minimum weight in belt

[BabyDuck]

remember you're reading in the dir forum. the team is part of the planning. 'doing it right' is a specific process.

 

[Soggy]

Interesting signature you have..
"If somethings wort doing, its wort doing it right"
Not planning for worst case scenarios, from my point of view, is NOT doing it right, its doing it half assed..
You think the army train for running over and capturing POWs or you think they train for running over and taking a bunch of psychos?

Ok...you tell us. How many simultaneous failures do you think it is reasonable to expect on a given dive?

Did you also lose your buddy while you simultaneously overweighted yourself with unditchable weight and put such a hole in your drysuit and wing that they can't hold any gas, and your lift bag disappeared?

When you drive down the highway, do you have redundant brake pedals and cables, two engines, and 4 spare tires? I mean, you could have 4 flats simultaneously. It's possible.

Please, tell us, in your incredible mass of dive experience, what the right way to do things is?

 

[S. starfish]

The "minimal" amount of minimal ditchable weight really depends on your configuration. Just remeber that the more weight you ditch (or accidentaly lose) while under the faster you're going to be comming up.
You should be fine with 5-8 lbs ditchable - you'll find that a lot of people choose to dive with no ditchable weight at all, weighting themselves so that in case of an all out failure they can swim for the surface. You'll also find that moving weight from the belt to your plates really helps out with trim.

 

[Dan Gibson]

It appears to be somewhere between 0 and 24

Please, tell us, in your incredible mass of dive experience, what the right way to do things is?

 

[Tigerman]

Ok...you tell us. How many simultaneous failures do you think it is reasonable to expect on a given dive?

Did you also lose your buddy while you simultaneously overweighted yourself with unditchable weight and put such a hole in your drysuit and wing that they can't hold any gas, and your lift bag disappeared?

When you drive down the highway, do you have redundant brake pedals and cables, two engines, and 4 spare tires? I mean, you could have 4 flats simultaneously. It's possible.

Please, tell us, in your incredible mass of dive experience, what the right way to do things is?

You know.. planning ahead dosnt apply only to diving..

As for 4 flats.. yep, ive actually seen that happen..
Ive actually seen 6 flats as well, but that was an armored personell vehicle. The antenna that should be tied down came loose and hit the 300k volt powerlines coming straight out of the powerplant. The radio operator got shocked and 6 tires melted. Talk about multiple failures at once? Avoiding the first however would have avoided the other two in that case.

John is about to take a trip with his car (since youve mentioned cars). Hes to drive across the mountain and the wether is good, but its in the middle of the winter so snow is to be expected.

Planning ahead he makes sure he has gas, spare tire, snowchains and showel in order to not run out of gas, be stuck with a flat or simply get stuck in the snow.

Now sadly for john, the weather changes half way and he gets into a blizzard. Hes also over halfway, so its shorter for him to keep going than to turn back, so he does.
In this sudden weather change he gets stuck, get back on the road using the showel and the snowchains, but he get stuck again. "No problem" thinks John, ive got gas, I can just sit it out and wait for the plowtruck.
Johns problem is that the plow truck dont see him when it comes as the car has already snowed down and john has ran out of gas from ideling all night to keep the car hot. John freeze to death.

Now if john had planned for multiple failures, namely 1. not being able to get out, 2. Running out of gas keeping the car hot and 3. Not being rescued by the plow truck, hed still be alive, because hed brought warm clothes and food.

The sad fact about the story of John is that it has infact happened.. Unlikely? Yes. Avoidable? Most definetly.

 

[Doc Intrepid]

Tiger,

No one is talking about not planning for contingencies.

The topic of this thread was ditchable weight.

The focus of this forum is technical diving. By definition (broadly accepted if not formal), technical diving involves an overhead preventing surfacing - either tangible (cave, wreck) or intangible (a decompression obligation).

If you have a problem then clearly the team (the entire team, not just you) has a problem and must solve it, but "drop weight to ascend" is not a step in any planning process to address team response.

The assumption is that you cannot ascend to solve the problem. Hence, dropping weights only exacerbates your issues, as now you will be unable to hold deco stops during your ascents.

Dropping weights *may* have some validity in a recreational environment, although AFAIC only at the surface. Dropping weights has virtually no validity in a technical environment, as you cannot ascend to any significant degree to resolve your difficulties. You must resolve them at depth and afterwards control your ascent.

Ergo, there is virtually no technical failure scenario where dropping weights is the initial response.

FWIW.

YMMV.

Doc

 

[Dan Gibson]

John should have looked more closely at the weather report before deciding to make the trip and should have informed someone of his plans in case he did not show up on time. Now that would be DIR. What John did seems half assed.

You know.. planning ahead dosnt apply only to diving..



John is about to take a trip with his car (since youve mentioned cars). Hes to drive across the mountain and the wether is good, but its in the middle of the winter so snow is to be expected.

Planning ahead he makes sure he has gas, spare tire, snowchains and showel in order to not run out of gas, be stuck with a flat or simply get stuck in the snow.

Now sadly for john, the weather changes half way and he gets into a blizzard. Hes also over halfway, so its shorter for him to keep going than to turn back, so he does.
In this sudden weather change he gets stuck, get back on the road using the showel and the snowchains, but he get stuck again. "No problem" thinks John, ive got gas, I can just sit it out and wait for the plowtruck.
Johns problem is that the plow truck dont see him when it comes as the car has already snowed down and john has ran out of gas from ideling all night to keep the car hot. John freeze to death.

Now if john had planned for multiple failures, namely 1. not being able to get out, 2. Running out of gas keeping the car hot and 3. Not being rescued by the plow truck, hed still be alive, because hed brought warm clothes and food.

The sad fact about the story of John is that it has infact happened.. Unlikely? Yes. Avoidable? Most definetly.

 

[Soggy]

Ive actually seen 6 flats as well, but that was an armored personell vehicle. The antenna that should be tied down came loose and hit the 300k volt powerlines coming straight out of the powerplant. The radio operator got shocked and 6 tires melted. Talk about multiple failures at once? Avoiding the first however would have avoided the other two in that case.

This is a single failure. The antenna came loose.

The sad fact about the story of John is that it has infact happened.. Unlikely? Yes. Avoidable? Most definetly.

John made a lot of mistakes and skipped a bunch of preplanning steps that would've solved his problem before it ever occurred. That is the DIR way of problem solving....avoid the situation. You are probably too new to appreciate that and it sounds like you are still in the mindset that you need to bring the kitchen sink down with you. With the right mindset and skills, this has repeatedly been shown to not only be unnecessary, but actually detrimental since now you have more *sources* of failure.

There are many solutions to a given problem. One is to allow yourself to get into the problem and then try to figure a way out. The other is to remove the problem from the equation. So, yes....avoidable, completely.

So, since you have seen 4 tires blow...do you carry 4 spares? Would that have helped the situation above, or was triple-A (your buddy) able to help out with the problem before the spares were needed?