Why the long...................hose?

[RayfromTX]

My wife went to the 7' hose when she couldn't get comfortable with the hose having it's way with her.

On many dives I use less air than her so I share with her for part of the dive to extend our time underwater. During that time she appreciates my 7' hose as well.

 

[Bob DBF]

1. A long hose would have given the separation needed to calmly deal with the ascent.
2. A necklaced second would have minimized/eliminated the fumbling for an octo.
3. A streamlined octo/inflator works great until you need to use it. Tough to exhaust when it's in your mouth.
4. Luckily both divers were relatively calm, the outcome could have been much worse than a missed safety stop.

1. The long hose may be more convient, however calmly ascending is more a training issue than the length of your hose.

2. Although I now use a bungeed backup, I never had a problem prior to that deploying the safe second, for others or myself.

3. The octo/inflators I have used, other than the Sherwood Shadow, used a cord to pull the shoulder dump open so one does not have to remove the reg.

4. Calm is the most important tool for a diver in an emergency. The focus on equipment as a solution for inadequate training and practice overlooks the fact that the same issue with better equipment can turn into a clusterf**k if the diver is poorly trained or has not bothered to practice with his gear.



Bob

 

[doctormike]

4. Calm is the most important tool for a diver in an emergency. The focus on equipment as a solution for inadequate training and practice overlooks the fact that the same issue with better equipment can turn into a clusterf**k if the diver is poorly trained or has not bothered to practice with his gear.

Bob

Optimized gear is not a solution for inadequate training, nor is it meant to be in place of better training. However, for any given diver, having a better gear configuration will give them an edge when an emergency happens, since even the best diver's skills may degrade in that setting.

As Mike Tyson said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth".

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

As a long time user of a long-hose configuration I'm a firm believer in its benefits. But I'm going to offer the opinion here that based on the description of the incident in the OP, these two divers would have more benefited from practicing the air sharing drills they learned in OW before attempting a wreck dive to 100+ feet. It's never a good idea to assume that just because you mimicked something your instructor showed you a time or two during your OW checkout dives that you'll be able to count on using those skills in a real-time emergency situation. Like all skills, you develop them through practice. And like all skills, you lose whatever level of proficiency you achieved by not using them after you've learned them.

Yes, a long hose might have helped in this situation ... but it could have also created more problems, depending on how good they were at deploying a long hose. It wasn't the gear choices that created the situation described in the OP ... it was a lack of being able to deploy what they supposedly learned with sufficient skill to have averted the rapid ascent.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[rongoodman]

I've settled on a 5' hose for recreational dives. It wraps comfortably around my chest and I don't need to bother tucking it.

 

[doctormike]

These discussions happen all the time here. I think that it's kind of a straw man to respond to a gear optimization suggestion with a recommendation for better training. It's not that training and practice aren't important, it's just that it's not an either-or thing.

The thing about a better gear configuration is that you figure it out once, it's with you for all of your dives, and if and when someday you need it, it's just there. Sure, it's great to practice and drill things, but that's a long term commitment and skills degrade over time. Having better gear doesn't prevent you from practicing. And it's not that the gear choices caused the OP incident - it's that some configurations are better than others for dealing with an incident no matter what the skill and comfort level of the divers involved.

For example, one of the reasons I don't like the combined Octo/Inflator things is that proponents always talk about how it's fine because they practice with it and discuss it with their buddies ahead of time, that you can pull the hose to dump instead of using the valve, etc.. As opposed to just having an extra second stage that is exactly like the second stage that you were diving with, and that you can just stick in your mouth or your buddy's mouth and breath from like every other underwater breath that you ever took. So in case you or the diver you are rescuing doesn't have perfect skills in case of an emergency, there is one less thing to worry about.

As far as I can tell the long hose / primary donate thing works well, has no downside that I can see, and it will always be there for you even if it's 20 years before you end up needing to donate gas. I'm not saying that everyone has to use it, or that all agencies should adopt it, or whatever. I'm just saying that it's a darned good solution to the problem.

 

[BRT]

Seems like you'd take it out of your mouth to exhaust, then replace. I agree it's apt to be more cumbersome to deal with (I use one) in an air-sharing situation, but that's a trade-off for not having a separate hose & 2nd stage to deal with the rest of the time.



That brings up a question. I've never used, or tried to use, a 7' long hose setup. I don't think most OW students get trained with that, and I suspect those who do probably have better-than-average instructors. So, let's say for sake of argument the long hose style arrangement suddenly became standard agency practice for, oh, say, SSI or PADI. What are the odds mainstream-trained newbies would find a way to screw it up in real world OOA scenarios? Would it really cut down on badly handled OOA situations?

Richard.

Pull your shoulder dump. I never exhaust through my inflator.

 

[JohnnyC]

http://cloud2.snappages.com/ac566fc7767e6c89f0768bcb0ce70965749666d0/2011_DAN_AnnualDivingReport.pdf

I'm not seeing where 56% of accidents involved an OOG situation. In fact, according to section 3.7.2 (pg 30) it reports that only 13% of fatalities were due to being out of breathing gas, and a number of those seem to be due to extenuating circumstances (entrapment, cave, rebreather fault, etc.). If you could point me to the section where it mentions 56%, or really any number other than the one I found, I'd appreciate it. I feel like I missed something somewhere.

 

[dberry]

Training is important, but clear communication pre-dive is essential when diving with an insta-buddy (like many of us routinely do.) The majority of recreational divers only know to look for the yellow regulator stowed in the "golden triangle" (or whatever OW classes label it.)

Also, my wing doesn't have a shoulder dump, just a dump at the bottom, so my inflator gets used most of the time.

 

[pjhansman]

Lots of interesting discussion happening here. I've been considering going to a long hose for a while and probably will make the switch soon. Also, I'm still not sure what constitutes the officially recognized signal for "head for the anchor".

However......

Maybe I've missed something, but it seems to me that the original situation described has little to do with equipment and more to do with WHY somebody would run low on air at that depth. Sounds more like a training issue than an equipment issue. This is just not something that should happen unless there's been an equipment failure.