Girl Scout saves panicked diver

[Dan]

Question to drysuit divers:
If you are diving solo and got inverted due to the ankle weight fell off or air got malditributed to your ankles, what would you do to fix it?

 

[DandyDon]

I heard about some air in some drysuit could be maldistributed to the legs and some divers had drowned because of that. For that reason, they put ankle weights.

That's one of the issues they taught us about at DUI drysuit field days and how to get out of them. This was just Discover Dry diving, but I remember it happening to me and how I inverted easily.

 

[Vicko]

Question to drysuit divers:
If you are diving solo and got inverted due to the ankle weight fell off or air got malditributed to your ankles, what would you do to fix it?

Tuck and roll?

 

[Marie13]

Question to drysuit divers:
If you are diving solo and got inverted due to the ankle weight fell off or air got malditributed to your ankles, what would you do to fix it?

You shouldn’t be diving regularly with ankle weights. If your feet are light, then heavier fins. Gaiters that wrap around your lower legs also help keep too much air from getting into your feet.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

Question to drysuit divers:
If you are diving solo and got inverted due to the ankle weight fell off or air got malditributed to your ankles, what would you do to fix it?

Tuck and roll. Simple. Or if using a down line, grab the line and use it to get turned around. Also, if you are using the suit properly, there should not be so much air in it that managing getting inverted is an issue. I have never used ankle weights. I've used gaiters but now find them unnecessary. If you're using the suit for exposure protection and the BC for buoyancy, there should not be an unmanageable amount of air in the suit to start with.

 

[BoundForElsewhere]

Most of us would have been doing shots after an experience like that.

Congratulations to the young woman and her parents. I think I'd buy my daughter a billboard on the side of the highway if she managed something like that. Good on you, Paige.

 

[BRT]

Question to drysuit divers:
If you are diving solo and got inverted due to the ankle weight fell off or air got malditributed to your ankles, what would you do to fix it?

Tuck knees up tight and rotate arms at your sides.

 

[BlueTrin]

Question to drysuit divers:
If you are diving solo and got inverted due to the ankle weight fell off or air got malditributed to your ankles, what would you do to fix it?

When you do a drysuit class they teach you to do a roll. Something like this:



Personally I found that with more experience you can feel better when you start being floaty in the legs and deal with it before it is uncontrollable. When I started, I didn’t notice as much the changes of trim/buoyancy and reacted often too late. (If you are only slightly floaty, you just need to go a bit heads up and extend your legs to bring back the gas into the upper body)

Also, from my experience, if you use the BCD for buoyancy instead of the drysuit, the air bubble (in the suit) is much smaller so it is much less of an issue, because it won’t get as floaty.

 

[yle]

Question to drysuit divers:
If you are diving solo and got inverted due to the ankle weight fell off or air got malditributed to your ankles, what would you do to fix it?

Get proper training on how to use a drysuit before trying to use one on your own, especially if you're not particularly adept at figuring these things out on your own. Some people scoff at classes like "drysuit diver", but as this story illustrates, they exist for a reason.

And I'm pretty sure those classes do NOT teach students to ditch their BCD if they are inverted.

 

[Edward3c]

I heard about some air in some drysuit could be maldistributed to the legs and some divers had drowned because of that. For that reason, they put ankle weights.

Then there was another drowning accident went the ankle weight fell off. I’ll try to find the article, if anyone else couldn’t find it sooner.

Wearing ankle weight won't make any difference when inverted because air is in the legs. Proper drysuit instruction teaches how to get out of a surface inversion. The wearing of ankle weight gives a false sense of security.