Have You (or Your Buddy) Ever Run Out Of Air?

[dshorwich]

I've been in out of air situations twice in 20+ years of diving. Both situations were resolved without incident. I'll write them up separately, as they were rather different events:

The first time was very early in my diving career, dive #22. I was diving with my brother, who was a little more experienced diver than I was at the time, but only a little. Most of our diving to that point had been in DM-led groups, rather than as a buddy team. We were at a warm-water location, diving with a cattle boat operation and using their rental gear. One morning they gave me a reg that must have been poorly maintained, but I was too much the newbie to pick up on the problem.

So imagine my surprise when, just after our initial descent to about 65', my second stage literally fell to pieces, with the top half coming off. I didn't immediately know what had happened, just knew that I'd inhaled some water when I tried to take a breath. I tried purging my second stage, which of course didn't work (ever try purging the ocean?), then tried a couple more times before giving up on it and switching to my octo. For whatever reason, I couldn't get anything from the octo. I may well have put it in my mouth upside down.

At this point I was really wanting to, y'know, breathe, so rather than spend time trying to figure out what the hell was going on with the damn reg, I looked to my brother. The thought of a CESA flashed through my mind, but I was not sanguine about making the attempt from 65'.

To my brother's credit, he was there, ready; he'd seen that I was having some sort of issue, and was waiting to see if I could resolve it, or would need assistance. (I can think of an insta-buddy or two I've had over the years who would've already gone over the side of the ledge and down the wall we were planing to dive.) As I swam the short distance over to him I wasn't panicked, but I was feeling a certain sense of urgency, let us say; so I didn't give him an out-of-air signal, but rather pointed to the octo on his hip, with emphasis.

He handed over it swiftly, I took a welcome breath, we got ourselves settled and neutral, then looked at my second stage and saw that it had fallen apart. He pointed to my octo, asking what the problem was with it; I signaled that I didn't know, but wanted no part of it. So we ascended together, with me on his octo (intercepted along the way by one of the boat's DMs, to whom we showed my reg, then indicated we had the situation under control), got back on the boat, swapped out the reg, returned to the water, and completed the dive.

In the end the incident was a confidence-builder: even though I was a new diver, I'd gotten myself out of a potentially serious situation (with the help of an alert buddy) without incident. (True, technically speaking I wasn't actually out of air - there was plenty of air in my tank, but I couldn't get to it, with one second stage defunct, and the other apparently problematic.) The main lesson I took from this was: don't panic. If I'd panicked, things could've gone south in a hurry. It's not that I'm especially brave, I don't think; I was just too busy working the problem to have time to freak out.

I got myself a reg when I got home from that trip.

 

[clownfishsydney]

In 3,825 dives, no. Nor have I ever seen anyone run out of air who was diving at the same time as me. However, I dive regularly with the same divers, some for as long as 28 years.

 

[KeithG]

no. never been close.

 

[scagrotto]

I came very close on my 3rd dive after getting certified. Since I didn't have other convenient options for more diving I went ahead and took AOW immediately after, so it was #3 of the AOW course. We were at a certain popular quarry in eastern Pennsylvania, and it was my first night dive. As I recall the plan was to see a few attractions as we worked deeper, to a max depth of 70', and from there we would follow lines to other features at shallower depths. All went well until we had worked our way back up to something at 50', and followed a line that the instructor thought lead to something closer to shore and a bit shallower. Unfortunately the line lead to something deeper, and for some reason we didn't abort and turn back soon enough. We managed to get back down to 70', at which point I was quite low. It would have been better if I had taken the instructor's octo, but I was rather fixated on the abundant air I knew could be found at the surface, so I gave an emphatic thumbs up and headed up the line as quickly as my computer allowed without squawking. When I got to the surface there wasn't an overly obvious gap between the needle and the peg, although I never noticed the reg offering any resistance. Having ended well, I figure it was a useful lesson.

It's weird to me when people say they're willing to share air to extend a dive. I would never do it as I personally find it risky.

If you do it at depth after one of you is down to 500psi I'd agree, but when I've done it we both have enough that it's not time to end the dive yet. I would assume that others who share air to extend the dive also do it early. Even if you're not regular buddies that know who usually runs low first you should figure out fairly early who's the limiting factor fairly early on. As long as you both have enough air it has the same risk as doing the air sharing drill that you should be practicing anyway.

1. Just before going in, breath off your reg and check SPG at same time for falling pressure

That's one of my rules, too. Sometimes being anal about things is good.

 

[Diving Dubai]

I've never been OOA nor seen anyone OOA in 300+ dives. BUT....

Last year I felt as I was OOA. I have a wet breath through my reg. I did a quick exhale and carried on except no air!
I was carrying a pony so spat out my main, put in my pony reg and.. Still NO air - or rather I wasn't breathing anything in.

A look at both of my SPG's showed I had 130 bar in my main and 200 in the pony - so plenty of air in the tanks.

My buddy (wife) was close but I wasn't going to faff and headed for the surface (we were at 22m).

I can still remember the sensations. your lungs are trying to breath but you have nothing. In my case there was no panic. the best way I can describe my mind was to imagine reading 4 columns of text simultaneously on a page and they all making sense. So 4 differnt thought going through my head

Why no air
What a stupid way to die
The surface is a long way away
WHY NO AIR!

At 10 m I could suddenly breath, my wife who'd followed my wondering why I'd finned off upward in a hurry caught me as I was clearing my mask - my huge exhale had flooded it.

It appears that water from the wet breath had gone down my throat and caused my epiglottis to spasm shut. Not great

Anyway I signal i was Okay (what more to say) and we continued the dive albeit shallower for 20mins.

According to my PDC the ascent with 2 warnings too 50 seconds So I guess less than 1 minute. I can tell you that the finning upwards seemed a lot longer. I guess I would have surfaced within 2 mins. Not great for the health but at least I would have been on the surface.

So not OOA but I certainly know what it feels like.

as A PS it was the last dive of the trip. The 1st and second stage (Aqualung LX) are in my garage not used to this day, I went out and brought a New Aqualung LX supreme to complement my other reg. One day I'll take it to my LDS for a check to see what happened.

 

[KenGordon]

Here are some statistics and commentary from an analysis of the annual BSAC Incident Reports by someone with access to the raw reports. Note that there is certainly severe under reporting but all the incidents with very bad outcomes are there.

It is quite sobering.

"From 2006 to 2015 inclusive there were 173 OOG incidents.
21 were fatal
159 involved recreational diving
14 involved technical diving (I used a broad definition for this)
34 involved divers under instruction
96 involved single cylinder divers
45 involved single cylinder + Pony
19 involved twinsets
39 involved Alternative Take of which 9 (23%) failed
47 involved Alternative Donate of which 15 (32%) failed
2 involved Primary Take. Non failed
7 involved Primary Donate of which 2 failed (29%)
81 involved no successful action to provide emergency gas
(This category included panic ascents to the surface)

It is clear to me from looking at each incident in detail that the most likely individual to experience an OOG event is an inexperienced diver, possibly under instruction, in cold water and diving with a single cylinder or single and pony.
Many were the result of a regulator free flow.
It is worrying that many of these incidents did not involve a successful provision of emergency gas.
It was also of concern that a significant number of attempts to provide emergency gas were not successful.
Common factors were panic ascents to the surface, some after failed attempts to access emergency gas, many where no attempt to access emergency gas took place.
There were a few really silly ones such as people descending on their pony cylinder and failing to realise it. Dilineation of regulators an issue. One twinset diver descended with his isolator valve closed, breathed down one tank to empty then bolted for the surface.
Cold water aspiration is an issue. Once an OOG diver has inspired some cold water the airway spasms and closes. At this point the casualty is unable to breathe emergency gas if it is available."

 

[divad]

No.

 

[dmaziuk]

It appears that water from the wet breath had gone down my throat and caused my epiglottis to spasm shut. Not great

Pretty scary, actually: makes you wonder if you do emergency ascent, will it open when air in your lungs expands, or will you surface with AGE. And if you don't, will it relax away before you black out and let go of the reg or after.

 

[DogDiver]

Been diving for 50 years and have never run out of air. Nor has anyone diving with me run out of air.
With that said, I've been in proximity to divers running out of air. Simply diver not paying attention.

 

[dshorwich]

The second (and hopefully last) time I found myself in an out of air situation, it was entirely my own fault. I still think about this incident fairly often, to remind myself how I got myself into that predicament, and to review what I could've/should've done differently. The short version of the story is, "I got careless". The longer version provides a useful illustration of how several small factors can combine to create a situation that could've been avoided, so here goes.

This happened while doing a survey dive with Reef Check California. For those not familiar with central/north California diving, it's a cold-water, low-viz environment. We conduct our surveys by laying out a 30-meter transect line (using a track-and-field measuring tape), tying the loose end of the tape off to a giant kelp plant, and securing the reel in a rocky crevice. We then do our surveys along this line, in a 'box' 1m to each side of the tape and 2m above it. We do several different kinds of surveys: fish, invertebrates, and algae, as well as a terrain description survey.

A few more relevant facts: all our surveys are conducted at 60' or shallower. A given buddy team will typically have 30-45 minutes of work to do on a dive. During some kinds of surveys, there will periods of buddy separation, e.g. one diver is on one part of the line surveying inverts, the other is on another part doing algae. (The fact of the matter is that a diver in the midst of a survey is pretty much useless as a buddy - worse than a photographer.)

So one day several years ago, I was on a boat in the Monterey Bay area for a survey. As is often the case on Reef Check surveys, I was diving with a new-to-me buddy; an experienced diver, but new to the Reef Check program. In the course of our pre-dive planning conversation, she let me know that she needed to descend super-slowly in order to equalize, and that it would take her several minutes to descend. She suggested that I could wait at the surface several minutes while she began her descent, then follow her bubbles down and meet her at the bottom.

I said, nah, that's OK, I'll just go down and wait for you - I figured I'd get in a few minutes of looking around before starting in on the survey work. So that's what we did, I went down first and poked around for about 5 minutes before she joined up with me.

We had a number of teams spread out over different parts of our survey site (a full site survey consists of 36 individual surveys, in an area about the size of a football field), and we were on the deeper end of the site. We were looking for the 55' contour line to start our survey, but where we descended the bottom was at abouy 70', so we needed to get shallower. We swam off in the direction we thought would take us shallower, but neither of us was well-acquainted with the somewhat irregular topography of the site, and after a few minutes of swimming we weren't getting any shallower, so we tried a different course.

After a few more minutes we'd reached the low 60s depths, and I decided that was going to have to do, as we'd had been swimming around at 65-70' for some time now, and hadn't yet gotten started on our work. So I tied off the tape and started in on the fish survey, with my buddy trailing behind, doing one of the other types of survey. We fairly soon became separated, as expected; our plan was to meet up at the reel after we'd both finished our work.

After 15-20 minutes I was done with my work, and at the reel, so I began my wait. I checked my gauge, and found that I was significantly lower than I expected or wanted to be - I don't remember the exact number, but it was surely below 1000 psi, perhaps already down to 750 (I was diving an AL 80). "Aw, heck," I said to myself (or words to that effect), "guess I'm going to have to skip a safety stop."

Now, what I certainly should have done at this point was swim up the line, find my buddy, let her know I was getting low, and ask her if she would mind terribly finishing up by herself and reeling up the tape, 'cause I was going to need to head for the surface soon.

Why didn't I? Well, there was one last factor at work: the water was decently cold that day (50F), and I dive wet. And while wetsuit compression doesn't make much difference in warm-water diving, I most definitely feel the difference between 30' and 60' when diving at home.

So by the time I'd finished my survey work, I'd gotten substantially cold, which had two effects: my breathing rate went to hell, and I went into a kind of mental shutdown. I kept thinking, "surely she'll show up soon, I just need to gut it out a little longer." But as mentioned, she was new to survey work, and new surveyors often work slowly, as I did when I was new to it. I don't know exactly how long I waited; no doubt it seemed longer than it actually was.

As best I can remember, and here's a real sign of mental shutdown, I didn't check my gauge again while I was waiting. I think I was in a kind of denial. Ego may have played a part, too - I didn't want to admit to myself that I'd gotten myself into this situation. And when my buddy appeared out of the murk, I failed to let her know I was low. Duh.

So I started reeling up the line, and it was about halfway reeled up when I felt that pulllllllll on the reg. "Oh, darn," I said to myself (or words to that effect), "now I've gone and drained my tank." I wasn't panicked - I was pissed at myself, and mortified, in equal measure. I swam over to my buddy and gave her the 'out of air' signal. She hesitated for a split second - later, on the boat, she told me her first thought was, "Why is he giving me the out of air signal? I'm not out of air." - but then quickly gave me the reg in her mouth & switched to her bungeed backup (while I certainly made some mistakes on this dive, we did at least have a proper buddy conversation on the boat, so this went smoothly enough). We might have then checked her gauge & considered whether she had enough left for us to make a safety stop together, but instead we just headed up. I discarded the reel.

For those of you still reading, I'll summarize how I managed to screw up:

1) spent some minutes toodling around at the start of the dive rather than following my buddy down, as she'd suggested;

2) spent several minutes looking for our depth contour, which we never found;

3) was diving a little deeper than I usually do in home waters, and didn't take that sufficiently into account;

4) went into brainlock after I passed a certain point of chilliness. I mean, while I was waiting I might have at least ascended 10-15' to slow my consumption rate some, but I wasn't even able to come up with that solution.

*****

So, two out-of-air situations; one gear failure, one mental failure. Both provided useful lessons, in their different ways.