I f*** up and I am ashamed

[Dody]

How can that be? It would be covered in your OW course so you avoid an uncontrolled ascent.

Honestly. You have many many more dives than me but do you really care about uncontrolled ascent? It should never happen once you know your stuff. Faulty LPI, lost weight belt or upcurrents are the only instances I would worry about runaway ascent. I agree that an easy reply would be that I don’t know my stuff… yet.

 

[Dody]

Please understand that I only started diving last november and that I have been diving almost every week since. I am very comfortable under water and diving is now like normal life for me after 77 dives (don’t you dare laughing!). I am usually very safe. I have been on almost all the courses I could. I have read all the DAN material I could get including accidents and near misses. But I am human. And humans make mistakes. If sharing my experience helps someone, I will be happy. I don’t mind being criticized. It mens that I am still alive .

 

[rongoodman]

My personal rule of thumb, and this is just me, is after doing a few dives where I've had no trouble being underweighted, and my tank is down around 500 PSI and I've finished a 15-minute safety stop, at what's likely to be my lightest point in the dive, lift my inflator up and hit the button to release air from my BCD (BP/W wing now). If a small amount escapes, okay. If a substantial amount of gas escapes, and I sink quickly...I may be overweighted.

Other divers may have better 'tricks' for determining their weighting, and I make no claims to be good at it. I like to think mine is logical and conceptually simple (i.e.: easy enough for me to do).

If you're using a wing all you have to go a little head down and reach back to feel how much air is there. If if it's more that a fistful or so, drop a pound or so and check again on the next dive.

 

[Raphus]

I hold my safety stop at 5m (not 3) so I thought it was OK. Even though, I am very careful once I reach 10m. I ascend very very slow, my eyes on the DC. I now know that it was stupid even though this incident would not have happened if I had not lost control of my depth.

I mean a deco stop. Which is usually done(the last stop) at 3m. You are not planning to go into deco, but it can happen(entanglement, an emergency, or whatever). So I would always weigth myself to be able to hold a 3m stop.

Personally I weigth myself so I am neutral at 0.5m.


I(and others) told you months ago, that you are not properly weighted, after you described how you weighted yourself.
Maybe you will beleave us now.

The 10m distance to your wife is too much.
In low vis I can always touch my buddy and in good vis I should be able to reach my buddy with 1 strong kick. So like maximum 2m distance. If something happens you need to much time to travel the 10m.especially if you buddy swims in the other direction, or worse bolts to the surface.

 

[Blackcrusader]

Of course I care about an uncontrolled ascent. I've seen it happen when a diver has lost a weight or a weight belt. I dive with extra weights and on many occasions I have had to give a weight to an under weighted diver especially at end of dives when they cannot maintain their safety stop depth. Their claim was they were ok at the beginning of the dive. You were not ok even at beginning of the dive and struggled to descend. You need to add more weight and stop with the being underweighted so much you could not control your depth on your dive in shallow water. Add more weight then use your BCD if you need to. That's what it is for.

I think now you understand being underweighted can be dangerous.

 

[The Chairman]

We love this any recommendations, contacts, where to start?

On the forum;

@kensuf
@Capt Jim Wyatt​

There are many more not on the forum or I'm forgetting about...

 

[Raphus]

But diving underweighted is a big mistake that I was never warned of.

Like I said in the post above.. We had a whole discussion about this topic, some. Months ago. But you didn't listen. You were warned.

 

[Centrals]

Thank you for your post. I will show it to my wife. A couple of weeks ago, she came to me while we were at 35 meters asking why her DC alarm was on. We were at 5min NDL. I signaled her that it was OK and that we just needed to ascend a bit. Instead, she stayed watching an octopus. I grabbed her valve and went to 20 m where the NDL was like 15 minutes. After the dive, I told her that she was narced but she said no. Oblivious.

Did you ask her why she raised the question, the alarm, in the beginning? Only two reasons:
1. She does not understand the reason.
2. Narcosis.
You should had given her the ascent signal instead of OK in a situation like that.

I agree. However, the problem is that as you get more and more experienced, you become sloppy. You dive like you walk at the surface. You believe that because you have properly checked your equipment, nothing foul can happen to you. You forget that you are underwater. I am perfectly aware of that and that's why I don't want to do tec diving. But this event showed me that even as a rec diver, I am not in full control.

Not every "experienced" diver have this kind of mentality. It is all down to individual.

 

[Blackcrusader]

Like I said in the post above.. We had a whole discussion about this topic, some. Months ago. But you didn't listen. You were warned.

Yes, and some questioned why I dive with extra weights on my vacation dives.

 

[boulderjohn]

I've read elsewhere that over the course of a typical dive using a standard AL 80 tank, one may lose about 4-lbs. in weight due to compressed air usage.

It obviously depends upon how much you lose. Empty a full tank and you will lose nearly 6 pounds.