Scuba Death in Cozumel Early this Week???

[fishnchips]

Very sad, my heart goes to the husband...

This is just a reminder that the basic skills that we teach need to be like reg. recovery... We NEED to remember...

Very Sad indeed. We learned all the skills but sometimes, in certain situation, the victim just seemed to forget the skills. Learn something from this..... I will mentally rehearse the basic skills everytime before I get into the water.

 

[got4boyz]

Very Sad indeed. We learned all the skills but sometimes, in certain situation, the victim just seemed to forget the skills. Learn something from this..... I will mentally rehearse the basic skills everytime before I get into the water.

Excellent idea. It's easy for it to all become routine that you stop paying attention to all the little things.

 

[got4boyz]

My 15 yr old son had to orally inflate under water, since he was given a rental B/C that had a sticky inflator, and he had to disconnect the LP hose...I watched him carefully the whole dive, and he did quite nicely without me...

I probably would have called the dive not thinking about adding air manually, but once I'm bouyant I seldom have to mess with it throughout the rest of the dive so it should be an easy thing to do. I'll try it next time I dive!

 

[pt40fathoms]

I have inflated my BC many times orally at the surface but never underwater. I guess there's no reason you couldn't do it underwater. It was never taught in my classes.

Oral inflation of your BC is a required skill under PADI Standards. However, most new divers tend to be so overwhelmed by what they are doing, that many of the skills are promptly forgotten soon after the open water dives are completed.

Next time you go diving in a familiar area, where you have ample shallow dive areas, let your buddy know that you will be unplugging your inflator hose before you descend and practicing manual inflation for the duration of the dive. You'll be surprised at just how often you use the inflator, and how much less you use it after a few dives using manual inflation. Naturally if you get nervous during the dive, just plug it back in.

 

[Snowbear]

Next time you go diving in a familiar area, where you have ample shallow dive areas, let your buddy know that you will be unplugging your inflator hose before you descend and practicing manual inflation for the duration of the dive. You'll be surprised at just how often you use the inflator, and how much less you use it after a few dives using manual inflation. Naturally if you get nervous during the dive, just plug it back in.

You can do this without unplugging your inflator and I agree it is good to practice...

 

[Scubaroo]

You can do this without unplugging your inflator and I agree it is good to practice...

Ditto - just put the mouthpiece up to your mouth, and blow while pushing the deflate button - no need to disconnect the LP inflator hose. Not much point turning a skill practice into a real emergency by not being able to inflate your BC if you *really* need to.

 

[Michael Schlink]

Beth go to your LDS, if you have one, and get with a qualified instructor and go over a skills assesment. You just now realized that you can inflate you BC, manually UW. You had to have your husband/buddy "fix" your inflator while you were kneeling in the sand at 60'! I'm sorry to be the one to say it but I don't mince words. You shouldn't be diving. If your kneeling in the sand at 60' why do you think you weren't overweighted?? How did you get there so easily and why couldn't you correct the inflator hose problem yourself, perhaps while you were dropping 60' to the sand. when did you realize that your inflator wasn't working. Do you and your buddy do a predive equipment check?? A refesher at the minimum is in order, sorry to be so harsh but you had several problems with that dive and didn't realize them and you weren't able to handle a relativley simple problem UW. More practice, please Dive Safe-M

 

[CelticRavenVA]

I am kinda shocked to read a few of the posts in here regarding basic skills being lost after they are out of class. While everyone knows I am a fairly new diver maybe I have a different perspective then most, or maybe people should take up my perspective. Before diving, I mentally run though all the skills from my OW class. I then go though with my buddy a full gear test and we both see how each others equipment works. (I have an Air2 as my second air source, lots of people haven't seen them) Once I have checked and re-checked Everything, we hit the water then.

Maybe I am just paranoid.... but I come home alive....

CR

 

[Scubaguy62]

Beth...Although I don't agree with the statement that makes up my subject line, Michael has a good point about seeking more training and about doing a pre-dive check...For some reason I have seen many husband/wife (male/female) dive teams where the wife (female) relies a bit too much on her husband (male buddy) to fix things for her. I don't mean to sound sexist or for that matter that we should not rely on our buddies to help us out, and if this offends anyone, please accept my apologies.

It is a fact, however, that in every dive team there is a buddy that is the weaker one and one that is the stronger one. The weaker usually depends on the stronger one more than they should, or the stronger one over supervises the weaker one. It's a vicious circle that we don't need as safe divers.

I always tell my wife that she should, within her level of experience, handle emergencies without my assistance at first and know what to do to help me if I get in trouble, so we practice OOA and other drills often.

Orally inflating a BC underwater is almost a useless skill, although we all learned it on our open water training. I believe, however, it is more important for us to know how to orally inflate the BC on the surface and to not be afraid of sinking a bit, while inflating, in order to achieve buoyancy at the surface.

Just try this on for size, suppose that when the lady noticed she had a problem with her power inflator, she disconnected it and tried to arrest her runaway ascent by dumping air using the pull-to-dump feature, would it have made any difference for her to know how to orally inflate her BC underwater? If she only had remembered to ditch her weights, she would have floated to the surface.

This is a sad case of one minor emergency that when compounded by panic, caused a snowball effect which resulted in a fatality. It could have happened to anyone of us! I believe it behooves us more, as divers, to learn how to control our emotions, thereby preventing the snowball efect that replaces sound training with panic.

Semper Safe,

Rick

 

[saltwater taffy]

I think way too many divers rely on their BCD to help with their buoyancy. I dove once with an English gal and she said that they call theirs stab jackets or stabalizing jackets. She said that really the only time one should use this is when on the surface.....Just a thought