Diving without problems - Is it possible?

[divingjd]

A lot of people have switched to folding/pocket snorkels because of that. I know I have.

FWIW, your chances of catching and stopping a runaway diver are pretty slim. If it happens again, and you didn't catch him within the first few feet, just wave goodbye, do a normal safe ascent and meet him on the surface. You can't help your buddy if you're injured.

Terry

All the instructors I know have discussed the chase-down scenario in detail. We usually conclude it's best to let them go. When you actually confront the situation, it's hard to do, you want to help. I will be less likely to chase somebody next time, and if I do, I know that I will be dumping air all the way.

The snorkel's not worth worrying about, just one of those things.

 

[IceIce]

I'm agree that even small thing can lead to incident and accident. It's undebatable that things can change from enjoyable to disaster in matter of seconds underwater, so do not estimate little things that happened, but be grateful that you can solve that. Kudos.

The difference between a "near death experience" and an annoying problem is getting good training, and doing what you have been trained to do, and not doing dumb things.

May I chip in one more thing.
The difference between a near death experience and annoying problem is how you handle emergency situations, how calm and fast you react to it, nobody can claim how they would do it until they have been in that situations.

Experienced divers:
Divers can log thousand of dives and never had an accident because they know how to prevent it,
Divers who experience emergency and know how to react when one occurs.

Log more dives can thicken up your skin, more hours can prepare you better, but CALM is what you must have when the day comes, a day which all of us try to prevent.

 

[Web Monkey]

All the instructors I know have discussed the chase-down scenario in detail. We usually conclude it's best to let them go. When you actually confront the situation, it's hard to do, you want to help. I will be less likely to chase somebody next time, and if I do, I know that I will be dumping air all the way.

We discussed it in my DiveCon class and Stress & Rescue, and I even ran an ascent simulation at one point on a spreadsheet.

Given the time it takes to figure out that the other diver is in a runaway ascent, and his speed and accelleration rate, chances are excellent that you'll be bent by the time you reach the runaway diver, even if he isn't.

You would need to exceed both his speed and accelleration curve in order to overtake him enough to be able to grab his shoulder dump or inflator hose, giving you a much better chance of getting bent than the runaway diver.

OTOH, it's really hard to watch somone fly away.

Terry

 

[Damselfish]

sometimes things that go wrong get a disproportionate share of discussion. Kinda like the news.

 

[boulderjohn]

I once had a moment when I made a bad decision and then caught myself in time with a "what the heck were you thinking?" realization. If you were watching me and not thinking about the details of the dive, you would not have seen a problem.

So, in normal definition of terms, I have never had a problem. More than that, I have never even seen a significant problem, except for the time I saw the aftermath of dive on another boat in which a diver had a heart attack and they were giving CPR (he survived).

If you read Scubaboard enough, you will recognize that there are several frequent posters who seem to observe near death experiences on every dive they ever take. Maybe I am just blessed and lucky, but I don't believe them.

 

[lamont]

Given the time it takes to figure out that the other diver is in a runaway ascent, and his speed and accelleration rate, chances are excellent that you'll be bent by the time you reach the runaway diver, even if he isn't.

you've got some time before you are actually symptomatic and bent. divers doing dry deco take advantage of this, blow off a significant amount of deco, climb on board a ship and recompress in a dry chamber. pretty sure that you're going to run less of a risk on a recreational dive chasing after someone on a runaway ascent.

 

[Doc Harry]

Um, no, it's not possible.

I had a regulator blow with catastophic loss of gas at 70 feet on my 15th dive.

 

[KrisB]

If you need practice learning how to respond to any situation without panic, I would heartily recommend running sound (especially at weddings)

Been there... no kidding about learning to respond. As soon as you can run sound for a wedding without breaking a sweat, you can do anything without panic!

I chased him down and shared air with him, but did not get the ascent under control before we reached 6 feet. Everything turned out OK, but it was scary for the next day or so waiting to see if I was going to develop any DCS symptoms.

What happened to Rule #1 of your Rescue class -- don't make another victim!


I'm only at about dive #65, but the only "iffy" type stuff has been observed in other divers. Sometimes things cascade. Take my recent adventure in Maui. The DM had given Sudafed to a diver, as she had complained about trouble clearing on the first dive. So, for dive two, things went well... until the end. Take inexperienced (or at least nervous) divers, a reverse block that led to near OOA (she and her buddy descended again to try and get it to clear), no safety stop, then surfacing in a current, with the boat's tag line already out (and about 6' away from them). Result: near panic.

Yes, it was on the surface, but it was two divers that were close to panic, neither of whom had yet achieved positive buoyancy.

Thankfully, they were able to swim to me (I was on the tag line), then we were able to all get to the tag line... mightn't have been pretty otherwise!

 

[Azza]

I have a student try to kill me but I fixed that problem by becoming an independant Instructor

I once had a reg knocked of my tank valve at 33metres while wrestling with the biggest damn cray anyone has ever seen. I fixed that by switching to DIN and leaving the big boys alone

 

[Darnold9999]

Roughly 150 dives (didn't count the first 30 or so) 1 stupid that just left me brused and bleeding and watched someone else handle an OOA that could have been serious. By and large as long as you dive within your own abilities you will be fine, like everything else its when you push the envelope that bad things tend to happen.

The stupid was me being way too over confident and was a very good learning experience. Not panicing is everything IMHO.

The OOA was someone not taking responsibility for their own safety. "Oh look I'm running out of air, I'm sure the DM will come and fix this before the guage gets to 0, no need to worry" The worry came big time when the guage hit 0 at 30 feet. The look of panic is imbedded in my brain. Was also a good lesson - YOU are responsible for your own safety nobody else. IMHO your buddy is just someone packing around a possible extra gas supply. You may or may not have access to it. What's you plan if you don't. (Buddy may very well be more than that, but I prefer to plan for the worst and hope for the best.)