Just saw "Last Breath" on Netflix

[LFMarm]

They should have had safety divers on Scuba or CC. It would have most certainly avoided a fatality. Here are pics of the same dive done safely last month

 

[Nedster]

They should have had safety divers on Scuba or CC. It would have most certainly avoided a fatality. Here are pics of the same dive done safely last month

This does not always work. Scuba divers are limited by accent speed and particularly from depth, need to perform safety stops. Just check out the tragic death of Audrey Mestre to see this point perfectly.

 

[Nedster]

So they can inhale as soon as they break the surface.

It's actually the urge to breathe, so they exhale while almost at the surface. Many freedivers, in particular, the deeper ones train themselves to remove the nose clip just before surfacing as it's one less thing to perform on their surface protocols. I know one world-class freediver who removes his nose clip and surfaces with his fingers in the OK positions, so if he is hypoxic, then that's two of the three surface protocols performed already. He just has to do his recovery breaths and say 'I'm OK'.

 

[LFMarm]

This does not always work. Scuba divers are limited by accent speed and particularly from depth, need to perform safety stops. Just check out the tragic death of Audrey Mestre to see this point perfectly.

If you need to rescue a free diver deep down, you can always hook him up to a DSMB, send him to the surface and have him taken care of by surface support. The main problem in this accident is that the support free diver had to dive pretty deep to recover the disoriented diver. This dive was an effort big enough to put the rescuer in serious trouble.

 

[Nedster]

It's actually the urge to breathe, so they exhale while almost at the surface. Many freedivers, in particular, the deeper ones train themselves to remove the nose clip just before surfacing as it's one less thing to perform on their surface protocols. I know one world-class freediver who removes his nose clip and surfaces with his fingers in the OK positions, so if he is hypoxic, then that's two of the three surface protocols performed already. He just has to do his recovery breaths and say 'I'm OK'.

If you need to rescue a free diver deep down, you can always hook him up to a DSMB, send him to the surface and have him taken care of by surface support. The main problem in this accident is that the support free diver had to dive pretty deep to recover the disoriented diver. This dive was an effort big enough to put the rescuer in serious trouble.

The problem was that he had to leave the line that he followed down to 'chase' the freediver. In regular competitions, the freediver is tethered to the decent line and there is a counter-weight system in place to get divers back to the surface if they have a deep-water blackout. This was not a 'regular' freediving competition. Anyway, it's a pretty unfortunate incident.

 

[Sea_Jay]

IME the problem with exhaling before you break the surface is that the surface is always farther away than it looked when you started exhaling.

That's why I never look up on my ascent. Too easy to trigger that autonomous exhale response when you can see the ripples.