Moral of the story: Diving equipment is cool, but use common sense and when using it make sure you are balanced.
I was on my first Advanced Open Water training dive of the weekend and we had already established whom our buddies would be. My buddy was a person that I had been diving with before so we were familiar and comfortable diving together. As many of you know or will soon find out, the AOW training deals a lot with additional task loading activities which are fun and potentially stressing.
My buddy and I had been in the process of acquiring lots of new cool gear and we were both rather excited to use the gear. We were both trained to always be familiar with your gear before diving with it, and only dive with what you need for that specific dive. I had taking the time to get acquainted with my new gear so when the time came I would be comfortable and ready to use it efficiently. My buddy however did not, and he thought it would be ok to do that in the water and worse during training. I had only my basic required gear for a cold water dive and my compass as this was the navigation dive and I did not see exactly what my buddy had in his BC as he was preparing for the dive.
After we did our buddy check and swam out to the buoy, my buddy kept on complaining that he felt as though he was rolling in the water. We stopped and I helped him check his weights for proper balance and in the effort I found out that he had pretty much packed all of his new gear in one pocket. This caused a major balance and buoyancy issue that was causing his rolling in the water.
Due to the constant rolling, balancing of equipment, and my observation of extreme agitation, I decided to take a break at the surface with my buddy and allow him to relax so we didn't need to call the dive. He kept on fighting with his gear and I did not see any sign of him calming down so I was about to call the dive when suddenly I noticed that his automatic surface sausage inflated. That really caused more anger and then put him into a near panic state due to the stress which then caused his mask strap to break off of his head and sink. The gear he had in his right pocket was one large and one small flashlight, his compass which was needed, a surface sausage, and a large dive knife. In his opposite pocket, he had a pair of 5mm gloves which he had not put on yet which were very buoyant.
I kept my distance and talked him down from panic and told him that we were not going to dive now and it was ok for us to just relax and figure out a better way to fix what was going on.
Moral of the story: Diving equipment is cool, but use common sense and when using it make sure you are balanced.
