Who has had to bailout?

[JonG1]

Do you have a link to the thread pls Cathal

 

[Vicko]

On the first day of MOD1 on a Meg. I read all sorts of things about minimal loop volume so I decided not to use the ADV at all during training at least.
In the first 10 minutes of diving I hear a gurgling sound from my left lung so I tried dewatering, worked fine and kept going, only on my next breath I heard it again. For some reason I took it as something normal....

Did not really pay much attention until at 45minutes and at 6m simulating a stop, I lost control of my buoyancy and went slightly head down to get back to 6m. At the same time my instructor gave me a boom drill and in the middle of it he gave me the bailout signal. I again went slightly head down, started flushing the loop and as my hand went to close the dsv I got a mouthful of cocktail. At first my instructor was confused why i'm washing out my teeth before putting the bailout reg in my mouth, apparently I was doing it for a good 20 seconds. Took 3-4 breaths from the reg but since I could still feel something funky in my mouth I ascended to the surface.

Turns out that the adv was not screwed in all the way and me trying to keep the loop as empty as possible kept sucking in water. The unit passed a positive and negative check (was negative for 2 hours almost) and a bubble check, still not sure how the adv got that way.
Me going head down twice with a lung full of water was enough to bypass the water trap and get the water from the canister to the inhale side.
Luckily just a few days earlier I was reading about someone's cocktail mouthwash from a SF2 here on the forum so I reacted fast enough to clear my mouth and not inhale any.

 

[cathal]

Do you have a link to the thread pls Cathal

Post in thread 'Anxiety that doesn’t seem to leave'
Anxiety that doesn’t seem to leave

 

[stuartv]

Diving a rEvo since 2013. I should have bailed out once but I was not able to. I had a massive panic attack coming up from a wreck. I was at 55M on the ascent with 100 mins of deco left and my breathing went off the charts for about 3 minutes. During those 3 minutes I absolutely knew that even if it meant a rapid ascent I could not get off the loop onto a 2nd stage.
I managed to get my breathing back to normal after about 3 minutes and the next day I ordered a BOV! I posted the reason for the panic attack on another thread.

2 questions:

When you say that you knew you could not get off the loop, what do you mean? You could not physically or psychologically get yourself to take the DSV out of your mouth long enough to switch to an OC reg? Or you knew that you did not have enough BO gas to handle the rate at which you were breathing? From your statement that you ordered a BOV the next day, I'm guessing you meant the former - that you could not physically or psychologically make yourself take the DSV out of your mouth.

You said the triggering event was "diver error" (in the other thread). Was it an error in the way you assembled or were diving your unit? Or an error nothing to do with your actual CCR?

 

[JonG1]

Not dissimilar to Cathal, I had numerous experiences of breathing related issues on my CCR, the reality was I was too deep or too far too soon, I never got to a full scale bailout and go home, but the ease of taking sanity breaths via a BOV with a simple lever flick, was a god send and allowed me time to calm down and take stock.

 

[cathal]

2 questions:

When you say that you knew you could not get off the loop, what do you mean? You could not physically or psychologically get yourself to take the DSV out of your mouth long enough to switch to an OC reg? Or you knew that you did not have enough BO gas to handle the rate at which you were breathing?

You said the triggering event was "diver error" (in the other thread). Was it an error in the way you assembled or were diving your unit? Or an error nothing to do with your actual CCR?

To answer your first question, yes, I was not able to physically stop breathing for long enough to take the DSV out of my mouth and put the OC reg in.

To answer your 2nd question, its a bit longer - The unit was working fine and it had been built correctly. The context is important here, I was diving the unit 2 years at this stage, it was my first deep dive of the year, I had just finished the MOD2 the year before. So basically a newbie at deep stuff.

I had built the unit the night before, it was working perfect, the wreck(Justicia) was a 3 hour steam out. So while packing the unit onto the boat I turned on the Dil and inflated the wing a small bit when putting the unit on the bench on the boat. I then turned off the dil (or so I thought) and ran the cargo strap across the unit to secure it to the boat.

At this stage, the cargo strap was running across the rEvo MAV and unbeknown to me it was pressing down on the Dil button. To make this worse I had actually not shut off my dil cylinder fully. My dil cylinder was actually still open just a fraction but enough. Between the 3 hr steam out, the engine noise and being in the cabin I never heard the hissing of the dil going into the loop or the OPV firing, I also never noticed when kitting up the contents gauge that would have shown that there was about 5 bar of dil left.

When kitting up on site the main clue that I missed was when I put the loop in my mouth, it was over pressurised, I never stopped to check out why. My other main error was that I never bothered to check my contents gauges kitting up as I was a **** hot CCR diver and sure I had checked them on shore.

When prebreathing the unit worked fine. I pressurised the wing and I injected dil into the loop. I first noticed something was up at about 6-10M when going down the shot. It was hard to breathe off the loop so I pressed the MAV a couple of times as I dont use the rEVO ADV. I heard nothing, at this point I am at 15M and I press it again and still nothing and I am now at 20M and approaching the lazy line junction on the shot where I place my name tag.

I now can't breathe. I check my dil gauge and its zero. So I pull out the LP whip off my BO and connect it to the MAV and it works fine and I am breathing normal. So decision decision, do I turn the dive or do I keep going down? I go down off course as I have a perfectly good rebreather with new sorb, 5 working cells and now an Ali 80 cft of Diluent plumbed into the unit. Another massive mistake.

But as I descend my mind is frantically racing with worry as to what had happened to my diluent, what happened? So I continue on in this frame of mind for 40mins at 70M. I was absolutely miserable on that dive and on the ascent at 55M or so thats when the panic attack occurs with a 100 minutes of deco left.

I experienced a panic attack on every dive thats season and it only went away over the course of the winter. The next year I was fine. So yes, the entire incident was preventable and it was user error, one that I learned a hard lesson from tbh.

 

[chris_duc]

Twice:
1. Solenoid that failed open and therefore constant add of O2, B/O to debug and then back on the loop with feathering the O2 bottle
2. CO2 hit

 

[stuartv]

To answer your first question, yes, I was not able to physically stop breathing for long enough to take the DSV out of my mouth and put the OC reg in.

To answer your 2nd question, its a bit longer - The unit was working fine and it had been built correctly. The context is important here, I was diving the unit 2 years at this stage, it was my first deep dive of the year, I had just finished the MOD2 the year before. So basically a newbie at deep stuff.

I had built the unit the night before, it was working perfect, the wreck(Justicia) was a 3 hour steam out. So while packing the unit onto the boat I turned on the Dil and inflated the wing a small bit when putting the unit on the bench on the boat. I then turned off the dil (or so I thought) and ran the cargo strap across the unit to secure it to the boat.

At this stage, the cargo strap was running across the rEvo MAV and unbeknown to me it was pressing down on the Dil button. To make this worse I had actually not shut off my dil cylinder fully. My dil cylinder was actually still open just a fraction but enough. Between the 3 hr steam out, the engine noise and being in the cabin I never heard the hissing of the dil going into the loop or the OPV firing, I also never noticed when kitting up the contents gauge that would have shown that there was about 5 bar of dil left.

When kitting up on site the main clue that I missed was when I put the loop in my mouth, it was over pressurised, I never stopped to check out why. My other main error was that I never bothered to check my contents gauges kitting up as I was a **** hot CCR diver and sure I had checked them on shore.

When prebreathing the unit worked fine. I pressurised the wing and I injected dil into the loop. I first noticed something was up at about 6-10M when going down the shot. It was hard to breathe off the loop so I pressed the MAV a couple of times as I dont use the rEVO ADV. I heard nothing, at this point I am at 15M and I press it again and still nothing and I am now at 20M and approaching the lazy line junction on the shot where I place my name tag.

I now can't breathe. I check my dil gauge and its zero. So I pull out the LP whip off my BO and connect it to the MAV and it works fine and I am breathing normal. So decision decision, do I turn the dive or do I keep going down? I go down off course as I have a perfectly good rebreather with new sorb, 5 working cells and now an Ali 80 cft of Diluent plumbed into the unit. Another massive mistake.

But as I descend my mind is frantically racing with worry as to what had happened to my diluent, what happened? So I continue on in this frame of mind for 40mins at 70M. I was absolutely miserable on that dive and on the ascent at 55M or so thats when the panic attack occurs with a 100 minutes of deco left.

I experienced a panic attack on every dive thats season and it only went away over the course of the winter. The next year I was fine. So yes, the entire incident was preventable and it was user error, one that I learned a hard lesson from tbh.

Many, many thanks for sharing that story! Such a good opportunity to learn from other people's experience!

New question, just for my edification: What did you use for wing and/or suit inflation once your onboard dil was empty and you had your offboard plugged into the MAV? Guessing you had separate drysuit inflation and you used drysuit for buoyancy through the dive?

 

[cathal]

Many, many thanks for sharing that story! Such a good opportunity to learn from other people's experience!

New question, just for my edification: What did you use for wing and/or suit inflation once your onboard dil was empty and you had your offboard plugged into the MAV? Guessing you had separate drysuit inflation and you used drysuit for buoyancy through the dive?

It was 7 years ago now. I had a separate dry suit Inflation bottle, I’m guessing I entirely relied on that for inflation throughout the dive, yet another whopper of a diver error on my part!

 

[Wibble]

It was 7 years ago now. I had a separate dry suit Inflation bottle, I’m guessing I entirely relied on that for inflation throughout the dive, yet another whopper of a diver error on my part!

Note to self: do a few rounds of hose switching drills: wing, drysuit, offboard dil, offboard O2...