Equipment Some excitement on Sunday morning

[stretchthepenn]

A minor bit of excitement cropped up this past Sunday morning.

I joined a dive shop's fun-dive day at a nearby lake, where I got buddied up with a relatively new diver who'd recently taken AOW. Neither of us were familiar with the site and thus opted to join a tour group led by a DM/instructor from the sponsoring shop.

The plan was to play follow-the-leader down to the tourist attraction at about 80'. Thing was, the viz stank between zero and 50', so even though the group leader took his sweet time, keeping sight of the preceding buddy pair's fins posed a challenge.

My buddy was having some trouble clearing her ears, so she lagged behind a bit, and I didn't want to lose the fins in front of me, so I kept a middle position while my buddy slowly descended, a bit above me and to the right. We hit 40', and I'd just completed a buddy check and turned my attention forward when I heard what sounded like a scream. "Eeeeeee!"

What the hell was that?

My buddy zoomed up, eyes huge as saucers. Her first stage's mouthpiece had popped off, and her octo wasn't giving air. She nabbed my octo, I took control of her BCD, and we proceeded at a reasonable pace to the surface.

No harm was done, everyone was fine. But still, it was kinda exciting.

Lessons learned?

• Stay close(r) to my buddy when recreational diving.
• Do a better job of adding air to both my and my buddy's BCDs if there's an emergency.
• Advocate more forcefully about staying clustered if visibility is poor.
• Purge the octo/take actual breaths from it before descending.

 

[M Parker]

When you're faced with a new dive partner with very little experience, how reasonable is it to take a look at their kit ? - it makes you think we should all be taking a much closer look at things like mouthpiece security.

Too many attach mouthpieces without using a proper cable tie tool ( & that includes some dive shops!) . You can buy them for $30. If you don't want to buy the right tool don't do the job.

 

[Sascha314]

In poor viz (below 2m) its very hard to have multiple buddy teams connected, even 3 people in one team is difficult.

Dive in an overlapping pattern, and divers behind should have a torch that is recognized from the diver in front. Slow pace and descent in that case. Needs to be clarified before.

A buddy check involves that each diver takes at least threw breaths from each regulator.
A loose coming mouthpiece may happen.

If one has peovlems equalizing, signal. Either all wait or the one buddy team stays alone. This managing leads to further complications as you have seen.

But why did you need to manage her BCD?

 

[Ukmc]

Can you please elaborate on what happened to your buddy’s air delivery system? One should not need a mouth piece to breathe from a regulator. Was her tank empty?
Also you should not need to control her BCD unless it is a rescue scenario and/or the other diver is incapacitated.
Also did your dive leader notice what was going on? Did you discuss a procedure in a pre-dive briefing on what to do if there is an emergency and how to communicate in low viz? Group control can be difficult for a DM in a low visibility with a lot of low experience divers. How many divers were in your group?