@NW Dive Dawg happy birthday, and I'm glad to hear that you made it out safe and sound. I don't think you'll find another ling that tastes quite as good as that one, for some time to come. Thank you for sharing your story here, this is a good learning opportunity for all of us. It takes a person with the right attitude to make a thread like this, let alone to take in 9 pages of feedback graciously! If you've read Gareth Lock's
Under Pressure, I think this attitude is consistent with what Lock would call "Just Culture," which he identifies as one of the clearest indicators of being on a trajectory of improved safety outcomes.
In case you're open to feedback from yet another SB poster, here's mine:
You already mentioned several times that you will work on doing a better job with pre-dive checks: breathe both regs, check both SPGs, check both valves, etc etc. I think that's a great idea, and will help keep you safe down the line. But, one thing to keep in mind is that we're all human, and all fallible, so relying on our memories alone to keep us safe will only work, like, 99% of the time, not 100%. Checklists are a well-documented way to improve outcomes of safety checks like this. You might give it a shot, and if your wife is not a diver, she might be a good checklist reader.
I will echo others that a bungeed pony reg, or a slung pony would be safer. Not going to belabor that point, since it is discussed at length above. Also, +1 that spring-loaded brass clip on your chest doest not strike me as a safe way to secure your alternate reg (or anything, really), especially while diving with line. It takes a surprisingly small amount of pressure to open the gate on these things, particularly with thin line like monofilament or cave line. If your spear fishing sometimes involves a wrestling match with the ling like Eric says, I would think this applies doubly.
I don't have an opinion on whether Air2s are a good idea or not -- I don't use one myself, but my belief isn't firm enough to try to convince you not to use yours. Your idea of rebreathing out of your BCD on your way up is interesting to me. The concern I would have is hypercapnia: too much CO2.
That little voice in your head that tells you to breathe, isn't triggered by low oxygen content in the lungs, it's triggered by high CO2 content in the lungs. So, if you are rebreathing, each breath you take is going to make your body hungrier for air, and want to breathe faster and faster. Hypercapnia can quickly lead to severe headaches and loss of consciousness. The rebreather subforum has many stories of hypercapnic experiences when their sorb fails. Those stories are ******* scary, man.
But what you are talking about here, I would expect to bring on a hypercapnic state even more quickly, since you don't have any sorb at all, versus a rebreather sorb breakthrough, where you'd still have some sorb draining CO2 out of the system, just not enough to maintain life. I get what you are saying when you say that you'd stick the Air2 in your mouth just in case that urge to breathe gets to be too much -- but I dunno man, it's going to cost you that little bit of time and mental energy to deploy, and if the situation where you actually start breathing it is where your body is desperate for air, you might not be getting any upside out of the deal. I think discussing this with a rebreather instructor, or a dive doctor would be a good idea, because it might be worth doing, or it might just add more gas to the fire.
One other note that I didn't see brought up yet. You mentioned a couple of times that this was a complex dive in challenging conditions: cold water, drysuit with thick undies, difficult to see your own gear, bad viz, the need to navigate and keep track of where your boat is, handling the spearfishing gear, hunting around for lings, diving solo, thinking about a delicious buttery lingcod dinner (
). That's a lot of factors! Would you consider this to be an apex dive for you, or somewhere near it? That is, a dive which is at or near the limit of your experience, training, and capability?
I have found in my own experience, and from reading anecdotes, that serious issues often occur on apex dives. The extra gear to set up makes us rush, the extra gear, tricky conditions, and specific goals like hunting, will tend to task loads us during the dive. That task loading makes us more likely to make mistakes, more likely to miss clues, and less likely to have important information available when we suddenly find ourselves neck deep in the sh--. This is a natural consequence of how our minds work, and something we all need to be aware of. Before a dive, it is worthwhile to evaluate how the planned dive compares to what you're used to, and when it's on the high end, really remind yourself to take that extra five minutes to breathe deep, get in the zone, and triple-check your stuff.
Glad you're alive, that this thread is up, and that the discourse is still pretty good, 80-something posts in. Hope this helps, cheers,
- Brett
