What did you learn from your very last dive...

[Aardvark]

I learned, today, that running a line from the anchor makes for a much more relaxing dive. No more "now, where was that boat" moments.

 

[Fuzzmutton]

I learned to always check to see if your buddy understood your hand signals and communication.

I recently went on a night dive at Monterey, CA with my 14 yr. old son. A sea lion buzzed us, curious as to what we were doing. I looked over at my son like, "Did you see that?!" and saw that he was inspecting his bellybutton lint or something and missed it. I grabbed his arm and pantomimed something huge passing us and then realized I didn't know a hand sign for 'sea lion', so thinking quickly, I barked loudly through my reg. Sigh he didn't hear me, and all he knew was there was something large in the water with us...at night. I spent the whole rest of the dive with him bumping into me because he was plastered to my side

Fuzz

 

[BTravlin]

That I can never get enough dives in on my vacations.

 

[UCFKnightDiver]

make sure you clip of your primary regulator when you go for your backup, backup malfuntioned, and I had to do a cesa from 50ft not fun.

 

[Squishy]

On my last dive I learned that the wind at the surface can make it hard to swim the same speed as your buddy if he is pulling the float/flag.

I could not swim slow enough to stay near him. I used very small kicks, and only about one kick for every six or seven of my buddy's, and kept leaving him in the dust. Visibility was not very good, so I would stop and wait for him to catch up and pass me, then before I knew it I was past him again. I couldn't figure out why (or how) he was going so slow until we surfaced and he said that the float was really holding him back.

Had I known, I would have at least taken turns pulling the float.

-Mike-

 

[SparticleBrane]

make sure you clip of your primary regulator when you go for your backup, backup malfuntioned, and I had to do a cesa from 50ft not fun.

 

[shoredivr]

I learned it's very difficult to do an artistic job of carving a pumpkin in 6 inch visibility when you are not allowed to premark the pumpkin.

Or not allowed to cut a hole in the pumpkin and gut it before the dive...sucker really is buoyant.

 

[UCFKnightDiver]

sorry rather not clip it off, today was in blue springs down at around 50 buddy was a just a little bit below me, but flow was absolutely kicking, umm went to switch to my neckl;aced backup (surgical tubing and zip ties, switched after today) just for practice, and sucked in a mouth full of air, because the bungee didnt allow me to make a seal around the reg mouthpiece (didnt realize this was the case till after the emergency) all I knew is i was breathing in water, umm in this time I accidently dropped the primary, in response I guess to sucking in water, flow was soo strong that i dimissed the buddy, didnt know what was wrong with the backup at the time, and thought it might take too long to find the reg, so I thought my best chance was a swimming ascent which i did.

In hind sight I wish I had stayed a little closer to my buddy, though we were not far away different conditions require different measures! also wish I would have ripped the necklace off the backup, but didnt realize that was the problem at the time. Then need to make sure I keep a death grip on the reg at all times, I clip it off once I have the backup in my mouth, but I hadnt done that yet because I was just taking a breath. Once I caught my breath at the surface I acctually went back down to recompress any bubbles, and to make sure my buddy was ok, though I had only been down for around 2 minutes when the incident happened.

In all I was extremely lucky, hopefully I will be able to learn from the incident, and improve my diving for the future.

I think it was just not our day to dive! had other problems... first off had to wait for the manatees to get out of the run at first, diving is probably done for the season there were a bunch of them just past the steps, also my buddies wetsuit zipper busted before we got in. Then I had the cesa, and then my buddy had some ear problems, after that we called it a day, at our saftey stop though, a manatee had come back up the run, and came up to like a foot away from us just checking us out, it was a good expirience there, and though the emergency wasnt a good one, hopefully I will turn it into a learning expirience.

Feel free to point out anything else you think I did wrong, or that I can/should improve on.

 

[SparticleBrane]

sorry rather not clip it off, today was in blue springs down at around 50 buddy was a just a little bit below me, but flow was absolutely kicking, umm went to switch to my neckl;aced backup (surgical tubing and zip ties, switched after today) just for practice, and sucked in a mouth full of air, because the bungee didnt allow me to make a seal around the reg mouthpiece (didnt realize this was the case till after the emergency) all I knew is i was breathing in water, umm in this time I accidently dropped the primary, in response I guess to sucking in water, flow was soo strong that i dimissed the buddy, didnt know what was wrong with the backup at the time, and thought it might take too long to find the reg, so I thought my best chance was a swimming ascent which i did.

In your original post you said your backup malfunctioned -- sounds to me like the malfunction wasn't the regulator, but rather one of situational awareness.

Feel free to point out anything else you think I did wrong, or that I can/should improve on.

I'm getting a vibe that you are not as comfortable in the water as you think. You should also probably learn how to breathe from a free-flowing regulator -- in this situation, if nothing else worked, you could have purged it to breathe.

 

[Dtaine]

Let's see ... on my very last dive (well, two dives since it was a two-tank trip) I learned that 1) some people really do just follow the person with a computer, 2) that I'm really glad my team wasn't the one with the crowd following, 3)that I need a dive knife that doesn't rust, and 4) that yes, it's time to stop messing with rented jacket bc's and pony up the money for the bp/w