Cold in the Water - What you SHOULD know!

[VooDooGasMan]

Dump besides today I can barley turn the Wing nut on bands to take off BP/W after dive. muscle strength is gone after 40 water temp.

 

[dumpsterDiver]

Here's another: If the diver is getting cold during the dive and trying to control their breathing to a slow steady pace, air consumption can still rise a lot. It took me a number of times to realize that as I got colder, my breathing rate could stay the same, but I was unconsciously taking deeper breaths and exhaling more completely... This can cause a pretty big jump in air consumption and can be hard to notice, since you are not breathing faster.

 

[Randy43068]

Cold you say? Yer gonna need a pee valve. :d

 

[Bob DBF]

On two occations I have buddied with a diver that went hypothermic. Both times the diver was relativly new and had never experienced real cold and we encountered uncharactisticly cold thermocline. I wear a Farmer John and the suit of choice with most divers is a one peice so I have the advantage, if its warm I zip the jacket down and let the water cool me and when cold I zip it up.

The first time I was clueless. Towards the end of the dive my buddy would "look" at something on a rock or the bottom. I would remind her of the pressure and time and we would again move to the anchor line. When it happened on the anchor line I knew something was wrong. Up the anchor line and blew the safety stop so I could verbalize WTF. It was evident boarding the boat what was going on. She remembered being cold and decided to tough it out but nothing else untill I was yelling at her on the surface. I wrote in her log "hypothermia is not your friend".

The latest, I figured out after the second, lets get moving, and the "100 yard stare" in his eyes. We had been deeper and some of it could have been N2, but out of the water he was cold for a long time. Both divers stopped diving for the day to warm up.

In that condition, should you loose that buddy, they would stay there looking into lord knows where until the air ran out. One more reason not to dive in single file.



Bob
--------------------
I may be old, but I’m not dead yet.

 

[DivemasterDennis]

Our students do their open water dives at 5000 feet altitude in water that varies from 55 degrees to 68 degrees. Advanced students doing a deep dive hit a thermocline that has fairly constant 50 degree temperature. We add 10 feet to dive planning profiles and to actual depth when calculating pressure groups after a dive. I know many computers do an automatic altitude adjust when giving NDL's but I am not aware of any computer that adjusts for the stress of cold water. I think divers should know to plan dives as if they were at 10 feet deeper than they are to adjust and be conservative due to the stress of cold water diving at anything under 70 degrees; maybe even more at extreme cold depths unless you are very used to those conditions.
DivemasterDennis

 

[lowviz]

I am excercising great restraint in my response when it comes to you starting a thread on cold-water diving.



Situational awareness is the first to go. I try to track it by noting that simple things become "too much trouble" to do. Like seeing something interesting and not exploring it because running a reel would be "too much trouble".

When checking my SPG becomes too much trouble, (I just did that anyway) it's time to go...

 

[Jax]

I am excercising great restraint in my response when it comes to you starting a thread on cold-water diving.

Yeah, right, from a guy that doesn't think it's too cold until he needs a jackhammer to go diving! :tongue2:

 

[lowviz]

You know you want to, it's only a matter of time.

-wouldn't an ice cert look nice in your collection...

 

[Akimbo]

Yeah, right, from a guy that doesn't think it's too cold until he needs a jackhammer to go diving! :tongue2:

OMG, that reminds me of an old B&W photo from Navy diving school. The river is frozen over around this partially submerged wreck the class had to raise. It was the first dive in the morning and I am standing on the ice in full deep-sea dress (35 Lb shoes, 85 Lb weight belt, 54 Lb helmet) as tenders use fire axes on the ice around me. I often went first because I was short and the small suits leaked less. Man that was the pits.

 

[lowviz]

OMG, that reminds me of an old B&W photo from Navy diving school. The river is frozen over around this partially submerged wreck the class had to raise. It was the first dive in the morning and I am standing on the ice in full deep-sea dress (35 Lb shoes, 85 Lb weight belt, 54 Lb helmet) as tenders use fire axes on the ice around me. I often went first because I was short and the small suits leaked less. Man that was the pits.

-gimme a hand with this, once Jax sees the bottom of an ice sheet, we'll never hear the end of "how cool" it is...