panic under water - I had serious problem

[liberato]

In that course, what is the purpose of the 15 meter OOA swim drill? Seems very extreme. Do you do it with regulator in or out of mouth? The drill seems dangerous in and of itself. Is it supposed to train you to expect your buddy to be 15 meters away in an emergency? No, thanks. I'll keep my pony bottle!

 

[cornfed]

In that course, what is the purpose of the 15 meter OOA swim drill? Seems very extreme. Do you do it with regulator in or out of mouth? The drill seems dangerous in and of itself. Is it supposed to train you to expect your buddy to be 15 meters away in an emergency? No, thanks. I'll keep my pony bottle!

I assume it's supposed to demonstrate comfort.

 

[pilot fish]

Pilot fish,

You seem to be digging for what to do with this.

In any situation where you exchange regs you should clear it before inhaling. Full stop.

You can do that by exhaling or by pressing the purge release. In either case (any case) you should form the habit of taking your first breath after that with your tongue touching the roof of your mouth. That works like the fender of a bicycle to keep any drops of water in the reg (or in the event of an upside-down reg potentially quite a bit of water) from shooting into the back of your throat. In addition you should make your first breath a little tentatively if you can. Gasping your first breath (any breath) greatly increases the chances of blowing drops of water to the back of your throat, which will make you start to cough.

Also, when receiving a regulator from your buddy it's the *receiver's* responsibility (in most systems) to acquire the reg and verify that the reg is in the correct orientation. It may not have seemed obvious at the time but it's taught like this from OW onwards.

R..

This is the procedure covered in the Rescue Diver course? What do you mean by "full stop"? By clearing it you mean exhale to get any standing water in it out? I'm going to guess that in a full panic mode the receiver is not going to rememebr alot of this.

Thanks for the info.

 

[mania]

The procedure doesn't make sense to me. Why not turn on the stage reg first, then deploy the hose and breathe off of it? The way that you described it, you're beathing off a reg that you know is turned off which doesn't make sense to me.

Another reason - despite the fact that you have to be sure that at 21 meters you are breathing EAN50 and not pure O2 - is that when inside caver or wrecks it's easy in fact to push the stage's regulator if the stage is all the time turned on and you can loose your deco gas.

In that course, what is the purpose of the 15 meter OOA swim drill? Seems very extreme. Do you do it with regulator in or out of mouth? The drill seems dangerous in and of itself. Is it supposed to train you to expect your buddy to be 15 meters away in an emergency? No, thanks. I'll keep my pony bottle!

Not only to have the comfort but also when penetrating caves or wrecks - in narrow corridors you are not just next to your buddy - in most of the cases you are behind him and sometimes the distance is longer than 1 meter. So you have to be able to get to your buddy when OOA.
Advance Nitrox is the first pretechnical course - so most of the excercises you do are semitechnical ones.
This is why you do this procedure without mask and along the guide line - to simulate the real cave or wreck situation.
Mania

 

[cornfed]

This is the procedure covered in the Rescue Diver course?

It should be covered in OW.

 

[pilot fish]

It should be covered in OW.

I do not recall being told to purge the donated reg in OOA situations. It might have been mentioned that you should exhale first to clear any standing water, as in a snorkel, but I would imagine Rescue goes into greater detail in that regard, since you are using EAN etc?

 

[mania]

PF - this is a part of OWD. There are two ways to clear the regulator - either by breathing out or by pushing the by pass that's on top of the regulator. In both cases the only reason to do so is not to inhale water.
And OWD students are taught both ways by I think all organizations.
This is why I behaved like an idiot....
Mania

 

[Sideband]

Pilot Fish,
Not really. It is one of the first things explained about breathing off a reg. What gas it has is not relevant.
That is why you hold the reg you are donating by the hose. It leaves the purge free and clear for the ooa diver to use. If they have been ooa very long they may very well be out of breath as well since they should have been exhaling a small stream of bubbles the whole time. If so they won't have much breath to clear with.
Joe

 

[Marek K]

I agree about not covering the purge button when donating a reg, for that reason.

Hmmm... this brings up a question... do you guys normally clear a reg underwater by exhaling? Or by pressing the purge button?

I can certainly do it both ways, but for some reason have gotten into the habit of always using the purge button... maybe I just like the feeling of that burst of air from a reg I'm putting in my mouth underwater.

I'd certainly want to press the purge button if I were the receiver in an OOA situation...

Diver0001 has a good point about using your tongue in any case, as a deflector with the first breath... I need to get into that habit... though I am very slow and tentative on the first breath...

--Marek

 

[jepuskar]

Mania,

I own a Dacor Viper (side exhaust) and you can position it anyway..there is no backwards or upside reg with this guy...so I'm thinking there are other models out there as well besides the one you mentioned.

J