OOA Frequency

[BDub]

One LOA.

My wife and I were doing a night shore dive in Kauai and were quite a long way from the entry/egress point when she got stung by a jellyfish of some kind. Without realizing it, her breathing rapidly accelerated and had gone from about 1800psi to 800 in less than 5 minutes (in 40fsw). She signaled her air pressure to me, which I instantly knew was extremely low for her. I gave her my longhose and she signaled that she was ok to swim towards the exit, rather than make a direct ascent to the surface immediately. We did this until we hit 800psi on my tank, then started our ascent, surfaced, and swam in the rest of the way on the surface. The surface swim back seemed like forever though, as we were told there was a tiger shark sighting a few days previous and the last place we wanted to be at night was on the surface!

I've had one or two "semi-LOA" situations with students. They weren't technically LOA, but were a little lower than I preferred, and I had plenty of gas, so we shared mine on the way back in.

 

[Dan Gibson]

Was the buddy configured with the inflator off the left post instead of the right?

See, there is a good reason for routing a particular way

Personally involved with 4 OOA.


4. Few years ago. Near Courtenay BC. About 170ft. We were diving stages to preserve our backgas. Some of my buddy's switch from stage to BG when the stage is empty or damn near. I can't remember the exact sequence but my buddy made the switch only to find that his primary wasn't working. His stage was basically empty so he signalled OOA, and I donated my primary. Took a minute or so to figure out that he never turned on his primary's first stage in the first place. When he went to his primary and it wasn't working he just did an OOA instead of going to his backup because as he said "If I went to my backup and it wasn't working either, then I would've been in trouble. So I just did an OOA so that I had gas and we had time to figure out the problem." We sorted things out and continued on.

 

[divingjd]

Two - one as donor, one OOA myself. The first was a deep dive in the Caribbean (max. depth 125'), when somebody in the group ran out of air at 80' and started an emergency swimming ascent. I went after him (probably not the best idea, since I was about 20' deeper at that point) and shared air. He said there was some problem with his SPG (a rental), but I strongly suspect he was not monitoring his air supply closely enough. He was an admitted air hog. The second was a deep wreck dive in the Straits of Mackinaw. My reg froze up at 114' (42 degrees F). Grabbed my buddy, went to the buoy line, started the ascent breathing from my free-flowing reg and switched to my buddy's pony to finish the ascent when my air supply got low.