It depends.
Normally if I'm employing it strictly as a surface marker then the intention is to warn the Zodiac as to where I'll be surfacing. On those dives I'll deploy it at the end of the dive a few minutes before surfacing. The obvious time to do this is at the safety stop.
On technical dives I tend to deploy it at the first long(ish) shallow stop. This is often 9 metres but seldom deeper. In this case I'm not using it as a marker buoy but to create a stable platform to "hang" on during a long stop.
There is the odd time that you'll want to deploy it deeper. When we dive wrecks on the North Sea, if for some reason you need to make a free ascent from the bottom then currents can be so heavy that it is of paramount importance to let the boat know as soon as you can that you won't be coming up on the up-line. Any delay in doing so could result in becoming lost on the surface. When diving those wrecks we're normally at anywhere from 25 to 40m deep and I normally have a spool with 50m of line on it to account for the fact that in current the blob will not go directly to the surface.
R..
Normally if I'm employing it strictly as a surface marker then the intention is to warn the Zodiac as to where I'll be surfacing. On those dives I'll deploy it at the end of the dive a few minutes before surfacing. The obvious time to do this is at the safety stop.
On technical dives I tend to deploy it at the first long(ish) shallow stop. This is often 9 metres but seldom deeper. In this case I'm not using it as a marker buoy but to create a stable platform to "hang" on during a long stop.
There is the odd time that you'll want to deploy it deeper. When we dive wrecks on the North Sea, if for some reason you need to make a free ascent from the bottom then currents can be so heavy that it is of paramount importance to let the boat know as soon as you can that you won't be coming up on the up-line. Any delay in doing so could result in becoming lost on the surface. When diving those wrecks we're normally at anywhere from 25 to 40m deep and I normally have a spool with 50m of line on it to account for the fact that in current the blob will not go directly to the surface.
R..
