
How my pride almost killed me - ryanwaggoner
http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/09/how-my-pride-almost-killed-me/
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bambax
> My dive buddy took a minute to realize what I meant _and then another minute
> to fumble for his spare regulator_

(emphasis mine)

Yikes! Why didn't he let him share his main regulator while he was looking for
the spare?? What if he couldn't find the spare?... (they often become
entangled in the tubes in the back and are hard to get)

This is really bizarre.

~~~
lukatmyshu
So many questions (and so many places this could have been fixed). a) As soon
your dive buddy saw your air gauge was that low he should have gone into the
share air procedure. Parent's idea of letting him have your main reg while
fumbling for the spare is also a good idea (although I don't believe most
training includes that step). b) The divemaster should have been proactive
about asking you how much air you had. It is really easy to suck down a lot of
air quickly (especially your first few dives) and asking the group how much
air they are using early on can indicate if someone is being aggressive with
their air. c) i can't believe you guys were spread 60-70 (in total) away from
each other. That's pretty far. d) If you were that low under where you ran out
after 10 feet, the DM should have taken you up. Remember you also need to
inflate your BCD on the surface, you don't know if the boat is going to be
there, lots of things can still go wrong.

I've been in a really similar situation. 100 feet down, my dive buddy was
someone who hadn't dove in 5 years. It was a drift dive and he was trying to
take a lot of pictures. 20 minutes into the dive (the DM queried, he didn't
volunteer) he revealed he had roughly 500 PSI left (some believe that's the
level you should be at when you get _out_ of the water). Our DM sent us up
together, we shared air ... but it was still touch and go.

------
fondue
"Forgot that air supply runs out faster the deeper you are."

I ran into this one on my certification dive; we were diving on the Madera in
Lake Superior in December, I was having trouble keeping my bouyancy which I
chalked up to inexperience but later discovered was a leaky BCD. When we went
to move to the stern which is in 60 feet of water we all checked our air and I
had a quarter of a tank left! Everyone else had at least three quarters of a
tank. None the less, the rest of the dive was called off and we had to swim
back to shore. I asked why we didn't at least try the deeper dive and he
reminded me that you consume much more air in deeper water, pretty much double
every 30 feet, that we wouldn't have even made it to the stern before I ran
out.

------
gaius
The divemaster should have rejigged the buddy pairs so each newbie was with an
experienced diver.

A lot of new divemasters are overconfident too, it's possible to go straight
from scratch to DM in a summer, but it's like that SCRUM master certificate
doesn't make you an expert methodologist by itself, you need experience too.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Actually, my dive buddy was pretty experienced, and I think that was part of
the problem...he was just complacent. You see the same thing with a lot of
pilots who have several hundred hours under their belt. They have enough
experience to be overconfident because they haven't had the shit scared out of
them, and not enough to know what they don't know.

~~~
gaius
An amusing story from my last dive trip, where the DM had done his training a
closed fist meant 0 whereas we'd all been trained that it meant 50. So for the
first couple of dives before we'd asked why we were coming up early, he'd
thought everyone had 50bar (a quarter-tank, for the non-divers) less than they
had...

------
wiredfool
So, you hadn't dived in a year, since your cert. You planned to be in over the
cert'd depth, on your first post cert dive. In a group with one dive master,
over a wall, which is tricky. And then there was peer pressure to not suck
down air too fast. That's not really a recipe for success.

