What if...? Equipment Issues

[FWADIVER]

* What would you do if your buddy kicked your reg out of your mouth?

Either recover it or go to the back up

* What would you do if your mask strap broke and you lost your mask?

Take my backup mask out of my pocket and look for the one that was lost.

* What would you do if a fin strap broke during your dive?

In the unlikely event a spring strap broke I have a piece of cave line tied inside to hold the fin on until I can get back to wherever we started.

* What would you do if your inflator/dump valve pulled out of your BC?

Use my drysuit for buoyancy
.
* What would you do if your only light went out on a night dive?

Never only carry one light on a night dive.

 

[Cave Diver]

Hum...okay, I could see these things could come up. So, is this a dive ending thing if your inflator hose won't attach? I'm not trying to be stupid, but there are some things that can happen that will be alright for you to stay down.

A lot of that is going to depend on the individual diver. I need very little to no air in my bc to dive. I also have no problem taking gear off underwater and messing with it if something isn't right. For me, it might not be dive ending. For a newer diver, it probably should be.

 

[Jewls]

* What would you do if your buddy kicked your reg out of your mouth?

Blow a slow stream of bubbles from my mouth, lean to the right, swing my right arm around to locate the hose and put the reg back in my mouth, purge and breath. If can not locate the hose I would reach over my head and locate the hose from my tank. If all else fails, grab my alternate, put it in my mouth, purge and breath. Find reg and switch.

* What would you do if your mask strap broke and you lost your mask?

Stop, look, signal buddy, rap on tank, since I can't see much, I'd signal that I would ascend and abort the dive following standard procedure. I’d probably plug my nose along the way too.

* What would you do if a fin strap broke during your dive?
Stop, signal buddy, see if it can be fixed, if not, thumb the dive.

* What would you do if your inflator/dump valve pulled out of your BC?
Stop, signal buddy, I should have barely any air in my BCD at depth, if I am able to control buoyancy I might consider to continue on the dive if I know the conditions at the surface are calm. If I feel uncomfortable with it, I would thumb the dive.

* What would you do if your only light went out on a night dive?


In this case, if it were my only light, I would swim towards my buddy and signal to borrow their back up, then thumb the dive.

 

[Bubbletrubble]

* What would you do if a fin strap broke during your dive?

I think most divers would first check to see that their foot wasn't going to come loose from the fin. If that was a possibility, they would probably reach down, remove the loose fin, and carry it in one hand. This brings me to raise another related issue...

For conducting ascents, many OW instructors advocate that their students initiate ascent while being slightly negatively buoyant and maintain that negative buoyancy during the ascent. The reasoning is that this method gives the novice diver more control during the ascent -- stop kicking and he/she will immediately arrest the ascent -- since the diver must contend with neoprene expanding (gaining buoyancy) and air inside the BCD expanding. I've witnessed some newer divers who take this advice a step further and dump all of the air out of their BCD prior to ascending. Here in SoCal, where divers wear thick wetsuits and considerably more lead than warm water divers, dumping all of the air from one's BCD at depth can make a diver extremely negatively buoyant (20+ lbs. negative or more, in some cases). Combined with a situation in which the diver only has use of one fin (busted fin strap or leg cramp), I can see how using this method to ascend might be...ahem...very challenging. Something to consider.

* What would you do if your inflator/dump valve pulled out of your BC?

It's this very scenario that makes me steer clear of power inflater assemblies that have the pull-to-dump feature. I was once diving with a buddy of mine who wanted to demonstrate at the surface this neat-o feature on his Seaquest QD Pro BCD. When he yanked on his power inflater assembly, the disc that attaches the corrugated hose to his BCD separated into two pieces. This left a gaping hole in the BCD bladder and air escaped rather quickly. We were able to handle the situation OK -- turns out that the disc simply needed to be re-seated and tightened. Still, we would have rather not spent those few frantic seconds addressing the problem.

 

[miketsp]

..snip..

equipment issues
* what would you do if your buddy kicked your reg out of your mouth?
This should not even require analysis by any qualified diver.

* what would you do if your mask strap broke and you lost your mask?
Depends a lot on circumstances. The worst moment and most likely moment would be when hauling down a shot line in a strong current. I've had times when the current has twisted my mask around on my head and if the strap gave way it would disappear very quickly downcurrent.

* what would you do if a fin strap broke during your dive?
I replaced my fins straps with springs precisely because this happened to me while swimming against a strong current. I had to surface asap and get my smb up so the boat knew where i was. This is probably the most dangerous of the 5 situations. In current you will just be carried away. You can't make much progress with only 1 fin.

* what would you do if your inflator/dump valve pulled out of your bc?
Remove the bc and use it inverted. I've seen a dm do this. Or use my smb as a buoyancy device.

* what would you do if your only light went out on a night dive?
I'd never be in this situation. If diving with my regular buddy we'd have 2 each. If diving with an insta-buddy i'd be carrying at least 3 light sources because often he'd have only one and i wouldn't want to abort the dive if his light failed. I've been in this latter situation.

. . . . . .

 

[Jewls]

After reading many of the answers given if your inflator/ dump valve broke, I see that my answer was pretty wrong in my thinking. The reason for my thinking is because of my second ocean dive experience.

We're on the boat about to dive, I have checked all my gear, except for what? My dump valve. We do the back roll and my BCD starts gushing bubbles and it's really hard for me to swim and kick and stay at the surface. I swim to the boat, get back on (tank and all!) and let the DM know what's going on. He switched BCD's with me, giving me his to use (he was pretty small so it worked) and he dove with mine. I guess the reason I thought it would be ok to continue the dive is because I saw him do it with my busted BCD and he later explained why (explaining his control in buoyancy , weight and experience). However, now thinking back onto this situation, sure I could continue the dive at depth and ascend, however, maintaining my body at the surface in rough, choppy conditions isn't easy for me to do with all my gear on and pulling me down, but I've never done it other than this one time and I didn't drop my weights.

So I guess the answer is (for me anyways) signal buddy, end the dive, ascend and drop weights at the surface. I would want to keep my weights on as to prevent a run away ascent, considering there could still be air trapped in my BCD. I could drop them once they prevented me from either surfacing or remaining on the surface.

 

[Anti-Hero]

Hum...okay, I could see these things could come up. So, is this a dive ending thing if your inflator hose won't attach? I'm not trying to be stupid, but there are some things that can happen that will be alright for you to stay down. If you can't reattach it without taking off your BC, then hopefully this is something you've practiced before and you can maintain good buoyancy while doing so, if that's the case, try it out. If you've not practiced it before...hum, I don't know if I would do it.

For most divers this should be a dive ending event. Remember that accident chain? This would most certainly be a big bright, golden link.

If you have a dump valve failure, does it mean that water will start getting into your BC? If not, you might have another dump and you can use that. My BC has a rear dump, and you can yank down on the inflator hose to dump at the top of it. But, in this case, I would want my buddy to be really close to me and assist me if I start having an uncontrolled ascent. If that happens that I start floating off, I will swim downward, then if I still have trouble I will grab and bear hug anything around me until my buddy can assist me. I have had to do this before, because I failed to get the air dumped. I think it's the right way, if not then let me know.

I'd be very cautious using the corrugated inflater hose pull dump. There have been numerous incidents of a diver trying to "pull" it, and end up yanking it right off. This would cause you to rapidly lose the gas in your BC. And yes, if this happens you can expect water to begin filling the BC. A runaway ascent is a whole different issue and much easier to handle IMO.

 

[Cave Diver]

I guess the reason I thought it would be ok to continue the dive is because I saw him do it with my busted BCD and he later explained why (explaining his control in buoyancy , weight and experience).

This is really going to be situationally dependent. For newer divers, I would recommend that any sort of gear issue would be a reason to thumb the dive. Most of them are going to have enough task loading going on trying to keep track of the depth, buoyancy, air supply and their buddy. Trying to deal with malfunctioning equipment just adds a link to the incident chain.

I've done the same as your DM on dives before and switched equipment with someone else who was having issues. But that's a decision made with experience and comfort, and an understanding of the limitations I'm placing on myself with sub-par equipment.

An equipment failure during a dive is also not an automatic reason for me to end the dive. However it is cause to evaluate and inform my buddy of what the problem is so there are no surprises later in the dive.

 

[Bubbletrubble]

* What would you do if your buddy kicked your reg out of your mouth?

I think pretty much everyone knows what to do if this happens, so I'm not going to bother addressing it. However, I will tweak the scenario a little and ask people to imagine they are the kicker rather than the person being kicked. What should you do if you happen to be in front of your buddy or another diver...you kick...and then you feel one of your fins hit something?

Lots of novice divers will actually kick again (perhaps multiple times) and kick harder in this scenario. I've seen this happen on several occasions. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the fear is that something big and bad is trying to grab my fin (shark?)...or my fin is getting hung up on something (kelp, fishing line?) so I need to kick to free it. It's easy to see that if the kicker does this and someone else's face is in the way or the fin is becoming wrapped up in some sort of entanglement...well...that's not good.

From the kicker's perspective, the best thing to do is to immediately stop kicking with that one fin. Experienced divers will freeze that one fin and continue to kick with the other, trying to get a little distance between themselves and whatever they had just kicked.

 

[fjpatrum]

Equipment issues
* What would you do if your buddy kicked your reg out of your mouth?
Either recover it or use my octo if I couldn't recover my reg quickly. Already had this happen a couple of times.

As the kicker, I'd look back to see what it is I'm kicking. I've done that once or twice already too.


* What would you do if your mask strap broke and you lost your mask?
Probably just swim to recover it or not worry. A good seal and the mask stays in place anyway. If I couldn't recover a truly lost mask, I'd just surface. That said, a good equipment inspection pre-dive will always prevent this.

* What would you do if a fin strap broke during your dive?
I'd probably fin with one foot and one fin, if I could or just surface. Again, a good pre-dive inspection should ensure this never happens.


* What would you do if your inflator/dump valve pulled out of your BC?
Already had this happen. My dump valve pulled right out of my bc on my 9th dive. I just rose up about 10 feet in the column and continued my dive. I don't use much air in my BC anyway. If I was say 80 FSW I'd probably not worry about it any more than when I was at 40 feet, though, especially after having dealt with it once already. There is absolutely no reason to end a dive because of this, in my opinion. Old-school divers didn't even use BCs. If, for whatever reason other issues started to arise, I'd abort my dive, dumping weight if necessary.

* What would you do if your only light went out on a night dive?
First I wouldn't do a night dive without a backup light, but if for whatever reason I did, I'd just grab/signal my buddy (if I could) and surface. My computer has a "day glo" light that I can activate to see my depth etc so I could at least use that for determining I was actually surfacing rather than going deeper, and I could hold a reasonable safety stop.