ReaperFive
Guest
Hey guys, just wanted to share an experience I had last weekend.
On Sunday, I was doing some solo diving at a new spot at my favorite local dive site, a lake called Murner See outside Schwandorf, Germany. I was pretty excited, as it was to be my 50th and 51st dives.
To preface this, I'd never had an in-water incident before. All of my dives had gone according to plan, with no serious problems. I'm fairly cautious, and I do try to mitigate the risks as much as possible.
My 50th dive went beautifully. I explored the area, which was much more interesting than my previous dive site at the other end of the lake, with a nice 30' cliff and a smooth bottom that descends (reputedly) to the lowest point at around 150'.
My previous dive site bottomed out at around 75', and I'd been wanting to get some deeper dives in. I did my first dive to 120' for two minutes, then returned to 40' and explored the cliff until I reached 1kpsi of remaining air and surfaced. The water at depth was extremely cold, probably in the mid 30s, although I didn't notice the temperature on my computer.
After a 2-hour surface interval, I switched tanks and got back in the water. I dove immediately to 110', where I stayed for about 2 minutes, then decided to turn around and slowly return to shallower water. At 105', I was looking at an old culvert when I noticed that my regulator seemed to be sticking open a bit when I exhaled. My immediate thought was, "oh no, you're not going to start freeflowing on me now." I took it out of my mouth to see if I could get it to stop, and it immediately started freeflowing wide open, blowing a huge plume of air.
I stuck the reg back in my mouth and checked my air. I had 2200 psi remaining; I started ascending immediately. As I came up, I struggled a bit to control my buoyancy, since it was hard to tell with all the noise if my wing was actually dumping air or not. With some effort, I did manage to do a controlled ascent and monitor my air, taking about 3 minutes to reach the surface. Obviously, with 500 psi remaining at 20ffw, I didn't have a choice but to blow my safety stop. I surfaced unhurt but a little shaken.
In retrospect, the incident was fairly minor and easily manageable, and I think I reacted adequately. I am, however, a bit irritated at myself, as I'd been looking for several months at getting a redundant air source but hadn't actually done so, mostly because I was hesitant to lay out the money, and hadn't decided what kind of redundancy I wanted. This would be more forgiveable for normal diving, but I should have had some kind of redundancy for solo diving.
Anyway, it was a pretty good wakeup call, and knocked the aura of invincibility off of me, which is never a bad thing. It definitely impressed upon me the difference between talking about contingencies and when something actually happens to you personally. Previously, I was considering buying a pony bottle for redundancy, but I'm starting to think I'll just go to doubles, since I'm eventually headed in that direction anyway.
R5
On Sunday, I was doing some solo diving at a new spot at my favorite local dive site, a lake called Murner See outside Schwandorf, Germany. I was pretty excited, as it was to be my 50th and 51st dives.
To preface this, I'd never had an in-water incident before. All of my dives had gone according to plan, with no serious problems. I'm fairly cautious, and I do try to mitigate the risks as much as possible.
My 50th dive went beautifully. I explored the area, which was much more interesting than my previous dive site at the other end of the lake, with a nice 30' cliff and a smooth bottom that descends (reputedly) to the lowest point at around 150'.
My previous dive site bottomed out at around 75', and I'd been wanting to get some deeper dives in. I did my first dive to 120' for two minutes, then returned to 40' and explored the cliff until I reached 1kpsi of remaining air and surfaced. The water at depth was extremely cold, probably in the mid 30s, although I didn't notice the temperature on my computer.
After a 2-hour surface interval, I switched tanks and got back in the water. I dove immediately to 110', where I stayed for about 2 minutes, then decided to turn around and slowly return to shallower water. At 105', I was looking at an old culvert when I noticed that my regulator seemed to be sticking open a bit when I exhaled. My immediate thought was, "oh no, you're not going to start freeflowing on me now." I took it out of my mouth to see if I could get it to stop, and it immediately started freeflowing wide open, blowing a huge plume of air.
I stuck the reg back in my mouth and checked my air. I had 2200 psi remaining; I started ascending immediately. As I came up, I struggled a bit to control my buoyancy, since it was hard to tell with all the noise if my wing was actually dumping air or not. With some effort, I did manage to do a controlled ascent and monitor my air, taking about 3 minutes to reach the surface. Obviously, with 500 psi remaining at 20ffw, I didn't have a choice but to blow my safety stop. I surfaced unhurt but a little shaken.
In retrospect, the incident was fairly minor and easily manageable, and I think I reacted adequately. I am, however, a bit irritated at myself, as I'd been looking for several months at getting a redundant air source but hadn't actually done so, mostly because I was hesitant to lay out the money, and hadn't decided what kind of redundancy I wanted. This would be more forgiveable for normal diving, but I should have had some kind of redundancy for solo diving.
Anyway, it was a pretty good wakeup call, and knocked the aura of invincibility off of me, which is never a bad thing. It definitely impressed upon me the difference between talking about contingencies and when something actually happens to you personally. Previously, I was considering buying a pony bottle for redundancy, but I'm starting to think I'll just go to doubles, since I'm eventually headed in that direction anyway.
R5
