OOA + Gear Failure in Cozumel

[InTheDrink]

Plus I'm bitter.

I've been trying to get my wife to dive for years but she thinks it's boring. Anything slower thank skydiving or bungee jumping is boring to her. She is fearless, but if anyone's got any tips to get that kind of girl into diving you'll be a friend for life not to mention several beers up.

J

 

[wve]

I've been trying to get my wife to dive for years but she thinks it's boring. Anything slower thank skydiving or bungee jumping is boring to her. She is fearless, but if anyone's got any tips to get that kind of girl into diving you'll be a friend for life not to mention several beers up.

You just need to find some leverage. The deal at our house is that she will go diving with me as long as I go dancing with her. We discovered that both activities are fun.

Or maybe you need to leave some of your dive magazines laying around where she can find them. When she reads the stories about all the accidents and incidents, she might realize that there is plenty that can (and often does) go wrong -- which offsets the boredom factor.

Finally, if those don't work, dare her to go on a shark dive. There is nothing quite like entering the food chain...

 

[ScubaSteve]

Try getting a picture taken with you diving with the Hooters dive squad and leaving it on the table

Plus I'm bitter.

I've been trying to get my wife to dive for years but she thinks it's boring. Anything slower thank skydiving or bungee jumping is boring to her. She is fearless, but if anyone's got any tips to get that kind of girl into diving you'll be a friend for life not to mention several beers up.

J

 

[InTheDrink]

Try getting a picture taken with you diving with the Hooters dive squad and leaving it on the table

Or with some Chipendales dudes, that'd proper freak her She'd probably leave me but then I could focus on finding a diver wife. See, there's always a solution

 

[tfsails]

OK--time to get back to the original intent of this thread: As a professional service tech at my LDS, I try my damnedest to put out a good product. I would never turn out a customer's reg that I wouldn't dive myself. Part of what we do is a very thorough operational check of the reg after we've rebuilt it. We put it on the flow bench to see how well it breathes and adjust it to specs. We pop the purge button 50-100 times to allow the poppet seat to take a set before we adjust it. We breathe from each second stage to get a subjective idea of how well the reg is performing. We also have the other technician do a "QA" check on the reg as a final hedge against anything going wrong.

We also invite the customer to come with us the next time we're in the pool to check out his equipment before he goes on his trip. It isn't often, but we have found instances where we've made a minor boo-boo on the customer's reg. Of course, we fix it immediately and at no charge.

While there is no excuse for shoddy maintenance, we are human and we make mistakes just like anybody else. My coworker and I are ex-USAF aircraft maintainers and we've adapted several of the quality measures that served us well in the military to the scuba shop. We've caught several mistakes using this method.

Bottom line #1: If you get your gear serviced, take it to the pool and dive with it BEFORE you go on your big trip. It's a helluva lot easier to get it fixed in town than on a liveaboard somewhere and you'll have the confidence that you know your stuff works before you jump overboard.

Bottom line #2: If you run out of air at depth, it's nobody's fault but your own. Even if you had an unknown leak, you should be monitering your air supply closely enough to see you were going through a lot of air and surface in time to avoid an OOA scenario. New divers can blow through their air really quickly (I know I did...) and may not have the experience level to see an OOA situation coming. I can sympathize a little with them, but still the responsibility for managing their air lies with them. Period.

 

[mike the brit]

surface checks don't always find the problems. In my very early days i used to dive with a 15l cylinder & 3l pony. First dive breath of 15L, then do second dive breathing off 15L to a set point then complete dive with 3L. Checked everything on the boat, but when I switched during second dive to the 3L, the reg did not suplly any air....not an issue as such as i still had the savvy to go back to the main cylinder and end dive.
Now 10 years later, I always check every reg under water, this includes deco/ stage cylinder regs at 6m.
I think the thirds rule should be taught from OW courses, not just on the more advanced courses. I was lucky to have a great technical diving teacher and all this was again reinforced, but its amazing just how many people do not check their regs at all, or rely on others to bail them out.
I guess all this has been covered already, but does not hurt to repeat my experience of over a decade ago.
happy diving

 

[TSandM]

I spent two weeks diving in the South Pacific this fall, and I never saw anybody on any boat do a buddy check, except for a few who began doing so once they saw me and my husband run through ours. Equipment checks were taught in my open water class, but when I went on to AOW, nobody did them (including the instructor who was usually my buddy). I wasn't very good about it, either, until I took Fundies and it was mandated. It takes about two minutes to run through your equipment from head to toe, making sure everything is working properly. It saves a ton of annoyance from things like having to climb back on the boat because you forgot your weight belt, or swimming back from the drop point because you realized you don't have your depth gauge . . . or having to do a CESA because your buddy's octo isn't working.

It's so easy to do . . . Why doesn't anybody do it?

 

[wve]

It's so easy to do . . . Why doesn't anybody do it?

Good question.

My wife and I do ours, and I see couples doing them, but I agree that it seems to be a minority.

On the other hand, maybe I am too occupied with our own getting ready that I don't see others doing their buddy checks...

I tend to check my buddy because I might need his/her reg, or I might need to rescue them, and I want to know how their releases work. When I start checking my buddy, s/he is reminded to do the same.

 

[diverbob]

Reading the story, my first thought was they are newbies, probably had never experienced narcosis before at 90 feet, and then when they started to get shallow, it cleared, they got their bearings back again, and then noticed they was down to 300psi.

 

[Web Monkey]

I think we're all in agreement here. Why nobody knows how to buddy breathe anymore is beyond me.

That's easy.

Buddy breathing isn't popular because gas management isn't either. There's a really good chance that shortly after starting buddy breathing, there will now be two OOA divers.

If this happens to be at 130', you could easily find the whole group popping up like a whack-a-mole game.

Terry