Diving incident at Eagles Nest Sink

[KevinNM]

I think several people have articulated that there may have been a problem with the diver losing buoyancy control once he removed his rebreather. If he had a CCR failure but still had the ballast associated with it, the outcome may have been different. We will never know.

The second 95, the two DPVs and the primary light would have helped a whole lot. The event that caused the diver to decide that his best course of action at 300 feet was to remove the CCR seems likely to have started the whole fall into the incident pit.

 

[Stoo]

The second 95, the two DPVs and the primary light would have helped a whole lot. The event that caused the diver to decide that his best course of action at 300 feet was to remove the CCR seems likely to have started the whole fall into the incident pit.

As I have read this thread, I keep thinking back to the old "cascading events" adage that seems to play a role in almost every non-medical accident. If ever there was an example of that adage, this is it...

 

[Dan]

....On this dive, after entering the restriction, buoyancy control of the CCR was lost resulting in a complete silt out. After a few minutes of working too hard to resolve the situation and allowing anxiety rise to an unacceptable level I was close to abandoning the CCR and exiting on OC. This is when I stopped all actions and just told myself to calm down, as long as I had the functioning CCR I had nothing but time. Eventually I properly oriented myself and exited the restriction, put the CCR back on, and exited the system. This situation nearly doubled my planned decompression time...

This is a good decision to make. Diver2 might have been in similar situation.

 

[Ron Lee]

Note the useful discussion here and compare it to that of a deep dive in Cozumel not many years ago. It was three people...the female owner of a dive shop, one of her divemasters and another male.

The end result was one fatality, one paralysis and another who may not have had lasting injuries.

To this date, I am not sure that we ever heard the facts around this event. Maybe they went really deep. How deep is not known to my knowledge. Possibly below 300 feet. Possibly on air. Possibly using AL80 tanks.

As a result of this event, there was a supposed down current cause which probably was false. It generated a lot of concern by divers going to Cozumel. Of course there was good discussion on how to handle a down current and a year or two later I got to experience a mild one. Not a threat to anyone and we all went towards shore a little to get away from that area.

Since the divers almost certainly had dive computers, a thorough investigation would have checked them for the dive profile. Maybe that info was released but I do not recall seeing it.

The suggestions on how to prevent that event from being a fatality are obvious and there were ways to minimize the risk even using air...which really was not suitable if they went well below 130 feet.

In this case, we have released very soon factual information that allows people to evaluate possible scenarios and might result in changes in how they do the same dive in the future. I don't know if anyone has had time to assess these scenarios and consider changes, but information is available to help in that process.

 

[CuzzA]

Maybe I missed it, but what is the procedure for pushing a breather through a restriction?

On OC I assume this wouldn't be as much of an issue because you have a long hose which allows you to be semi seperated from your rig while still breathing from it, but on CC you would have to close the loop, switch to OC bailout and then push your breather through while you follow, possibly breaking all physical contact with the unit, right?

Is it possible this separation has not been considered in training for CC gear removal for passing a restriction? I know this particular dive is beyond the scope of training agencies, but with the future of diving likely being CC, surely more divers will be doffing breathers to pass restrictions as their popularity grows and cost becomes more economical and I imagine with the abilities these units provide, more divers will be cutting the edge in exploration.

@PfcAJ thanks for clarifying why clipping your rig to the line would be a bad idea, but what's the answer. There has to be a best practice for this scenario, right? I find the mindset and forethought of cave divers facinating, but the answer can't be, push and pray, can it?

 

[boulderjohn]

To this date, I am not sure that we ever heard the facts around this event. Maybe they went really deep. How deep is not known to my knowledge. Possibly below 300 feet. Possibly on air. Possibly using AL80 tanks.

As a result of this event, there was a supposed down current cause which probably was false. It generated a lot of concern by divers going to Cozumel. Of course there was good discussion on how to handle a down current and a year or two later I got to experience a mild one. Not a threat to anyone and we all went towards shore a little to get away from that area.

Ron, I'm not sure how you missed it, but a pretty good description of the events eventually emerged. In that case, the truth was obscured at first by a deliberate attempt to mislead the pubic on what happened. To be blunt, people lied to prevent the truth from coming out. We eventually learned that they had planned to go to 300 feet, with two of the divers on AL 80s and one on a AL 100. When they reached 300, Opal kept going, highly narced and possibly even passed out. Her DM (can't recall the name right now) caught her at 400 feet. The other diver stayed at 300, fortunately, because after the other two ran out of air, they were able to do a 3 person buddy breathing off of his tank in order to reach the surface, albeit without any real deco stops.

I wrote those details to further the contrast with this thread. In that thread, people flat out lied in an effort to hide the truth. They wanted to hide the fact that people were foolishly diving far, far, far beyond their ability without proper equipment and suffered the consequences. The facts that they tried to hide are the real lesson for people to learn--don't do that! In this thread, we have divers doing a much more extreme dive than that one, but they were doing it with the proper training and equipment--yet they still died. No one is covering anything up., The people who were involved have been remarkably forthcoming with information--far more than you almost ever see in cases like this. People really are openly trying to figure out a truth that, unlike the Cozumel case, is not truly known to anyone.

 

[PfcAJ]

Maybe I missed it, but what is the procedure for pushing a breather through a restriction?

On OC I assume this wouldn't be as much of an issue because you have a long hose which allows you to be semi seperated from your rig while still breathing from it, but on CC you would have to close the loop, switch to OC bailout and then push your breather through while you follow, possibly breaking all physical contact with the unit, right?

Is it possible this separation has not been considered in training for CC gear removal for passing a restriction? I know this particular dive is beyond the scope of training agencies, but with the future of diving likely being CC, surely more divers will be doffing breathers to pass restrictions as their popularity grows and cost becomes more economical and I imagine with the abilities these units provide, more divers will be cutting the edge in exploration.

@PfcAJ thanks for clarifying why clipping your rig to the line would be a bad idea, but what's the answer. There has to be a best practice for this scenario, right? I find the mindset and forethought of cave divers facinating, but the answer can't be, push and pray, can it?

I think you're getting too hung up on "procedure".

Cave diving like this requires critical thinking and tailoring what you do to the situation as no two situations are identical.

 

[bamafan]

Maybe I missed it, but what is the procedure for pushing a breather through a restriction?

I am not a rebreather diver but I can tell you taking off your ballast while wearing a drysuit is a recipe for disaster. I am sure removing a bm rebreather pushing it through a restriction and putting it back on could be done but why when there are sm units?

Something to think about is that the farther you get from the entrance in a cave generally most people won't go bailing off into really nasty silty passage where you are going to have zero viz on the way out. Add in the 300' depth and you are talking about something that only a handful of people would do.

The craziest sidemount diver I know of is Marius Frei from Europe. He came over to the US and really hurt some feelings. He found the new section of Ginnie, connected two small passages in Little River, connected Jb1 to Jb2, extended the line in Manatee and last but not least extended the line in downstream Hole in the Wall. I doubt to this day anyone has been to the end of his line as it is beyond nasty. Supposedly he found some dry passages. The reason I am telling this is in my opinion what you are talking about is on this scale and the people who will do these dives are very few and far between.

 

[KevinNM]

Apparently people don't normally have to take off the rebreather to navigate this restriction. Something went very wrong that led to the diver deciding this was his best course of action. It's quite possible that at that point in time it really was his best course of action. Unless the GoPro has footage we will probably never know exactly what happened there that made him decide to do this.

 

[CuzzA]

Thanks for the replies. I should and will shut up on that issue, but the fact he presumably lost his unit really bothers me.

I will say that I am learning things from this thread. The deco clock on these deep dives are mind boggling and definitely puts things into perspective for someone like myself who has a desire to dive beyond rec limits and while this dive is not the norm it re-enforces the need for proper dive planning and having not only enough gas for your dive, but enough backup gas. Not that that was the issue in this incident.

The surface support theories mentioned earlier have made me rethink how much reserve safety gas I should keep on my boat and other boats I dive from. It's currently not uncommon for us to bring what we're going to use for the day and nothing more. We really should be bringing a couple reserve safety cylinders to facilitate help to a diver for whatever reason (entanglement, injury or accidental deco). It also has convinced me that I should pull my slate out of the gear bin and start carrying it again in case I need to communicate with someone topside. Clip it to my SMB/reel and send the message.

I'll echo Dan_T's post that I appreciate the explanations.