What do you do when the anchor line breaks free?

[BlueTrin]

Is that normal to tie from the wreck in this case for the DSMB?

Where I dive people just deploy a DSMB from the bottom and drift.

 

[doctormike]

I assume that one of you had wet notes or a slate you could have given to the diver trying to communicate?

Nah, this was a situational awareness issue. We have wetnotes, but wouldn't have needed them to figure this out if we had paid more attention to him. That was our failure...

 

[doctormike]

No offence but that was a major mistake not checking someone else’s tie in.

Good point!

 

[doctormike]

Is that normal to tie from the wreck in this case for the DSMB?

Where I dive people just deploy a DSMB from the bottom and drift.

Yup, and that's exactly why I posted it here, to get opinions from other areas of the world. No one drifts here on purpose.

 

[p_kos]

Hah! Glad you liked it...

They are out there!

View attachment 801466

The longer you look, the worse it gets

 

[johndiver999]

Nice write up, but it is not at all surprising that with three people hanging on a thin line tied between an smb and the bottom, that the smb would be pulled under. It could have got sucked under a lot deeper than a few feet.

What would you do then, if you are ascending in the current and meet the smb at 40 feet?

 

[BlueTrin]

If you are worried about a DSMB going down and you both carry two DSMBs, you can send a second DSMB along the line of the first one to give some extra lift.

(You’d still have an emergency DSMB in case one of you get separated)

 

[doctormike]

Nice write up, but it is not at all surprising that with three people hanging on a thin line tied between an smb and the bottom, that the smb would be pulled under. It could have got sucked under a lot deeper than a few feet.

What would you do then, if you are ascending in the current and meet the smb at 40 feet?

No, that's a separate issue. It wasn't pulled under by people on the line, it was from the current. We weren't using the line to compensate for buoyancy, we had to be neutral to hold our stops, which is what we were doing.

I guess there is probably some sort of physics and geometry equation to figure this out, but I would think that for the SMB to be at 40 feet it would either have been launched incorrectly (i.e. tied off before it hit the surface), or you were diving in the Niagra falls basin!.

So if you launch the SMB correctly, it will hit the surface. Then when you tie it off, it can get pulled down in current, but not 40 feet. But I guess if that happened, you would need to launch your second SMB from there!

 

[lukeb]

Great write up.

Question: Did your buddy use a jersey upline to tie his SMB to the wreck, which if I understand correctly he would then have discarded. Or did he use a different method? I am just curious if he was able to retrieve his line once you surfaced or if he tied it off knowing he would cut the SMB free and leave the line. I know there are different methods people use such as looping the wreck and then pulling up the line afterwards.

 

[johndiver999]

delete