Some minor mishaps and lessons learned

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WetSEAL

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Did my 4th and 5th shore dives today with the local club this morning. The organizer paired me up with a more experienced diver with about 500 dives due to my inexperience which I was happy for. I felt competent, safe and comfortable, but I recognize my inexperience and welcome learning from the experience of others.

I'm wearing a BP&W that I put together, a 40" long hose and 22" short hose on a necklace, a 26" SPG hose clipped off on my waist. Mostly DIR inspired setup at this point with the exception of not using a 7' long hose. My buddy is wearing a jacket style BCD with traditional clipped off octo.

At the start of the dive we went over our plan, hand signals...it was a good thing because my buddy was not familiar with the numbers hand signals that I have been using for remaining PSI, which I picked up from these forums (two numbers, first the 1000's column then the 100's column, up fingers for 1-5 and sideways for 6-9).

I told my buddy that he should feel free to give me any tips or pass on any lessons or point out anything stupid I do since I am new and eager to learn. He replied saying that he usually does something stupid every dive, which was a bit of foreshadowing for the day.

Visibility was very bad, I couldn't see more than about 10 feet, and my gear is all black so I know I have to be extra careful about being separated. Anyway, we were staying pretty close together when I realized that his SPG, which had been dangling freely off of him, had gotten tangled up my regulator hoses behind my head.

I remained calm, grabbed onto my buddy at that point to alert him to the issue and prevent him from drifting away from me while we sorted it out. Our faces were not facing each other and I couldn't turn to face him due to being tangled up in his junk.

While I was locked onto him I tried turning my head but couldn't see it, I tried reaching back with my hands but couldn't figure out how to untangle it. It was completely outside of my vision and I couldn't turn my head to see it but it looked like his body positioning was better suited to untangle it, so I figured I would just let him take care of it.

I felt some tugging on my regulator, and thought about switching to my octopus, but I couldn't tell if the tangle was on my primary hose or secondary hose, so I decided to just let him sort it out and be prepared should my regulator get yanked out.

My buddy was messing around for quite a while, and it seemed to be taking him longer than expected to get it untangled. After letting him mess around with it unsuccessfully for a while, I started to get the strange feeling that perhaps my buddy wasn't trying to untangle us at all, but was rather just completely obliviously poking around at the kelp and trying to swim away. Eventually, he did untangle us, but after the dive was over, he said that he just wasn't sure why I was staying so close to him.

Later on during the same dive, he gave the thumbs up and we surfaced. He said he just needed to get his bearings, and then we went back down (he had designated himself as the navigator). We went straight down together, and after getting to the bottom, he kind of floated up out of my vision and when I looked up, he was gone. I stayed where I was and searched around with my flashlight, but could find no sign of him. I waited for a couple minutes, and he was nowhere to be seen, so eventually I surfaced, saw the buoy on the surface (he was carrying it), and swam to his location and descended back down to him.

After I met back up with him, and made eye contact, he surfaced, and so I surfaced with him. Back on the surface I asked him why he had surfaced and he said because he lost me. That confused me because we had already reconnected and made eye contact before he surfaced, but oh well. I had a lot of air left, but he said to call the dive. He recommended that I swim back on the bottom (about 40 feet) while he follows along from the surface, but I didn't think that would be a good idea since I would just be diving solo at that point, the visibility was nothing.

After taking a break, we decided to go out for a second dive. Shortly after descending, I saw something artificial go floating by my face and saw him start floating up away from it, and realized it was his weight pocket. I locked onto his leg to keep him from floating up, grabbed the weight with my right hand and gave it to him, and let some air out of my BC to keep us heavier while I let him sort it out.

Later on in the second dive, I was following him, but he swam out of my vision somehow, but we were both using our flashlights and eventually I found him. There were no more incidents that day.

At the end of the day, I felt comforted knowing that my own SPG was clipped close against my body and hence not likely to get snagged in someone else's kit, and also felt glad about the fact that my weights were securely affixed, and not capable of simply falling out of the pocket of a BCD like his was.

However, I also learned some lessons. One is that I should add some more brightly colored components to my kit, which is mostly black, to help in very poor visibility situations during daytime dives. Second, I need to be more conscious about things that might be dangling off of other people's gear (or anything else) to prevent it from getting caught up on me. Overall I'm glad this happened, because it will make me more aware of that in the future.
 
Looks like you learned a number of things, not the least of which is:
Buddies differ and dive count doing just that, counting dived. Could be a diver who incrementally improved during many of those dives, could be one who used the experience to fortify habits that maybe could be improved upon...

BTW., up to 10 ft visibility is quite bad in many places... and pretty good in others... Of course better vis helps with most things, but, you also learned that not getting separated takes attention from both... possibly every second if vis is not great (if it's bad enough it may take contact...)
 
One important lesson I try to teach buddies is that everyone seems to use different signals for remaining pressure. It's so much easier to just show me your spg.
 
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