New maneuver of last resort?

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

The inside of the bladder of my BCD is some sort of plyable plastic. I clean it out with a flush of water and bleach after each trip so I figure that it's pretty clean.
Whoa?! :confused: I understood that bleach would damage the bladder, but water bed conditioner was fine - or a product sold by a dive store specifically sold for this purpose.

The times this BC breathing has come up before, I thot of sucking only. Didn't think of blowing in, sucking out, repeat. Now that might work - maybe?

Even then, tho - I'd be afraid of inhaling water from the hose. Depending on the position used and how much air is blown in first, could be a risk.

Guess I'll keep carrying my 15# pony rig to dive boats, then up the ladder at the end of each dive. :eyebrow:
 
Charlie,

Lets face it. Anyone who needs to consider sucking off their BCD has seriously screwed the pooch from the start.

Of course you are right. I am going to stop teaching buddy breathing and CESA since it instills a defeatist attitude that I would not want my divers to learn.

Thanks for showing me the light Doc.
 
Dude, if you'd prefer to teach your students how to inhale and exhale into their BCD after they run out of gas instead of teaching them how to work out a gas plan in advance you go right ahead.

It's a free country last time I looked.

There's all sorts of ridiculous crap being taught out there, and life has always been "buyer beware".

Knock yourself out.

Better teach them to rinse their BCD bladders with Listerine instead of bleach, though, if you're going to have them breathing out of them.

;)
 
True, it is still a free country, but that was not my point.

General instruction includes methods of getting to the surface in emergencies (not all are due to poor planning) and this would be one to consider. I only brought it up for discussion, I am not advocating making it law. The article in Undercurrent is pretty extensive, if you have a major beef I'm sure they would be glad to defend their point of view.

I am not sure that washing the bladder with anything except water is needed for breathing for one minute or less. Your snorkel (one's snorkel) probably accumulates a lot of "gunk" and no reports of people with pneumonia from snorkels that i am aware of.
 
It would seem to me that there is a danger of making a bad situation even worse just by attampting to breath (and rebreath) from your BC. Should the OOA diver fail to clear the inflator (and corrugated hose) of any water prior to inhaling, the result may be a breath of water (or air/water mix) rather than the expected breath of air. This, I suspect would be accompanied by the uncontrolable need to cough rather than the somewhat controlable urge to breath. Sounds dangerous. So if this is a tool one plans to add to his save-your-ass-from-drowning kit, it probably should be practiced. And before you contemplate parcticing something like this, maybe you should just add a spare air or some better backup just before the step that say suck the air out of your BC.
 
The only positive thing I see here is that if you breathe from your BC, in and out, you are sure to keep your airway opened, thus preventing a lung overexpansion while doing an emergency ascent.
 
Very good point regarding inhaling water. If you don't have enough air to clear the hose to begin with you may be in a world of hurt.

As for snorkels vs bladders... the snorkel doesn't retain water like the bladder does. Rinsing with an anti-bacterial solution is cheap insurance, doesn't take long.

Breathing in and out would be fine I think and could even enable you to do a slower ascent. Just don't overdo it and deplete all the oxygen.

One needs to consider his own dive parameters to decide whether practicing this skill is necessary. If you are somehow forced dive with unreliable buddies and without redundancy, it's certainly a good skill to have. I can totally see not bothering with this during instruction though - you never have enough time to go over everything during OW so spending time on this is probably a waste. For independent study, sure, why not...
 
This month's Undercurrent gives instructions on breathing the air from your BCD in out of air conditions. I've always wondered if this would work and the article shows it can.

Does anyone have actual experience in breathing the air from their BCD when unable to get air through another source?

Is this the new Spare Air?

Nothing new, & it works--has to, it's air...IMO, better than breathing water..I would much rather fight an internal bacterial infection than flatlined brain deadness.......IMO, that's what fluoroquinilones are for......
 

Back
Top Bottom