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by KING Staff
Posted on March 28, 2010 at 11:46 AM
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DES MOINES, Wash. - A diver is in critical condition after running into trouble while diving at Redondo Beach.
Police say at about 8:30 a.m. a 50-year-old Spokane woman was taking a dive with her instructor and her boyfriend, who is a certified diver.
When she was about 50 feet down, her mask starting filling with water and she couldn't get the air regulator in her mouth.
"The instructor felt the student tug on her arm and that's when she noticed the student was in distress with water in the mask and having trouble with the regulator," said Sgt. Bob Collins, Des Moines Police Dept.
Collins said the woman had to make a quick ascent and her instructor ascended with her.
When she was taken out of the water she was breathing but not conscious. An aid crew could not detect a pulse and began CPR.
The woman was taken to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in critical condition.
Yep - not a problem you should be having at 50fsw. Lot of questions raised by this article's sparse facts. One is if this was just a dive or part of a course. The mention of the boyfriend as certified, but not the victim has me believing it might have been a course dive. A second is how the victim performed in the pool, and if there was any reason to believe she hadn't mastered basic skills. Another is why they were at 50fsw if it was an OW course. It's within spec, but not necessary to go that deep. I suppose that a diver who has graduated from the pool to OW and is, or is about to be, certified should be able to handle it. If she hadn't proved that she could, she should still be in the pool.
The rest mostly revolve around why the victim had to tug on someone's arm to be noticed. How many divers in the group, and what was the instructor doing when this occurred? Was visibility an issue? Was her boyfriend her buddy for the dive, and what was he doing while this was happening? He's reported to be certified, but that tells us very little about his abilities and experience.
Hope she makes it, but the news report doesn't make it seem promising.
Very cold water there in Washington. Pool sessions usually don't prepare beginners for that. But we don't know if this was a beginning diver or not, but it does say it was "her instructor," so she was taking some kind of class. If she was experienced, this should not have presented a problem.
Redondo seems to be picking up as a dive site. I've been to the beach but never in the water there. Another article referred to the group as a certified diver, a student and an assistant dive instructor. One artcle said they'd only been in the water for ten minutes. I think I saw that the bottom is at about 80. Really unfortunate. Probably a little hair in the seal, or chewed rental gear, right? If Redondo's like Saltwater State Park or the Narrows, the vis could have been less than 15 feet. The sea life is large and beyond great, but you have to swim into it to see it. I read that the diver's condition has been upgraded to serious from critical this morning. So hopefully all will be well!
Redondo seems to be picking up as a dive site. I've been to the beach but never in the water there. Another article referred to the group as a certified diver, a student and an assistant dive instructor. One artcle said they'd only been in the water for ten minutes. I think I saw that the bottom is at about 80. Really unfortunate. Probably a little hair in the seal, or chewed rental gear, right? If Redondo's like Saltwater State Park or the Narrows, the vis could have been less than 15 feet. The sea life is large and beyond great, but you have to swim into it to see it. I read that the diver's condition has been upgraded to serious from critical this morning. So hopefully all will be well!
That's good news.
Yeah, Redondo is like most of the sites around here. You can get below 100 fsw pretty easily and you can stay shallower if you want to. Viz is likely to be below normal with all the rain we've been having.
Who knows what happened but it just sounds like a newer diver panicking with a flooded mask and let the reg get away from a second and swallowed some water. Hopefully there was no brain damage.
My status is too junior to post a link at this point, but an update on the diver's condition is available at kxly.com/news/22993823/detail.html for those who are interested.
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You do not have to be OW certified to use a drysuit in the PADI system. I did my OW certification class in a drysuit, and the shop where I certified routinely does that. It can be quite a task loading exercise for a brand new diver, but if I managed it, it's pretty manageable . . .
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Originally Posted by Pubcrawler
