Ghetto Lift Bag

[PfcAJ]

Beats me, man. You don't see me bringin up stuff from the bottom of the ocean!

That said, it seems that bringing up something in a slow, controlled manner where you can oversee and influence as many variables as possible is an advantage to 'sending' something to the surface. At a minimum, you're not under it anymore. Also, if the bag/lifting arrangement fails somehow, you would see the problem and might have the ability to correct it or at least be aware of it before you surface.

One conceivable reason for needing to 'control' the operation is if you are moving a heavy object (anchor) to a better location. Perhaps you want to bring the heavy object up to a waiting boat, and just sending it up would mean said item would be taked away by the current?

I can definitely think of worse ideas than being in control of a liftbag. Seems ok to me?

 

[CT-Rich]

My concern of lift an object, of say 50 lb, from the bottom is that if it starts to come down it may be doing so in a return-to-sender manner... It would definately suck to have a bucket or sack breach, dump its gas and head back to the bottom. just like using a crane on land, the first rule should be to not be under it while it is going up, lest it decide to come back down. The downside is that with dive gear, limited visibility and mobility, seeing your treasure break lose and head towards your noggin is questionable. I think either making barely positive / negative avoid being under it while it rising is the safest approach. A line form the bag to the boat will make losing track of the object less likely. The people on the surface have to treat the lines on deck with the same respect.

 

[DaleC]

I can see the reasoning for not riding a large bag to the surface but I have often used my 50lb bag (which I keep bungied to my tank as an alternate BC) for lifting small anchors, props, weight belts etc... It has a dump valve but I find it far easier to just burp it from the bottom. If I can control the buoyancy of a wing and a drysuit I can also control a small liftbag.

The one caveat is that I do use it often and am quite familiar with its performance characteristics.

 

[SailNaked]

Some good advice from people that have done a lot of lifting, and some opinions from the people that read the forums, the OP was could you use a garbage bag as a ghetto lift bag, I would say no. you can not attach a line to it, stuffing it in a laundry bag will help but again you can easily put enough air in the bag to rip it clean off the attachments.

A real lift bag is hard enough to learn to lift stuff with, ask yourself what you are going to do if you fill your lift bag and your object does not move, now what? all that tension what to do? the release comes in real handy at that point.

I would not "ride" up with a small lift, no reason to and I like to come up slow. adding and dumping air in an unstable configuration is not my idea of fun.

I have used kegs with cut out tops to lift a boat the forces involved are more than a diver wants to be too close too.

Garbage bag = 13 gallons, for my kitchen, 13 x 8 =104# as a lifting force that is more than I would like to be close too with only a laundry bag attached. So no, a garbage bad is not a good ghetto lift device unless you are maybe lifting about 10-20#.

 

[rhwestfall]

What is the lift needed? What depth? Part of a recently completed MSD cert was to locate & retrieve an object. If the depth isn't "crazy", there are other options to consider. We brought up a 200# object from 30' using the float tube, and some ingenius rigging.....