PADI Rescue Diver class near miss (and lessons learned)

[Petedives]

The setup:

An egotistical buddy who basically had a superiority complex and an
attitude problem to begin with. Dude had issues *before* diving.


The situation:

Quick dive including a little buddy breathing excercise.


The incident:

Instructor signals us to practice buddy breathing, doesn't specify who
should be out of air first, so I take first crack. Guy manages to begin
the process okay, we're sitting there taking two breaths a pop and he's
kicking his feet in 45' of water.

We start rising, with him holding a death grip on the left side of my BC
as per BB protocol. Both of our ascent alarms start going off. Instead
of calmly dumping air out of one of our BC's, since we were rising and
the situation was only getting worse, he decided to rip the regulator out
of my mouth (at bottom lung), flip head over heels, and kick for the bottom.

Needless to say, I was a little unprepared. It was more than a tiny bit
nerve racking to try and keep enough presence of mind to find my regulator,
purge it, and gasp a beautiful deep breath off my own air source, clamping
my jaw shut too keep my lungs from filling up with water.

This was the last of 5 days of Rescue Diver training. After we've been
taught and drilled on 50 different ways to deal with a non-personal diver
emergency. It wasn't training that failed, it was attitude.

I could have died. Had it been an actual OOA emergency, I would have.

I almost did anyway.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't dive with a-holes.

2. Better to dive solo than with a buddy you can't rely on to do the right thing.

3. I'm lucky as hell that I'm the type of guy to do more thinking than acting in
a panic situation. It was everything I could do to find my air, purge it, and
breathe through it.

4. There's a reason why PADI calls teaching BB skills optional. You can trust
equipment far more than you can trust people.

5. I need to rig my own solo diving gear and not trust buddies, even if I have
someone swimming next to me.

Peter

 

[jpcpat]

One of the arguments against BB has always been that it puts 2 divers at risk. I'm even more of this mind now. BB is better than drowning, just barely.

 

[Jake]

4. There's a reason why PADI calls teaching BB skills optional. You can trust
equipment far more than you can trust people.

5. I need to rig my own solo diving gear and not trust buddies, even if I have
someone swimming next to me.

I learned a very similar lesson in my rescue class, although not quite in such dangerous circumstances. We had to do a drill in the pool in which we took a breath off snorkel and hit the bottom in full scuba (though without regs). We then had to do at least 3 somersaults. By the time we were done with that, we were hurting for air. We then had to swim the length of the pool to our buddy who was facing away from us and didn't know when we were coming. It was crazy! We secured the octo, and hit the surface. Obviously, at any time we could have surfaced, so it wasn't a particularly dangerous drill.

Nevertheless, it taught me an incredibly valuable lesson: even in shallow water surrounded by other divers--including those who may be competent, skillful buddies--you are essentially on your own. We all get distracted by the stuff around us and may not be able to respond quickly enough in an OOAE that our buddy might have.

That week I bought a 19cf pony bottle, upgraded my basic reg set, and converted the old one for pony use. Almost anytime I do a dive past 65 feet (and especially on a wreck at that depth), even if I'm with my best dive buddies who i know and trust, i take that bottle with me. It may be overly paranoid, but it buys me some time a buddy might not be able to. When that thing's slung, I barely notice it anyways.

Congrats on thinking yourself through a dangerous situation!

 

[uspap]

Did you at least beat the crap out of the guy on land? I hope he failed the class. He will kill himself or someone else in the future at the rate he is going.

 

[TSandM]

There are a lot of reasons I've pursued the training I have.

If you have planned your dive so that, when the you-know-what hits the fan, your buddy is your last resource, your buddy had better be a good resource. Your "buddy" had better have bought into the idea that he IS your last resource, and that that's the most important thing he can do. Otherwise, you're diving solo in a fantasy world.

I have never done buddy breathing, and I ought to -- but I really think the long hose/bungied backup configuration avoids almost all the circumstances where that would be necessary. If you AND your buddy have that configuration, you're just not going to have to run into the situation you encountered.

Lastly, emergency skills should be practiced until they are not emergency procedures. I've been taught to begin each dive with an air-share. I don't, but I do air-shares on many dives, and almost ALL the dives with like-minded buddies. If everything is so routine that, in the face of REAL problem, you yawn and go, "Oh, THAT again . . ." you are the most likely to have a complete and competent reaction to the situation.

The last thing I'll say is that I did the drill of "buddy 20 feet away, I'm OOA" in Maui, and I didn't like the results at all. No matter WHAT the visibility is, in my opinion it is never acceptable to be more than one or two kicks away from your alternate air source.

 

[jeckyll]

TSandM: I've recently started with the airshare at 20 -30 feet at the beginning of a dive. On 2 recent dives my buddies came out of the water saying "wow, I really need to practice that more". IMO, that alone makes it worth it (especially for me). I used to only breath my regs at the surface, face down in the water, to make sure they worked, but now I do a drill @ depth.

As for buddy breathing, I believe that if both divers test both regs at the beginning of the dive, there should be no need for it. I can only imagine a very stressed / semi paniced OOA diver needing to pass the reg back to the donor. I don't see that as a situation I'd ever want to find myself in...

To the OP, good for you for reacting and getting your stuff together.

 

[wreckchick]

I have to say, if losing a reg for a second constituted an emergency for you then you need to work on your own self-rescue skills.

I don't disagree that the guy was a jerk, but finding and securing your own regulator is a skill you should have had mastered from your OW class.

Rachel

 

[dlent]

Since we've established what your buddy did wrong... Let's go over what you did wrong. First, your 50% responsible for the uncontrolled ascent. Second, you should have stopped the buddy breathing immediately when you noticed your teams buoyancy was out of control instead of continuing to put your buddy in danger. In a training situation, it's best to stop the training when things go awry. Training is supposed to prevent accidents, not cause them.

 

[Doc Intrepid]

..."clamping my jaw shut to keep my lungs from filling up with water"...

Peter,

Self reliance is a great lesson to learn. Every dive, even one with a buddy, is essentially a "solo" dive. It's best to plan as such. Things just happen sometimes - zero vis, heavy currents, issues, etc. - that can result in separation even when both parties are trying to stay together.

But this sentence is a problem.

When you are ascending (and trying to do something else simultaneously, such as screw with your regulator while it's out of your mouth), "clamping your jaws shut" is a recipe for a lung over-expansion injury.

Remember that bit about "never hold your breath: exhale out a tiny stream of bubbles" each time your reg is out of your mouth? It's important...make that a habit.

Just something to add to your lessons-learned.

Good luck with your class.

Doc

 

[Darnold9999]

my 2 cents. At 45 feet even if you are at the bottom of a breath of air you should have no problem either finding your own reg, octo or ascending under control to the surface. Finding your own reg or octo is the first choice, but the surface is an easy second choice. Personally would do one sweep for my reg, can't find it, grab the octo, for some reason its gone, head up as slowly as I thought I could - working to find the reg all the way up so I could abort as quickly as possible.

All this is easy to second guess at a computer screen, but bottom line you need to take responsibility for the incident and your response.