First "save" as DM. Sort of...

[dc4bs]

A: The "sort of" was that I was simply buddy diving with a new buddy (although it was at the request of my instructor), not specificaly DM diving with a class.

B: I did a buddy check with her at entry and looked at her gear when she had the minor freeflow mentioned. We then floated at the descent point while the rest of the group gathered together. When we all were ready to descend, she simply grabbed the wrong regulator (the 2 looked very similar). As she had never dove with it before, the pony reg was not attached to the BC like the octo was. We didn't realize what happened untill there was a problem. It was a simple honest mistake that I didn't catch at the time as I was distracted with starting my own descent.

 

[sheck33]

while it is true that good buddy awareness should have alerted him she was breathing the wrong reg from the beginning and would have avoided the whole situation i still think it was handled well......

 

[James connell]

sheck33 once bubbled...
while it is true that good buddy awareness should have alerted him she was breathing the wrong reg from the beginning and would have avoided the whole situation i still think it was handled well......

agreed - once the problem developed it was well handled ( except the part about showing the gauge, you needed to make sure she understood it was the "small" botltle before showing the gauge).

IF a pony is back mounted you never want the hose to come from the same side.

 

[dc4bs]

James connell once bubbled...
i'll buy it! as a stage mount i like them.

Hehe... I just redid my pony as a stagemount. Didn't think of that angle till now, but mounting that way also prevents any confusion like what happened on Saturday as well.

I dunno about having a new diver use one that way though. Back mount lowers task loading but one must be carefull if the reg on it is very similar to the primary.

 

[keyshunter]

A diver with only 9-10 dives has no business fooling with a pony bottle--particularly in a place like Dutch Springs. Dutch Springs is easy diving, but I have been there when the viz has gone to almost zero. When the quarry gets stirred up, I have had to actually hold hands with my buddy to stay together. Imagine the outcome if this problem had happened under low viz conditions.

A beginning diver needs to keep things as simple as possible--for example, learning how to control a minor freeflow without getting your buddy involved before learning to deal with three second stages.

 

[James connell]

dc4bs once bubbled...


Hehe... I just redid my pony as a stagemount. Didn't think of that angle till now, but mounting that way also prevents any confusion like what happened on Saturday as well.

I dunno about having a new diver use one that way though. Back mount lowers task loading but one must be carefull if the reg on it is very similar to the primary.

it has many more advantages than just that. it's not near the entanglement hazard a back mount is, you can double check it easily underwater, it's in a compact package ( a piece of innertube holds the hose against the bottom and a loop of surgical tube holds the reg to the valve ), it can be 'handed off' if nessesary, and it has MUCH better trim characteristics mounted that way.

 

[zeN||]

Good save




"When you're cool, the sun shines all the time" Z

 

[Rick Inman]

OK, I know I’m going to look like I’m trying to rain on your parade, but I REALLY don’t get it. Correct me where I’m wrong, but this is what I see:

Quote: "As she had never dove with it before, the pony reg was not attached to the BC like the octo was. We didn't realize what happened until there was a problem."

Did you do a buddy check and approve a third 2nd stage that could not be distinguished from the primary? A correction should have been made at this point.

Quote: "She hands me the light back and as I'm putting the lanyard back on my wrist, I see her suddenly spit out her reg and grab her pony reg...
Hmmm... what's going on here?
She then signals "Out Of Air" and looks like she is getting slightly panicy but seems to be handling it OK for now."

So you did exactly WHAT to contribute at this point? Watch her? Nothing wrong with that, you do need to assess what’s going on. But even you state that you thought she spit out her primary and grabbed her pony, which was an incorrect assessment due to the fact that you approved her setup in a way that made it impossible to tell. She seemed to handle the situation just fine on her own so far.

Quote: "(Here is where I made a tactical error...)

I take the pony SPG and bring it up where she can see it is reading 0 PSI figuring that she will put 0 and 0 together and realize what happened...
Immediately, her eyes get big and she spits out her primary reg and grabs my octo..."

Of course she does! She’s thinking that she is now on the pony bottle and you tell her she is STILL out of air. If you had not intervened she would have thumbed the dive, made the safety stop and all would be right with the world. But now she spits out a perfectly good reg and tank full of air and SHE grabs yours. Even here, she is the one taking the action.

So, what it looks like to me is: You missed an obvious correction at the time of buddy check by allowing two identical 2nd stages in configuration. When her pony went dry, you watched her take care of herself by switching to her other (turns out to be primary, but she thinks it’s the pony) reg. At this point she has a good reg with a tank full of air, and you know it, but instead of thumbing the dive, you show her that the tank she now thinks she’s breathing from is empty. So she decides not to wait for you to offer her air and grabs your octo.

I know that it’s easy to have perfect hindsight, but it looks to me like she came through like a champ and maybe you could learn (AS WELL AS THE REST OF US) where some improvement in buddy skills could be made.

If I’ve missed something here, let me know (I know you all will )

 

[HammerNoMore]

Rick Inman once bubbled...
If I’ve missed something here, let me know (I know you all will )

Unfortunatly I'd say that was a fair assement. I got the same thing out of it but did not want to be the one to make the unpopular comment .

It sounds like the newbie diver handled an OOA situation quite well and the only contribution the DM made was not panicking.

James

 

[dc4bs]

I know how to take criticisim...

I agree I could have done better. I know NOW it was a mistake showing her the 0 PSI guage but it seemed logical to me at the time.

The whole point of posting as many details as I could remember is to learn from others with more experience than myself what I could have done better. Also for anyone with less exp than me to see what I did and the responses so they may hopefully avoid making the same errors I did.
I didn't "just sit and watch" as things went wrong. The whole thing happened in seconds. As I was slipping the lanyard over my wrist, she spit one reg and poped in the next. As I moved towards her, she held up the reg she had spit out and hit the purge to show it was not giving air.

She said afterwords that there was no warning of low air in breathing resistance, etc. Everything was fine untill she went to take another breath and got nothing (overbalance regs behave that way).

From the time I became aware of any problem to the thumbs up took less than a minute.

As to the unsecured pony reg, my instructer saw the setup pre-dive as well and didn't have an issue with it. All I can say is I know better now...

The two 2nd stages were not identical, but were similar size, color and shape. The difference was the primary had a small, black venturi adjustment knob on the side (hard to spot, especialy underwater).

As the 2 regs hoses were coming from locations only a few inches from each other, I didn't catch the problem (see that the hoses were crossed). Everything 'looked' OK to me after we descended.

As part of the post-dive we talked about the fact that she HAD noticed that her guage seemed to not be going down very fast but she didn't alert me to that as she really wasn't sure if it was just that she was using air slowly.

She does have a prety low SAC rate and her boyfriend had commented that she hardly uses any air and that he had just switched to a steel 100 because he was an airhog and alwas ran low before everyone else. - 19 ft3 for 20 minutes @ 55 feet depth (+/- a foot or two as we swam around...) = 0.36 ft3/min. Prety amazing SAC for a diver that new. I just got home thismorning and havn't had time to dump my computer to my PC to verify the exact depths and timings but I will tonight.

She knew the main SPG was lower than when we started by a few hundred PSI but that was from tank cooling on entry (she didn't know about that) and from the small freeflow on the surface swim.