Leaving expensive equipment down.

[DevonDiver]

So, what you're looking for is basically an automatic life jacket like you'd find in a plane that inflates by an adjustable hydrostatic pressure sensor? It's a cool idea... maybe you could find a company to sell it to....

How reliable are such things? If it was attached to a camera... which was then attached to a diver... and it malfunctioned/inflated...it could lead to an uncontrolled ascent.

I used to have a DSMB that fitted with CO2 gas canisters for emergency deployment. I stopped using it, because it always felt like a 'time-bomb' in my pocket.

 

[herbdb]

I don't think something sized to make a camera housing positive would have a lot of impact on buoyancy, but that is a factor I did not consider.

 

[dumpsterDiver]

So, what you're looking for is basically an automatic life jacket like you'd find in a plane that inflates by an adjustable hydrostatic pressure sensor? It's a cool idea... maybe you could find a company to sell it to....

They already make them. they are on the market. The Freedivers Recovery Vest; A device to assist those who suffer freediver blackout (shallow water blackout) by bringing them to the surface

 

[oceanbound]

having learned this lesson the hard way (and expensively) I always have my camera clipped to me. I am not comfortable either with crew handing my camera to me or taking it from me on the steps. It is secured to my BC when I dive now. Experience is the best teacher, although pretty harsh when you loose a $1500 set up.

 

[herbdb]

The problem with leaving it clipped is a giant stride entry puts a lot of sudden stress on the housing, generally something to be avoided. From personal experience I can tell you it will also play havoc with strobe cables.

 

[Dwndiver7]

I was spearing in 30fsw in the bay (muck bottom). Rare day, vis was 15ft. I pulled the spear on my first shot into a gag grouper. This caused all the other gags to scurry off. Which silted up the bottom 5ft pretty bad. Made it impossible to see any grouper. I got a bead on a nice sheepie, so I took the shot. I'm at the top of the wreck, attempting to knife the sheepie. I look just over my hands and no SH@# a 30" gag is just hovering in front of me watching what I'm doing. I release the sheepie and trying to remain calm, I untangle my shock cord from my spare shaft. I proceed to load my main shaft and secure the shock cord. My last move in this task is to slide my hand all the way to the spear tip to check if the floppers are in or out. "No floppers... no tip either!" The sheepie had spun around so much , it unscrewed the tip. The bottom was so mucked up, I didn't even bother.

Now had this been my powerhead, ($150 vs $25) I would have exhausted all the gas we had available searching for it. But, this was only 30fsw.

 

[EastEndDiver]

Insurance for camera gear....it's worth the investment.

In reference to Devon Divers concern about a co2 inflation system, we used to dive with them back in the old days on the Horse Collar BC's.Some people took out the "live" cartridge and replaced it with a used one so the hole was plugged others like myself used a "live" cartridge with no accidental firing.If I remember correctly at depth 100+ feet I don't think if the co2 was fired it had much effect on buoyancy,it came into play as you rose to shallower depths.It was a long time ago so my memory could be a little foggy.

 

[oceanbound]

Insurance for camera gear with DAN isn't all it's cracked up to be. In their policy (which when I was using it was H2)) it says they will not compensate for items lost while in the divers care. So that camera wasn't covered. They don't cover if camera goes over board, or if you loose it while diving. I know this from experience. Second insurance lesson: If flooded they have a deductible. From experience mine was $250. Just food for thought on the insurance.

 

[CuNanoTube]

Well, I have a "funny" story actually. Funny in the sense that if one looks back at it you can laugh at the involved party's decision making process.
Note: I did not witness this but it was explained many many time to me (and the rest of the club).

Some of the divers in our local club were out on a member's boat diving a wreck in Toronto harbour called "The Davies". It sits at about 44m. The guys went down, had a short dive and then came back up like usual. Since it is a small boat they all clipped their gear to lines. One of the members did not clip well enough, his gear (BCD with integrated weight, computer, tanks, regs, light...) came off and headed right for the bottom. He started freaking out. After a 10 minute SI he went back down with another member in borrowed gear to grab his stuff. They had less then 5 minutes of bottom time left, but managed to find the gear. Since neither of them though to take a line down they inflated the BCD (still negative) and began hauling it up. Soon the guy that lost his gear free-flowed from the high air demand in the cold water. They lost vis and began a much quicker than intended ascent. After breaching both guys hit the anchor line and stayed there at 15' for as long as their air lasted as a precaution. No one was hurt fortunately, but it could have gone worse.

 

[Searcaigh]

I have been thinking about a small BC for my camera housing for years after two incidents of lost housings, but would probably not have helped these circumstances of a lost housing.

In the latter years when I lived in Jeddah, the boat we used was owned by one of my friends, and the practice was to hang the camera housings on 5M lines allowing us to go back to the boat and change housings (or cameras as initially I had two Nikonos Vs) without surfacing. This is of course back in the "film" days when the number of shots was restricted to 36-38 depending on how tight you loaded the film into the camera.

We had a favourite spot on Tower Reef, which was great for multilevel diving. We also had a submerged mooring that we had installed and shared with some other "friendly" boats.

On one dive I came back to the boat to find that the owner had lost one of his housings from a line that now only held an arm with a strobe which was not connected as it was used on slave mode.

A plan was made, and fortunately we were three reasonably experienced divers with probably more than 3,000 dives between us.

The housing was a metal one with an Nikon F4 inside an Aquatica Housing and a humongous Ikelite Strobe, so there was only one way it had gone .... straight down!

We dropped a line overboard with a 5L pony attached to it as a weight figuring that it would lead to the housing.

We also hung a 12L bottle with a reg attached on a 5M line for a prolonged safety / deco stop

The owner of the boat and one of the other divers then made the descent to recover the camera after a 1 hour SI.

Fortunately this was successful, and the housing was recovered from 72M, the pony bottle was sitting next to it in fact.

A week later the exact same thing happened to my F3 in a Tussey housing in the exact same spot! In my case, use of a "suicide" clip on the line, which had managed to unclip. Now it was my turn to repeat what we had done the week before

Changed the clip after that incident.