My Colombia Deep incident... Need your advice

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Divingblueberry

Contributor
Messages
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Location
Montréal
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100 - 199
(I decided to post it here, but I'll let the mods decide if there's a better section...)

Ok... I debated with myself for a while before deciding posting my incident on the internet. I, however, value the input of all the divers on SB and know I can learn a lot from what you have to say about all this.

I’ll be brief because there are a lot of details (but lots of them aren’t pertinent)

Cozumel. Great diving day. First dive : Colombia Deep. Pedro (Great DM. More than 10,000 dives. It’s my second trip to Cozumel so I’d say my 7th dive this DM) gives us the usual briefing and off we go! Very good start, 95 feet, I feel calm, love the scenery and remember thinking to myself « Jeez.. I am calm, in a great mental place. I am so lucky to be here to admire all this ».

Fast forward 15 minutes... I am ahead of the group and being on the cautious side, I decide to stay at 75 feet in a « no current » area and wait for Pedro and the group. I turned my head to look at where he was and, all of a sudden, I hear a crazy noise : the regulator is in my mouth but the hose is now unscrewed and blowing the air away !

(Technical aside : I have a 5 feet hose with a 90 degree elbow on my primary and a necklace. The regulator unscrewed not below the 90 degree elbow, but at the joint. I know what happened is my mistake since I should have checked my gear. The thing slowly unscrewed without me noticing it- I took it for granted... I am the only one to blame for this.)


Back at 75 feet...
Everything happened so fast (with all the noise and the blindness...) and my primary hose is making a hell of a noise, I cannot see anything because of all the bubbles around. I felt I was in a dire situation. Fortunately, just before it happened, I knew where Pedro was and headed for him.

Of course he heard the noise and headed for me. He got to me and turned off my cylinder’s valve off but, at the same time, I reached to my necklace and there was no air... ! That wasn’t good... panic was kicking in. Pedro put his secondary in my mouth and I finally started to breathe.


After few seconds, I was much more relaxed (but not quite there). I showed him my primary hose (with no regulator at the end and we started looking for it. We found it at the bottom, ( I have to admit, the Deep 6’s orange top helped a lot. I saw it 35 feet away at the bottom!) He screwed it back and I continued the dive.


Prologue :

The DM did a great job. I think he handled it perfectly.

I thought the dive would be over but when Pedro turned the air back on, I had 1600 psi. So 15 minutes after, I was enjoying my dive as if nothing happened. It was weird because I felt I should have been more « shocked » but I wasn’t. Overall, it was a good thing because when I got on the boat, a bit shaken up, I was ready for the next dive.


What is killing me is that I cannot stop kicking myself in the ass for not handling it better. I panicked and I shouldn’t have... I wish I could have been more « on top of things » and I am questioning my ability to handle stress underwater.

Your advice and comments are welcome.
 
Panic happens. The coolest cat can lose his cool at the slightest hint of danger, and the most spastic twitchy dude can stay dead calm even in the most austere of situations. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
 
Thanks for sharing...we all get complacent at some point in almost all hobbies and then some...your scenario is exactly why I consider my pony as my friend.

No doubt you'll never not preflight your kit again:wink:
 
I would put this in the category of sh*t happens that didn't need to, learn the lesson and carry on.

I would spend some time practicing a valve shutdown. You might have been able to preserve more air. Just as important, if you are comfortable with a shutdown, you should also be able to feather the valve to provide much needed air on demand.
 
Glad you had an attentive, calm and skilled diver nearby and the presence of mind to head for them! I like hearing when training works.

Sure kicks up a lot of bubbles doesn't it! Saw a Omni swivel fail two days ago in the water (not mine).

Cameron
 
Panic happens. The coolest cat can lose his cool at the slightest hint of danger, and the most spastic twitchy dude can stay dead calm even in the most austere of situations. Don’t beat yourself up over it.

Preach it, brother. Like the man in your Avatar said, "everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth".

I'm always amazed at people who post here smugly telling us exactly what they are going to do in this, that or the other emergency, and how they have precisely enough gas to handle whatever comes their way. It's very hard to predict how things are going to go down in real life.

Panic happens, and the best insurance policy is to have redundancies and big margins of safety built into your diving. The OP had Pedro instead of a pony bottle, and that was lucky. With a single gas source, other options would be feathering the valve as mentioned above, or kinking the blown primary hose and going to the backup second stage before ascending. CESA is always a last resort, and not a good plan B.

Thanks for posting, and dive safe.
 
All of the above. It's a perfectly normal reaction to relive a scary incident and re-traumatise yourself after the effect. I don't think many people would have handled things much different. We're all guilty of a degree of complacency and this sort of thing acts as a wake-up call.

I suppose my only observation would be that maybe you should have ended the dive at that point rather than continue. A significant equipment failure and near panic episode would have me heading for the bar. Easy for me to say though from the comfort of my armchair.

Take care mate and don't beat yourself up too much.
 
Glad you're OK. You can empty a tank very quickly through a ruptured LP hose, while an HP hose/SPG takes quite a while because of the built-in flow restrictor.
 
It doesn’t sound like you panicked at all. Sure you were startled and a bit unprepared but you recognized the problem, took action and found a solution. A panicked diver would likely have shot to the surface. The fact that you were still focused enough to safely continue the dive also supports the lack of true panic.

After the missed loose connection on your predive check, and most of us are guilty of something similar in our past, I think not going to your backup sooner and the DM turning off your gas before giving you his secondary may be two other errors in the dive.

As for exploring alternative actions you could have taken, besides the dive precheck, what do you feel you could have done better?
 

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