Got Lost on a Dive

[Scuba-74]

There is an accepted way to do a weight check, and it's not a guessing game. At the end of your dive, have someone in the water watch you during this process. With 500 lbs in the tank, let out all the air from your BC and (without kicking) exhale, you should sink. Slowly. If you sink like a rock, take off 2 lbs and try it again.

It can be awful hard to do when you are floating next to a charter boat with everybody else waiting for you to come aboard and move on, and when your weight is tucked away on the belt or in the pockets of a rental BC. I personally wouldn't attempt to mess with any of it on the surface next to the boat.

 

[Steve_C]

Actually it is not hard. You can do the same thing during your safety stop. Just allow another pound or two. Thats what I do. If you are going to do it at the surface just be sure to tell the crew ahead of time what you are doing so they do not panic when you go back down. Of course you would not be right at the boat but out on the tag line assuming the boat has one and there is not a lot of current.

 

[Scuba-74]

But how can you remove two pounds of your weight (or your buddy's weight for that matter), especially from rental gear? Ask in the shop in advance to make sure they give you a 2 lb piece and put it in the easily accessible pocket or clip on the D ring?

 

[Steve_C]

But how can you remove two pounds of your weight (or your buddy's weight for that matter), especially from rental gear? Ask in the shop in advance to make sure they give you a 2 lb piece and put it in the easily accessible pocket or clip on the D ring?

I essentially always have integrated weights. Not a lot of waist and I hate weight belts. Also many boats carry some weights on board. And sometimes somebody does not do a second dive. So often possible to swap some weights on the boat. On some boats you grab some weights from a bucket. Grab early.

 

[stadevene]

I'm late to the party on this and you've gotten lots of good suggestions.

Regarding your question on how people get dives, it can be tough for some of us. In my world the closest diving is iglacier-feded lakes. Not something I'm interested in therefore our dives are all on vacations. The best experience is dive specific trips. We frequent a resort in Roatan where you do nothing but dive. Up to 4 a day and 20 in the week is doable. There are lots of shore or boat to shore dive opportunities which allow you to get lots of time to work on your skills without feeling like you're holding up a boatload of people.

We had a watershed moment on one of those trips years ago where we experimented with weight and discovered how much extra we had been carrying. The lady who runs the dive op on the resort is big into helping people drop weight and get neutral. She runs a little talk early on in the week and gives you tips and suggestions and is then available throughout the week for encouragement. To her, it comes from personal experience as she was overweighted when she was new and as a caretaker of the reef, she wants less divers to crash into it. That one trip way back when helped a ridiculous amount. I dropped about 6 lbs of lead and increased my bottom time a lot. I also learned more techniques on how to adjust my buoyancy and how to adjust trim. Little tips really helped as does experimenting.

The most important thing is you're conscious of your limitations and mistakes and are wanting to do something about it. I'm sure we've all seen divers who are clueless that they need to work on improving their skills. The divers like you who are cognizant and who have a desire to improve are the ones I want to dive with.

 

[USMC CPL.]

The reason the DM said you should have skipped the safety stop is that even in a mild current you could drift pretty far from the boat in three minutes. The best thing you could do when instabuddies swim faster than you is to relax, enjoy your dive and be at the ascent line with plenty of air. You are responsible for your own safety.

I made that mistake on the Ruby E in San Diego. Got caught up in the current dive buddy left and I did my safety stop and ended up a bit aways from the dive boat.

 

[Rred]

A standard brick (yes, a BRICK) costs less than a buck and weighs about five pounds. And in many places you can scrounge a used one from a demo site for free. On vacation, just go to the nearest hardware or masonry store and if you say you just need one brick, odds are they'll give you a damaged one for free.

So you take down one brick, that you've broken in half. Voila, you've got two 2-1/2# ecologically correct disposable weights. Take the two halves down with you, if you think you're overweighted, throw one away. If you're really sinking fast, throw both away. Remember that Alu80 will get buoyant as it gets empty.

Now, if a dive operator really wanted to make tip money, they'd offer to pass some 2# weights up and down to you while you hung off the stern to get your trim right. If that means asking your instabuddy to hang out for a minute while you get it right, BFD, they can hang for a few minutes.

Skipping the safety stop...Yeah, I can see that in 3 three minutes with a 3 knot current (on the strong side of typical) you could be 300 meters further away from the boat. That could be inconvenient, but if a safety stop really DOES help prevent deco hits...I think I'd rather drift 300 meters away, and not get bent.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

One of the things that popped into my head when the OP described swimming away from the anchor and not finding their way back was what I observed once while diving off Monterey. One of the people was diving solo, and he had this large reel with him, that he would tie off at different rocks as they went along. Now in order to do this for a meaningful dive, you are going to need a fair bit of line. I don't remember if they were a photographer or not, in which he wouldn't need that much. Viz was around 15 feet, so I can imagine that it would have been easily to get lost if you were focused primarily on taking pictures.

 

[gcarter]

One of the things that popped into my head when the OP described swimming away from the anchor and not finding their way back was what I observed once while diving off Monterey. One of the people was diving solo, and he had this large reel with him, that he would tie off at different rocks as they went along. Now in order to do this for a meaningful dive, you are going to need a fair bit of line. I don't remember if they were a photographer or not, in which he wouldn't need that much. Viz was around 15 feet, so I can imagine that it would have been easily to get lost if you were focused primarily on taking pictures.

I saw people doing the same while bug hunting off Cape Ann.

 

[gcarter]

A standard brick (yes, a BRICK) costs less than a buck and weighs about five pounds. And in many places you can scrounge a used one from a demo site for free. On vacation, just go to the nearest hardware or masonry store and if you say you just need one brick, odds are they'll give you a damaged one for free.

So you take down one brick, that you've broken in half. Voila, you've got two 2-1/2# ecologically correct disposable weights. Take the two halves down with you, if you think you're overweighted, throw one away. If you're really sinking fast, throw both away. Remember that Alu80 will get buoyant as it gets empty.

Now, if a dive operator really wanted to make tip money, they'd offer to pass some 2# weights up and down to you while you hung off the stern to get your trim right. If that means asking your instabuddy to hang out for a minute while you get it right, BFD, they can hang for a few minutes.

Skipping the safety stop...Yeah, I can see that in 3 three minutes with a 3 knot current (on the strong side of typical) you could be 300 meters further away from the boat. That could be inconvenient, but if a safety stop really DOES help prevent deco hits...I think I'd rather drift 300 meters away, and not get bent.

When it comes to buoyancy control, a 5lb brick does not equal 5lb of lead. Density is a very important factor in the usefulness of anything carried for weighting.

An explanation on how buoyancy works can be found here:

Buoyancy | Science Primer

Noted at the end of the article:

*In common language, weight and mass are used interchangeably. In physics, they have distinct meanings. Mass is the amount of matter, or ‘stuff’ in an object and this property is independent of where the object is located. The standard unit of mass is the kilogram. An object's weight is is a function of the force of gravity acting on its mass. This means that an object's weight will vary depending on where it is found. For example, the force of gravity on the moon is less than it is on the earth so an object with a fixed mass will weigh less on the moon than it will on the earth. Since weight is a force, it is best expressed in the derived unit, the Newton (1 N = 1 kg m / s2).