What went wrong on your dive today/recently? And what did you learn?

[Belzelbub]

To those who still have yoke connector, please take a closer look into your yoke metallic o-ring seal surface. If you see some scratches like mine (see picture, below), that’s what mine looks like after 1500 dives. It’s time to replace it.


View attachment 778484

That one definitely looks pretty bad. I've had that happen on a smaller scale before. My personal regs and tanks are all DIN, but I was using aquarium gear which is all yoke. After I set up my gear, I turned it on to check air pressure. When I did, I heard a slight hiss. I notified the full-time staff and we swapped out the o-ring. Same problem. I then looked at the yoke and saw the sealing surface was pretty scratched up. Nowhere near as bad as yours, but enough so that the seal was compromised. This was the first time I encountered anything like that, so I decided to swap the regulator to see if the problem went away. It did.

Makes sense now that I think about it. If the yoke screw isn't backed off enough when installing or removing, this surface will be the first point of contact.

With DIN, I don’t have to worry about scratching metallic o-ring seal surface (as it’s no longer sitting on regulator like a sore thumb, ready to be beaten up during rough handling of installation of the yoke connector onto the tank valve.

Yeah, you'd really have to try to scratch that surface.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

What went wrong is that I didn't go!

 

[Boarderguy]

2 weeks ago decided I'd wait until the morning of to pack my truck at 0430 to make a 0645 splash. Drive is 1 hour. I got there, assembled my kit, got my drysuit on and realized my 16lb weight belt was still hanging in my garage. Fortunately my wife was working from home that day and very begrudgingly drove out there with every weight belt we have. We missed the slack tide but still got 30 minutes under before admitting the current was winning the battle. She got flowers when I got home.

 

[SlugLife]

What went wrong with my dive today, is that I dove into ScubaBoard. What did I learn? People are jerks on ScubaBoard, calling me fat.

---

On a more serious note, the incident I learned the most from (not today, but almost 2 years ago) was one of my regulator hoses coming loose.

Lost Improperly Tightened 2nd-Stage Regulator

This is embarrassing, my fault, and happened a little over a year ago. I'd rather not tell the story, but this was a year ago, and it would be improper for me to not share given I've learned from other's Accidents/Incidents. My dive was around an island, at 20 to 45 feet deep. At about 30...

scubaboard.com

As a result, I started taking redundancy FAR more seriously. That caused me to get a pony-bottle, and soon after start side-mount. I also added redundancy in other areas; buoyancy, cutting devices, and pretty much anything that could be a serious problem if anything went wrong. It inspired many of the posts in this thread including ones about proper weighting, redundancy, pony-bottles, and more.

 

[johndiver999]

Loaded my truck very early in the morning and it seemed like less than normal amount of stuff. Looked over everything mentally went through the contents of my gear bag and reassured myself it was all good and I didn’t need the emergency oxygen bottle for this trip. Drove 30 minutes, and my brain suddenly tells me I left my spearguns leaning on the garage wall. I got them out the night before checked them and had them ready to grab in morning. Lesson: when something seems like it might be missing, double check!!

 

[SlugLife]

2 weeks ago decided I'd wait until the morning of to pack my truck at 0430 to make a 0645 splash. Drive is 1 hour. I got there, assembled my kit, got my drysuit on and realized my 16lb weight belt was still hanging in my garage. Fortunately my wife was working from home that day and very begrudgingly drove out there with every weight belt we have. We missed the slack tide but still got 30 minutes under before admitting the current was winning the battle. She got flowers when I got home.

Loaded my truck very early in the morning and it seemed like less than normal amount of stuff. Looked over everything mentally went through the contents of my gear bag and reassured myself it was all good and I didn’t need the emergency oxygen bottle for this trip. Drove 30 minutes, and my brain suddenly tells me I left my spearguns leaning on the garage wall. I got them out the night before checked them and had them ready to grab in morning. Lesson: when something seems like it might be missing, double check!!

I've learned to pre-pack when you have the free-time and aren't in a rush, and go through a similar check-list as when you're getting in the water (air, BCD, computer, weights, mask, exposure suit, fins, boots, lights, batteries, etc). I'm about to do my first dives of the season in about 1-week, and packed up everything yesterday and went through my mental check-list twice. Since I had to drag stuff out of boxes, I hope I didn't forget anything, hah, but I'm sure I'll figure out fairly quick if I did. (checking a 3rd time can't hurt?)

 

[Wibble]

Following on from the soaking yesterday with the unseated QuickNeck seal, the undersuit and drysuit now dried, I tried again. Need to check the new drysuit and thick BZ400 heated undersuit and lots of diving coming up.

Went to the lake with sidemount kit as they won’t allow solo on a rebreather. Kitted up and descended down he ramp, no leaking yay!

Mooch around a bit and got to a container which is also a platform. Was preparing to enter through a window-sized hole cut into the side of it when "boom", utterly inundated with bubbles as a reg unexpectedly free-flowed.

Quite a surprise, so tried to stick a finger into the mouthpiece to no avail. Then switched regs to see if breathing it would stem the flow — of course not. Then started to shutdown the valve, loads of warnings going off about ensuring I shut down the correct valve. Stopped the flow. Waited for a few seconds and turned the valve back on again, more freeflow, so shut down again.

Now down to one cylinder, made my way to the exit and re-tried the valve and it didn’t freeflow, until I took a breath, then it freeflowed.

Damn it. Obviously my kit hates being in freshwater!

Checked the intermediate pressure when I got home, all fine. No freeflow in air either. Need to take a look inside; the XTX50s have been recently serviced along with the Mk25 first stages.

Lessons learned

• It’s the first time in my diving career that a real freeflow has happened underwater.
• Was quite a surprise and consumed a lot of gas as I should have been far quicker to do the shutdown — shallow lake, sidemount, no decompression obligation, so no real issues.
• Was surprised how violent it was, far more than being air-gunned by an instructor. Little wonder it induces panic in some people.
• As I was diving sidemount, it was easy to do the shutdown. Backmount would have been harder (although I regularly practised that when I dived backmount).
• A single tank would have meant a fast ascent to the surface (although I was diving solo, so a single with no pony would be out of the question)

Let’s hope the forthcoming sea dives are less eventful!

 

[rx7diver]

I had to look that one up... an 'octo' that leaks and causes 'inflation' problems... Didn't know there was such a thing where a secondary second stage and inflator were combined.

Lessons learned:

• There actually is such a thing

Yes, one of the arguments against using an AIR 2 (or similar) is that if it malfunctions, you might just lose two pieces of important gear, namely, your BC power inflator and your back-up 2nd stage.

People, especially people who dive very cold water, practice disconnecting the BC power inflator hose--in case they have to IRL. If these people are using an AIR 2 (or similar), then they need to keep in mind that they have just disabled their backup reg, too.

You can "always" orally inflate your BC. But you've still lost your backup reg. (Well, your buddy has your other backup reg, so there's that.)

ETA: I should add that, even given what I wrote above, I still sometimes dive my AIR 2 (I've owned an AIR 2 "forever" and still love it) for simple rec dives, and I trust my recently certified daughter to dive my AIR 2, too. My scuba cert class (in 1986) stressed buddy breathing and orally inflating one's BC. My daughter's class (last spring) was taught similarly. Neither I nor my daughter would be put out if we lost the use of our AIR 2 during a simple rec dive.

rx7diver

 

[RedSeaDiver2]

I've learned to pre-pack when you have the free-time and aren't in a rush, and go through a similar check-list as when you're getting in the water (air, BCD, computer, weights, mask, exposure suit, fins, boots, lights, batteries, etc). I'm about to do my first dives of the season in about 1-week, and packed up everything yesterday and went through my mental check-list twice. Since I had to drag stuff out of boxes, I hope I didn't forget anything, hah, but I'm sure I'll figure out fairly quick if I did. (checking a 3rd time can't hurt?)

I've learnt that creating a comprehensive packing checklist in Word is well worth the effort - just print it off before starting to pack, cross off the things that aren't needed on a particular trip, and then carefully pack the rest.

 

[rx7diver]

I've learnt that creating a comprehensive packing checklist ...

The approach I use is even simpler, I think: I simply completely set up my gear in my family room (well, I don't actually put on my fins or exposure suit, but they're there, laid out), and then, as I break it down, I pack it, including spares and save-a-dive kit, in my dive bags/duffel/milk crates, in the logical order that I intend to unpack when I arrive at the dive site.

Simple. And not necessary to rely on a checklist (which I would probably forget anyway).

rx7diver