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?

 

[Rollin Bonz]

How shook up was the buddy afterwards? "Taken in stride, lesson learned, I'll do better next time" or questioning her diving future?

 

[rjack321]

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.

When the mouthpiece is in your mouth and the reg is flopping around unattached, 99% of the time the new AOW diver is going to fail for an octo vs shoving the mouthpiece missing 2nd stage back into their lips.

 

[Ray and Pam]

Stop, breathe, think, react.
1st stage has a mouthpiece?
Don't need a mouthpiece to breath on 2nd stage.
What happened to the inoperative octo?
Can be a scarry experience on a dark dive, uncontrollable hyper ventilating, been there done that.

 

[steinbil]

Sounds like you handled the situation pretty well, and I agree with your takeaways.
On the other hand, this also demonstrates why I appreciate the way I was taught to dive with GUE:
1. Everyone in the team breathes from both regulators before descending (among other checks)
2. Descend together facing your buddy/team, maintaining same depth and descent rate

I understand this was an insta-buddy and not a team dive, and that being in a group complicates things, so this is not meant as criticism. I just wish there was more focus on these things in general, as it makes even simple recreational dives easier and more stress-free. Larger groups and bad viz is obviously not a good match, but unless the conditions were completely unexpected, I wonder why group separation and descent procedures were not briefed/planned better. I think it would be a lot easier to just ask all the buddy pairs to stick close together on the descent and regroup on the bottom where the viz is better, but that's easy to say in hindsight.

 

[NW Dive Dawg]

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.

Glad that everything worked out for both of you!

As far as your list of lessons learned...regarding the comment of "do a better job of adding air to both my buddy's and my BC's if there's an emergency"....... I think it's an important mindset to distinguish the difference between an emergency at depth vs an emergency on the surface.

If there is an emergency at depth (other than an uncontrolled descent) and...assuming that you were either neutral or close to neutral when the emergency occurred and you are now ascending together......the mindset should be...."do a better job of releasing air to both mine and my buddy's BCD's".

Not meant to be critical....Just something additional to think about.

 

[Scared Silly]

Twice I have been with other divers in the group have the reg fall out of their mouth leaving only the mouth piece. The first time I had my backup reg ready to hand off. The other time their partner had noticed the issue and was ready with their backup reg.

As for the backup reg not working when playing divemaster I would tell students to descend using their backup reg. If it was not breathing perfectly then they should abort the dive because if was not working during the good part of the dive, did they really want to rely on it during the bad part of the dive.