Going a bit on a tangent here, but would you typically carry and deploy from depth a larger SMB such as an 8ft? I guess you'd want the chase boat to be able to see the bag in fog/chop, but do people typically do this, or do they shoot a smaller, more manageable bag on deco and keep a large marker for surface deployment if needed?
Surface markers... innovation !
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Going a bit on a tangent here, but would you typically carry and deploy from depth a larger SMB such as an 8ft? I guess you'd want the chase boat to be able to see the bag in fog/chop, but do people typically do this, or do they shoot a smaller, more manageable bag on deco and keep a large marker for surface deployment if needed?
dbulmer
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I couldn't find the anchor one time in NC, and I shot my 6' bag from about 90'. By the time we ascended past the 70' mark, visibility improved, and we saw the line only about 25' away.
In the middle of nowhere, I wanted people to see me as well as possible as fast as possible. It isn't that bad to do. For the really large bags, I doubt you can get them completely full unless you're at the surface anyway. Even my 6' bag isn't completely full when I shoot it from 100'.
Tom
In the middle of nowhere, I wanted people to see me as well as possible as fast as possible. It isn't that bad to do. For the really large bags, I doubt you can get them completely full unless you're at the surface anyway. Even my 6' bag isn't completely full when I shoot it from 100'.
Tom
Wow... Where can I get trained like this ??? ;o) This is really impressive... I knew I was missing something ! The good thing about all this: I have still so much to learn, and I believe I'm in the best forum for it
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Wow... Where can I get trained like this ??? ;o) This is really impressive... I knew I was missing something ! The good thing about all this: I have still so much to learn, and I believe I'm in the best forum for it
Lots of us (in this forum, almost all of us) got trained like that ... but very few acquire the level of skill that fellow has ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
Yes I have used larger SMBs from depth. Its hard to get them full tho. If you are doing an unplanned drifting deco the bag needs to be large enough to attract attention. If you are doing a planned drift, it needs to be large enough to reliably follow.
The small bags are fine for recreational diving, you can't got that far in a ~5min ascent anyway. For deco dives with 20 to 80+ mins of deco you can go a LONG ways. For these dives, if we waited until we surfaced to shoot a large bag we might be too far enough away to ever find by boat.
SMBs are really not as visible as we think they are in a huge ocean. So when (not if) they don't do what they are supposed to do we bring backup gear like PLBs, dye canisters, flares, VHF radios, and such. Dive alerts are audible at about the same distances that medium/large SMBs are visible so they aren't as handy as you'd think, esp. over boat engine noise.
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