A. Not everybody uses a back inflate BC, and even if they were using a back inflate BC if they were to weight themselves right, there's no reason for the BC to "flip them on their face" as you purported.
True, not all BCDs are back-inflate, but they've certainly become a lot more popular over the past decade. Insofar as the suggestions to "weight right", suffice to say that you can go check my posting history and read some heated dialogs on the subject, which also includes my Engineering drawings of the Overturning Moments present with dive gear. To summarize it all very briefly, a back inflate simply does not have the properties to encourage a life vest style "face up" and this situation is exasperated when it is being dived with a buoyant-at-end-of-dive AL80 ... typical resort gear .. tank, whereas in many "No Problem!" instances, these comments are coming from local coldwater divers who are using Steel tanks which are negative at the end of a dive too.
B. If I were to dive in blue water and chances of becoming adrift are high, or in rough sea, then yes I will wear a snorkel.
Which I agree is appropriate, just as we don't wear a safety harness & line when we're not doing an ice dive.
In the case of the Bequia dive that I alluded to, the snorkle-less diver would have drowned had it not been for them receiving assistance from both their buddy as well as myself.
-hh
So you lost the boat, you ran out of the gas in three tanks, or at least did not think to share gas with an out of gas diver, and had a team that was unfit for the conditions. And the solution to all of this is a snorkel? Might there be other potential solutions?
A1: No, this was a planned drift dive. You're not going to blame the divers - - who faithfully followed the dive plan - - for the failure of the chase boat on a drift dive, since this is always an objective risk present on all drift dives.
A2: To my knowledge, only one tank (the snorkel-less diver) was drained, which we did not know had happened until the victim also fatigued out from resperatory distress from not having a regulator or a snorkel to breathe from while facing into the rough seas. At that point, the hazard from the rocks was far too immediate and the obvious recourse was to swim out, which was accomplished with a tow. Sure, it is possible that there might have been a better way to use the air supplies in our tanks too, but the root cause still goes back to the victim who made two bad judgement calls: #1 was for not being equipped (ie, snorkel) to survive the potential risk of longer-than-expected float under the prevailing (and known...it wasn't our first day of diving here) conditions; and #2 was failing to warn the rest of us that (a) they had OOA'ed their tank, and (b) they were having trouble. This all then resulted in the rapid escalation to full distress for which we responded with grabbing them and literally doing a rescue tow.
FWIW, it is possible that an octopus might have donated back to the victim on the surface during their tow at some point, but I no longer recall every detail about the experience to make a definitive "yes or no", since this did occur 8 years ago. This could have been a good thing if such an octopus donation didn't hinder the rescue tow, so the length of the octopus hoses probably would have been its determining factor. I don't think any of us had a long hose, which is the only way today that I'd retrospectively said that we clearly had overlooked a viable alternative.
...May not be a case of poor air management, but a mistake judging currents, weather changes, etc. &^*% happens. This sounds like a good case for those divers to have a snorkel, so again, it's just a personal preference. Is that a safety situation? Some would say the chances of that happening are too low to justify the hassel having a snorkel. Then again, at times I use my Dive Alert, and at times not. Haven't had to use it for an emergency yet and maybe never will. Should I keep using it if there is current?
What all of this really simplifies down to is that diving is not utterly risk free and there's a a lot of possible as you say,
&^*% happens events. What we all have to do is to assess the risks - - and the consequences of each of these risks - - and then decide upon what our acceptance threshhold is.
Historically, OW dive training introduced us all to the major risk factors and gave us the appropriate (if basic) solutions for how to manage those risks, but the training also did us a slight disservice by not educating us that what we were doing was basic risk identification, assessment and management: it just shortcutted to a "Do This, Do That, Wear This Stuff" without us necessarily understanding why (holistically).
This simplification continued with the identification of select pieces of gear as being supposedly "safety" equipment. This is effectively a misnomer because every piece of gear contributes to the larger context of risk management of the overall system.
When we look specifically at the lowly snorkel through the lens of system Risk Management, what we find is that it contributes in a low likelihood-but high consequence setting, which gives it a "Low Odds / High Benefit" ranking. Combined with it being a cheap piece of gear, its Cost:Benefit ranking will be higher than what one may otherwise expect. Afterall, do keep in mind that we didn't standardize having an Octopus on our gear until its price came down...
In any event, the question of if it is a piece of "safety" gear really isn't all that important. All dive gear contributes to safety in one form or another, which is what classically forms our overall Risk for a particular dive. Differences in dive environments and settings will invariably mean that there's differences in the risks present, some of which may very well merit - - depending on that particular diver's risk tolerance - - changes to their gear to mitigate these risks. And of course, the diver themself is the final arbiter of risk and safety ... if things don't look acceptable, you thumb the dive.
-hh
