Keeping up with Buddy in Low Visibility

[sdorn]

Sorry about the long story up front.

I had an interesting dive this weekend with my fiance. We got certified together about 6 weeks ago, and this was our 9th dive. We went to ABWA in Pelham, Alabama. We started off from the dock with the intention of making an arc past a few things they have on the bottom to look at that were supposed to be in around 60' to 65' of water, and then we were going to turn around and return along the same path, as the water gets deeper if you continue to follow it around along the wall back to the dock.

We start going down and get to 60' and the bottom still isn't in sight. Visibility is no more than 10' or so. I stop my fiance and we attempt to continue on but maintain a depth of between 55' and 60'. Soon we were out in completely open water where we couldn't see the bottom or anything else for that matter. In order to stay together, I was holding her hand with my right hand, and holding my compass with the left. I couldn't keep us in a straight line because of the fact that I was holding her hand and that kept pulling me off course. We ended up going in circles and got completely lost. In our attempts to move forward, we had descended to around 65'. We were down for a total of maybe 8 or 9 minutes at this point, and decided we needed to surface since we didn't know where we were and were not having a good time at all completely lost with nothing to look at.

We slowly surfaced while I watched my computer and kept an eye on our ascent rate. We did just fine until the last 20' or so, then we ascended faster than I wanted and there didn't seem to be anything we could do about it. We still weren't shooting to the surface or anything like that, but faster than the computer wanted us to go.

We get to the surface and figure out where we are. We took a new heading and decided to try and find our way again. We went back down and went straight to the bottom at 70'. I didn't intend to go that deep, but we ended up dropping faster than I wanted and I was more focused on keeping track of her than how deep we were. We did find one of the boats we were looking for when we got all the way down, which we went ahead and looked at while we were there. Then we tried to ascend back to 50' and continue on the heading we had picked at the surface. It didn't take long before we were going in circles again with me holding her hand so we didn't get separated.

We finally gave up, surfaced again (we were lost again), and headed back to the dock. At this point we were down to around 900psi of air and had a total bottom time of about 29 minutes. We were both so frustrated we didn't do anymore dives that day, even though we had driven 2.5 hours to get there.

So my question is how do you keep up with a buddy in low visibility without holding on to them, and if you do hold on to them how do you swim in a straight line? Would it make sense to tie a line or bungee or something to each other's BCs? One that could be removed easily at either end in the event of tangling?

 

[vjanelle]

Dive lights can help, but in vis that bad the only thing you can hope to do is to swim under it.

Once you've reached the surface, especially with a fast ascent you probably shouldn't bounce back down to 70' in the future. If conditions are that bad just abort the dive, it's not worth the stress and possible DCS. Pick another site or practice your skills.

Were you in a dry suit? It sounds like you weren't venting your bcd/suit(33' is about where this starts becoming more noticable). Your wet suit will also start having more positive buoyancy at this point.

Once you get to your desired depth, you can use your dead spaces to keep there... Ie if you feel the urge to equalize, you're going too deep.

 

[muddiver]

It appears that you (you and your buddy) did not make it clear who was the dive leader. It's called a dive TEAM, and as such one diver is in charge.

Then the second diver of the team is supposed to follow the lead of the lead diver. Your fiance obviously was not doing that. Makes for a lot of circular swimming.

For low vizability, in my NAUI advanced course through the local college, we made a short rope with loops on each end for the dive team to hold on to between each other. It kind of works.

Just don't clip or tie yourselves together in any way. That would not be safe.

 

[Crush]

So my question is how do you keep up with a buddy in low visibility without holding on to them, and if you do hold on to them how do you swim in a straight line? Would it make sense to tie a line or bungee or something to each other's BCs? One that could be removed easily at either end in the event of tangling?

1. You can both hold on to a short length of rope - say, four feet long. Do not tie the rope to yourselves - just hang on to it; or
2. Get your buddy to hold on to you while you navigate. I would suggest using a compass with/on your left arm, and your buddy stays with you by gently holding on to your right elbow (I can go into details on why the side preference if you wish).

It it pretty tough to navigate in a straight line in poor visibility. Navigation will be your job. Your buddy's job will be to stick with you and not impede you, plus look around for the bottom, etc..

 

[ae3753]

Thanks for sharing your story.

Low visibility stresses your basic diving skills - ascents, descents, buoyancy, navigation, team communication, and team awareness. Focus on being comfortable and confident in your essential skills and you'll find that low visibility diving does not need to be frustrating.

Avoid using of line or bungee to connect oneself as it's unnecessary. In addition, entanglement in low visibility situation can easily turn into an entanglement in a no visibility situation. And that is definitely no fun.

The best equipment for low visibility diving is a dive light. Diving lights facilitates communication and insures that the team remains together. In fact, dive lights are so helpful in team communication, some of us carry dive lights on all our dives.

In low visibility, it's often best to swim shoulder to shoulder. If it's really bad, then touch contact is great, but you shouldn't be guiding/steering through the touch contact. Instead, agree on a direction, both divers swim the direction, and the touch contact is used for communication (stop, go, emergency, separated, etc) only.

Good luck.

 

[sdorn]

It appears that you (you and your buddy) did not make it clear who was the dive leader. It's called a dive TEAM, and as such one diver is in charge.

We weren't trying to swim in different directions. I was just holding on to her so we wouldn't get separated. She was following me, but because I was holding on to her it was constantly turning us both.

The rope idea is good, one that we can both hold on to so we don't get separated, but leave some slack in so that it wouldn't make us go in circles.

I have a feeling we'll be sticking to better visibility conditions for the time being. Our next dive trip is to Key West, so hopefully that will be better.

To answer another question, we were in wet suits (3mm with hoods and gloves).

 

[ae3753]

The rope idea is good, one that we can both hold on to so we don't get separated, but leave some slack in so that it wouldn't make us go in circles.

A rope is a bad idea.

Absolutely not necessary, especially in the conditions that you describe.

Learn to be attentive and thoughtful buddies, and this will be better for your diving in low viz or great viz situations.

 

[Gombessa]

I'll just add that this kind of occurrence is COMPLETELY NORMAL for many newly certified divers. As you dive more and gain more control over your descent and ascent skills, and the finer-tuned sense of maintaining your buoyancy, you'll be able to stay together more easily, without having to hold onto each other.

I'd suggest for your first few dives not to do a free descent down to 50-70ft depth. Instead, if possible, start shallow, like 15ft, and work your way deeper. If you're near a beach/shore, you can use natural navigation to help out (deeper means you're heading away from shore, shallower means nearer to shore) instead of looking for some dock that will disappear as soon as you're 10-20ft away from it.

If you and your fiance can find a local diver who has experience with that site, I'm sure they would be able to show you a few safe, mellow dives to get your bearings until you feel a bit more confident striking out on your own.

Best of luck!

 

[TSandM]

I know there are folks on this board who routinely dive in conditions where I would go home and go out to lunch, but if you are close enough together that you are kicking and bumping into one another and you STILL can't see each other, why are you there?

Don and Kenn have a great idea with the dive lights. A bright, focused light can be seen a lot further than a dark lump of diver, or even bubbles. It is also right that one person should lead, and it is the responsibility of the other person to stay with the leader. You really CAN follow from a shoulder-to-shoulder position, and that way, all either of you has to do is turn his or her head a little to see the other.

Very low viz is a challenge. You have to stay close to the bottom to see it, which means you're likely to kick it up and reduce your viz even more. It takes discipline to stay together, AND buoyancy control (sounds like you guys either weren't anticipating the rapid buoyancy changes in the shallows, or may even have been a bit underweighted).

One word of warning -- don't let the clear water on your trip trick you into getting too far apart. 20 feet is still a darned long swim to do if you are out of gas.

 

[cwhitpan]

Wow, how much that sounds like my wife's and myself's first dive after getting certified. (Granted it was a quarry, so no hope of getting "lost" too bad.

Our first dive was almost identical to yours in how we were struggling to stay together, we tried holding hands, and all, but I was so worried about losing her, I couldn't do that and navigate effectively.

What we found that worked on our second dive that day was to communicate, not just who is leading, but where you want your buddy, so you always know where to look. We also found that if I hold the compass with my left hand and right (in the cross pattern from the manual) she just held onto my elbow, and she managed our depth. She would push up on my elbow, or pull down on my arm to direct me. This took a lot of the stress out of the dive and we ended up having a very good dive. (Aside from following a wrong line in the quarry! haha)

Hope that helps!