This happened just last week while I was in Cozumel and thought I would post it to hopefully encourage some people to learn from the mistakes I witnessed.
There was a group of us diving Columbia Deep on Wednesday of last week. The group consisted of 3 buddy teams (one of which was me and my buddy) and the DM. As standard procedure we all got the dive briefing before the dive that as soon as one person in the buddy team reached 700 psi in the tank to signal the DM and that buddy team would be asked to surface, making their safety stop while the rest of the group remained below to finish their dive.
So we all jumped in and enjoyed the first parts of the dive. We hit a max depth of 96 feet. At about 20 minutes into the dive I noticed one buddy team approach the DM, signal low on air and that they were surfacing. The DM reminded them about the 3 minutes safety stop, they acknowledged and then left the group. At the time I thought nothing of this thinking that one member of the pair had just reached 700 psi.
We continued our dive and finished about 25 minutes later. To my surprise when I got back to the boat we noticed the buddy team that left earlier was breathing from the DAN O2 units on board.
Later in the day my buddy and I talked to them and found out what happened. First of all when they signaled the DM the one member of the buddy pair was down to 300 psi, not the 700 psi as told in the briefing. The member who was down to 300 at that point soon after ran out of air totally before making it to the safety stop. No big deal he figured. His wife still had plenty of air on her tank, so he grabs her octopus only to find it wasn't working and giving him no air. So now he is at 20 feet approximately with no air and his wife's malfunctioning Octopus in his mouth. He bolts for the surface, dragging his wife with him.
They got lucky. They got on O2 right away and were monitored closely. Neither felt any pains. They obviously sat out the second dive.
Lessons to be learned from this are obvious. The first is the one I want to emphasize the most. I saw more than once on that trip people breath through the 700 psi limit down to 500 psi or less before alerting the DM and calling the dive. Perhaps they are embarrassed and don't want to ruin the dive for others by calling it early. I think I speak for everyone when I say I would much rather call a dive early because someone was low on air then have a real emergency happen because someone was too timid to call the dive when they needed to.
The second mistake is that the couple never checked their octopus before the dive. This also baffled me. How can anyone not just take a quick breath or two on their octopus before diving to ensure that it is giving air on demand?
In this case everything turned out alright, but these types of incidents should never happen. It could have very easily been a lot worse.
There was a group of us diving Columbia Deep on Wednesday of last week. The group consisted of 3 buddy teams (one of which was me and my buddy) and the DM. As standard procedure we all got the dive briefing before the dive that as soon as one person in the buddy team reached 700 psi in the tank to signal the DM and that buddy team would be asked to surface, making their safety stop while the rest of the group remained below to finish their dive.
So we all jumped in and enjoyed the first parts of the dive. We hit a max depth of 96 feet. At about 20 minutes into the dive I noticed one buddy team approach the DM, signal low on air and that they were surfacing. The DM reminded them about the 3 minutes safety stop, they acknowledged and then left the group. At the time I thought nothing of this thinking that one member of the pair had just reached 700 psi.
We continued our dive and finished about 25 minutes later. To my surprise when I got back to the boat we noticed the buddy team that left earlier was breathing from the DAN O2 units on board.
Later in the day my buddy and I talked to them and found out what happened. First of all when they signaled the DM the one member of the buddy pair was down to 300 psi, not the 700 psi as told in the briefing. The member who was down to 300 at that point soon after ran out of air totally before making it to the safety stop. No big deal he figured. His wife still had plenty of air on her tank, so he grabs her octopus only to find it wasn't working and giving him no air. So now he is at 20 feet approximately with no air and his wife's malfunctioning Octopus in his mouth. He bolts for the surface, dragging his wife with him.
They got lucky. They got on O2 right away and were monitored closely. Neither felt any pains. They obviously sat out the second dive.
Lessons to be learned from this are obvious. The first is the one I want to emphasize the most. I saw more than once on that trip people breath through the 700 psi limit down to 500 psi or less before alerting the DM and calling the dive. Perhaps they are embarrassed and don't want to ruin the dive for others by calling it early. I think I speak for everyone when I say I would much rather call a dive early because someone was low on air then have a real emergency happen because someone was too timid to call the dive when they needed to.
The second mistake is that the couple never checked their octopus before the dive. This also baffled me. How can anyone not just take a quick breath or two on their octopus before diving to ensure that it is giving air on demand?
In this case everything turned out alright, but these types of incidents should never happen. It could have very easily been a lot worse.
