Equipment If you can't drop your weights and you are sinking

[CT-Rich]

BSAC did similar work on their incident reports and found cases where the casualty had surfaced, but subsequently went back down again. When found they still had their weights attached. BSAC training was modified, in the 2000s, to include the surface jettisoning of weights, on all divers grade courses. Thereby reminding Sports Divers, Dive Leaders, Advanced Divers and 1st Class what they were learned in Ocean Diver.

This is what I was taught 45 years ago. Buoyant ascents were also taught back then, but I was taught this was absolute last choice. In the OP’s scenario, ditching the student’s weight would not have made the situation worse, since she died on the bottom. Her getting bent or an embolism would still be better than dead on the bottom, or she might have continued to the surface and walked away completely Scot-free.

Even if the rescuing diver that tried to bring her up had muscled her off the bottom, there would be no guarantee she might not have slipped from his grasp and sunk back to the bottom and once the surface, she would still need to get to the exit point massively overweighted.

 

[boulderjohn]

But not on any recreational diving classes that I am aware of.

Disconnecting an inflator hose to prevent runaway BCD inflation is a required skill for OW divers in all WRSTC agencies, and it has been since before I became a diver back in the last millennium. Students are also required to demonstrate inflating the BCD orally. For PADI, they have to do it several times in the course.

 

[boulderjohn]

I thought I would make a couple of observations on the week of diving I just completed. I was with a dive operation that used HP 117s, and everyone I dived with that week was using those cylinders.

I was using an aluminum backplate, and I had never used that kind of cylinder before. It took me a day to realize that I didn't need any weight. Even on the dive where I got a short fill and got all the way down to 600 PSI at the end, I still had air in the wing at the end of the dive. (Our dives averaged about 83 minutes, with one of them 95 minutes.)

There were men about my size diving with my group that week. They were all experienced and skilled divers, but they all used at least 6 pounds of lead. One of them had 9 pounds. I am well aware that we are all a little different in terms of the need for weight, and I have known people who absolutely did need more weight than I would have expected, but, based upon my years of weighting students, I don't believe any of them needed as much as they used. That means that if they had an emergency such that they needed to drop their weights, they would have ended up in the same situation I was in on every dive.