9 replies to this topic

[ScubaDadMiami]

The names of the actual participants from this incident have been withheld to protect the guilty:

Five divers went out on what was supposed to be easy drift diving off of Palm Beach County, Florida. Two were on open circuit, and three were on CCR.

The group decision was to make a drift dive in the 60 foot range so that everyone could enjoy a relaxing dive day together while part of the group would make equipment tests. First, a team of two open circuit divers were to dive for about an hour. After that, the three closed circuit divers would conduct a dive of up to two hours. While each set of divers were to be in the water, the remaining divers would follow in the boat above.

This was supposed to be a shake down dive in several respects. First, "Larry" had just finished his Optima training, and he was making his first post-course dive. "Curly" had just received the FX upgrade to the Optima and just installed a BOV on his unit. So, Curly was in the process of working out some issues with the new set up.

"Curly Joe" and "Shemp," the open circuit divers, hit the water first. Observing their dive flag movement on the surface, the group aboard the boat could tell that the divers were swimming against the current in order to keep from drifting into deeper water. After about 45 minutes, Curly Joe and Shemp emerged from the dive, proclaiming that the visibility was poor, they were tired from working hard to swim against the current, and that Shemp's drysuit was not so dry. Okay, on to the CCR portion of the dive.

Three CCR divers hit the water. Almost as soon as they get to the bottom, something was not right with "Larry." He handed the line to the floating flag off to "Curly," stopped, and started adjusting his hand sets. "Moe" and Curly were keeping an eye out, asking Larry if he was okay. Larry then switches to open circuit, signals that he is aborting the dive, and ascends.

Meanwhile, Curly is holding his video camera in one hand and the line with the float in the other. So, Curly passes the line off to Moe, and Curly shoots some video. The visibility is so bad that Curly is really not getting any good footage.

After drifting along for a few minutes, Curly suddenly hears a loud pop followed by the unmistaken sound of large amounts of gas escaping from somewhere unknown. What happened after this only took about 30 seconds. However, there were a lot of things happening at once. It might sound like it took a long time for the events to unfold. However, all of this happened in a matter of seconds.

Curly can't see bubbles at this point though he can hear what sounds like a free flow episode. Curly decides to bail out to open circuit to assess the situation. Curly turns to activate his newly installed bail out valve and tries to draw in some gas. When he does, nothing comes out! Curly then reaches around and deploys Curly's open circuit bail out regulator, opening the valve on its tank and drawing some fresh breathing gas. This time, the gas flows.

By this time, Curly sees what is going on. The hose that connects to Curly's bail out valve to onboard diluent tank has come undone (which is why there was "no gas" when switching to the BOV), and the hose is going full blast while snaking around in the water, draining diluent. Curly signals to Moe while grabbing the hose. Moe has already heard the sound, sees the situation, and he is on the way over.

Moe grabs the hose and hits the shut off valve that Curly had installed on it, stopping the gas flow. Moe screws the hose back together. Since Curly knows that Curly still has a functioning CCR, Curly goes back onto the loop.

Curly does a check of his diluent. During the event, it dropped from about 2500 p.s.i. to about 500. That's still enough to make the ascent with gas to spare. So, Curly decides to stay on the loop.

Suddenly, it dawns on Curly: The camera! During the excitement of the emergency, Curly had put the camera down on the bottom. In just a minute or two, Curly and Moe had drifted away from it. Curly decides to see if he and Moe can make any progress against the current to find it (even with the poor visibility). However, before doing so, Curly decides to plug in offboard gas since diluent is running on the low side.

Curly tries and tries again to disconnect the manual inject hose from the inlet. However, it just won't seem to come off. Curly tries signaling to Moe to connect it for him. Moe doesn't get what Curly am saying. So, Curly decides to give up on connecting it and start to see if he and Moe can just make a quick search for the camera before ascending. Curly still has plenty of bail out gas, and he and Moe are in about only 60 feet of water and well within the no decompression limits. So, Curly decides that spending a few minutes looking for the camera was not too risky.

After trying for about a minute to advance against the current, Moe thumbs the dive. Enough has already gone wrong on this day. It is time to put an end to it. Curly has no choice. Curly returns the sign, and he and Moe make their ascent. The pair drifts in the shallows for a few minutes, making a safety stop before surfacing. Bottom time is just over 30 minutes at 60 feet.

What happened? Since the water was at its coldest of the year, Larry added a vest to his wetsuit. He also did not bring a separate offboard bailout tank, which would have made him a bit more negative (at least when full). (The Optima comes with a Rite Source/Air II for bail out in shallow water. So, no requirement for separate offboard gas.) Because of this, Larry was underweighted for the dive. He was fighting to get to the bottom due to being underweighted, causing him to work hard and increase his respiration.

Second, not only was there strong current on this day but also strong surge (10 feet forwards, 5 feet backwards). In addition to the weighting problem, Larry also had to deal with the surge while trying to control the situation. The surge took Larry by surprise because he dove this site many times before on OC, but he never seen such bad conditions.

The third contributing factor was that Larry had his counterlungs pulled so tightly down to his waist (still working on the adjustments to his unit) that it made it so that he felt like he could not get sufficient gas exchange. This was why he decided to bail out and abort the dive.

Unfortunately, when Larry aborted the dive, trying to deal with the strong surge and current combined with the underweighting caused a delay in switching to OC on his handset quickly enough. His unit was adding oxygen during the ascent in an attempt to maintain the set point of the bottom as Larry started to rise, and his filling counterlungs pulled him up on ascent. Larry made a direct ascent to the surface, moving too rapidly for comfort. Fortunately, he had only been on the bottom for a few minutes, and he made it out of the water with only a damaged ego. Larry will certainly add some weight before making his next dive with this configuration.

Curly's BOV hose had an in-line shut off valve connected to the swivel using a hand tight fitting. Even though Curly double checked to make sure that it was tightened before the dive, apparently, head movement caused the shut off valve to work its way loose over the course of the dive. This was the reason the hose popped off. Curly has since added some Locktite to this connection to prevent this from happening in the future.

What else did Curly learn? Well, the whole purpose of this dive was to become familiar with his new set up. So, the lack of this familiarity did contribute to some delay and additional loss of gas that could have been prevented. Curly might have been able to shut down the shut off valve faster had he known what was going on and then had the instinct (from prior practice) to shut it down.

Second, Curly has since changed the feed for the BOV so that it comes from the left side as does his bottom bail out gas. Curly thinks that having everything that is diluent and bottom mix coming from the same side will make it faster to shut down the gas faster in the future should this need arise. Now, Curly will no longer have mentally trace the route of the gas before taking action.

Curly can't exactly say why he could not disconnect the manual add hose to connect to offboard gas. He has practiced this skill on a fairly regular basis without a problem. He is now considering adding a hose hat to the connector to make it easier to get off the next time. He will be practicing this skill regularly to make sure that this will not be an issue in the future.

One big intention of diving together as a team is to learn about one another's gear configurations. However, Curly had just assumed that Moe was routing onboard diluent to the manual add on his unit just as Curly does. (It turns out that Moe keeps the manual add valve free so that he can plug in offboard gas rather than to start the dive with gas of any sort already connected. He relies on the ADV to add diluent. So, he was not familiar with the way that Curly has his unit configured.) When Curly tried to signal Moe about connecting offboard to his manual inlet, Moe saw that Curly had a hose already connected there. So, Moe didn't understand that Curly wanted Moe to help Curly disconnect it so that Curly could plug in offboard gas. Curly will make sure to have discussions about topics like this with new dive buddies from now on, and Curly will not just assume that everyone does things the same way.

This being said, is there anything that went right? Well, Curly thinks that trying to bail out as a first move was the right thing to do. He had what was an unknown issue at that point, and it does not hurt to go to open circuit, assess the situation, and then to go back onto the loop. Bailing out to off board open circuit after trying to use the BOV was next in line. Overall, considering the circumstances, Curly feels a little better about things considering that this went well.

Once the situation was stabilized, Curly went back onto the loop. Curly thinks that this was another good move. It would seem obvious to do so while reading this. However, in a real life situation, Curly now knows that he has been tested in this situation, and he feels good about the fact that he thought to go back onto the loop instead of having his mind clouded by the situation.

Despite all the problems, Moe and Curly finished the dive in an almost routine manner. Although situations came up, Moe and Curly dealt with them on the bottom. Once things were stable, Moe and Curly finished the dive, including making safety stops, on their way to the surface.

Most importantly, Curly says that he feels pretty good that he kept his head especially after he tried to bail out only to find no available gas. He certainly knew that he had some kind of severe equipment problem before he saw that hose swinging around like a high pressure fire truck hose without the fireman controlling it. However, he started to go through the paces to make sure he had working gas and then to diagnose the situation.

Once Curly became aware of what was happening, he should have thought to shut down the gas, but he says that he thinks that the new set up and lack of practice of using it contributed to this. Once he has practiced some drills using the new set up, he now believes that he will know where everything is and will react in an instant.

The divers in this story survived the dive with nothing more than damaged egos. However, they hope that this lesson will serve them well in their future diving careers. Unfortunately, to quote Curly Joe: "[Curly's] camera sleeps with the fishes."

[PerroneFord]

Good lessons there for sure. And important to read for any OC divers who might do mixed diving. We can assume that Curly came off the loop correctly without flooding, or the problems would have compounded quickly. It is interesting that Curly's buddy did not notice the camera being put down, but in a low/no gas situation, the camera becomes a DISTANT second.

Unfamiliarity with the BOV is going to catch a lot of CCR guys for a while I suppose. We've just added a new BOV to one of the Megs at the shop. Since the CCR divers at the shop are also familiar with the KISS, this will not be too bad. But for those coming in who've only been on Inspirations or similar units without a BOV, it is something new to deal with. We have gone to a plug in manifold type system for diluent to simply routing and to make sure that diluent gas is available to the ADV, BOV, and drysuit if using non-helium mixtures. Units such as the Ourboros of course demand offboard gas for the suit and it has no BOV available at this time.

I need to do an Optima familiarization and an Inspo one as well. I understand the Meg fairly well at this point.

Thanks for the post Howard.

[BubbleBoy]

The names of the actual participants from this incident have been withheld to protect the guilty:

Come on Scuba Dad, admit it, you were Mo.

[JimG]

Three CCR divers hit the water. Almost as soon as they get to the bottom, something was not right with "Larry." He handed the line to the floating flag off to "Curly," stopped, and started adjusting his hand sets. "Moe" and Curly were keeping an eye out, asking Larry if he was okay. Larry then switches to open circuit, signals that he is aborting the dive, and ascends.

It appears that "Larry" (who is clearly having some type of problem, which not only continued but actually worsened during his ascent) returned to the surface solo while the other divers continued with the dive. Is that correct? Is that a standard protocol for diving a CCR?

One big intention of diving together as a team is to learn about one another's gear configurations.

With all due respect, there is nothing in your description of this incident that suggests to me that these three divers were working as a "team". In a team dive, we do not allow divers who are having issues to do solo ascents. We do not chase after cameras when we are having some type of difficulty with our life support equipment. We do not "learn about one another's gear" during the dive, while we are in the process of trying to diagnose a problem with it - gear familiarity is something that needs to be addressed before the dive even begins.

Maybe I missed something in the narrative - I understand that the purpose in posting this was to get people to consider what could have happened (but did not, thanks to the shallow depth and the divers' ability to triage the situation properly), but I can't help thinking that if the entire group had surfaced with "Larry" (i.e. as a "team"), then the rest of the problems would have been avoided altogether (and perhaps even discovered in time to make corrections or adjustments for the next dive).

Am I off base here?

[shadragon]

Here is a money making opportunity. Someone needs to come up with a device you can attach to a camera or expensive piece of gear. After x amount of time in water a CO2 cartridge fires inflating a small lift bag that raises the object to the surface.

Or just do what I do and clip the gear to a D-ring on a retractor... That way when I come up, it comes up too...

[JimG]

Or just do what I do and clip the gear to a D-ring on a retractor... That way when I come up, it comes up too...

That's exactly what I do too, except I don't use a retractor. I just clip the camera to a D-ring with a double ender. It's secure, effective, and easy to do, even in an emergency.

[PerroneFord]

Hmmm,

Lemme grab a chair. This is gonna be a wild one.

Edited by PerroneFord, 10 April 2007 - 10:23 AM.

[Diverbrian]

One major point is that camera is completely expendable. I did lose one on a Florida reef a few years back. The spring in the snap clip had rusted and the clip that I thought was snapped was wide open. Oops! Since I did my advanced nitrox, I have not been a big fan of retractors. They can cause entanglement issues. Still, I would rather lose the camera than suffer more dire consequences. Cameras can be replaced. Last time that I checked, you can't go to a store and purchase another model of me for any price.

[BubbleBoy]

.... Since I did my advanced nitrox, I have not been a big fan of retractors. They can cause entanglement issues.

Interesting point about retractors that has often concerened me too. I'm going to try starting a new thread on this topic, since it's a little off track here. We'll see where it goes.

[jextract]

I'd say "it depends" ... if your preferred type of diving is open reef and you use a traditional gear configuration (gracefully sidestepping THAT landmine), retractors are better than nothing for keeping your gear close to you and off the reef. If your diving puts you in situations where you're more likely to have obstacles to work around, be it kelp, wrecks, caves, etc., you might select another attachment mechanism like a double-ender.