Today!

dumpsterDiver:

Today:

So today I fire up my computer and it starts up and turns off twice.. So I am diving without a depth gauge or computer. But I will be diving the same nitrox mix as my 15 yr old son (who has a computer). So I have a new BP/W and never rigged it to carry my marine radio canister. My snorkel holder on my one mask/snorkel combo is loose, so I take the snorkel off the mask. My buddy says we won’t be drifting more than a half mile on the 85 ft dive, so we don’t need to pull a dive float.

My son knows my computer is dead and I have no depth gauge. We tell the boat driver we will probably be up in 45 minutes or so. It was kinda bumpy with 2-3 with occasional 4 ft today and a little windy. So we are drifting and catch lobsters here and there, rising well above the bottom as we scan for bugs. I think our bottom time ended up being a little over an hour. I was using a 120 cu-ft, son using an 80 and we both have small pony bottles. The other guy has 90 cu-ft.

Toward the end of the dive, I am running low and the other guys each have about a 1000 psi, and I give the final thumbs up at around 500 psi maybe. My son comes with me, and my other buddy signals that he will stay down and wants me to follow him from well above him. Not sure what good that does, since I have the only lobster bag; we have about 10 bugs in there.

So we rise up to around 45 ft or so, and in less than a minute, the guy on the bottom is signaling wildly for me to descend, presumably because he has found more bugs. So, being stupid and without a computer, I sprint down super fast, fighting the current, and reach him on the bottom. He pulls one bug, then another goes in my bag and I am still a little winded from the sprint down to the bottom and then it gets hard to breathe a little at the end of the inhalation. He is working on a third bug. I don’t need to look at the gauge and grab his leg, signaling bye bye, hit the inflator, remain motionless and start a somewhat accelerated ascent for the first 30 feet or so.

My son shoots down and grabs the bug from the guy on the bottom and then brings it up to me in the water column and we put it in my bag. I still don’t look at the gage, but it is breathing fine now at what I guess to be 50 feet deep as I sip it.

So the third (the bottom) buddy now decides to come up and the three of us are drifting along ascending and I am depending on my son to regulate our ascent rate since he has the computer. I look over and we are at 35 feet, and I stay with him and he is not looking at his computer and I look again soon after and we are at 42 feet. So I am pissed.

He is not watching the depth, I know we did not put his computer in deco, but who knows exactly where I am on the nitrogen status and I really want to make a nice clean ascent and with limited air, I don’t want to play yo yo and I do not want to share air or dip into my pony bottle. I also really want my son to be self sufficient, so I kinda ignore the third guy and key into my son for guidance on the ascent.

I try to signal to him that he needs to look at his computer and that he needs to modulate our ascent (I give him successive signals with horizontal sweeps of my hand) which I think he should understand to mean that I want to move up in small increments in the horizontal plane. He screws around more and sinks a second time, so I make a dramatic move and swim sorta quick up about 6-8 feet and then signal that he should come and hang with me,,, we are maybe at 30 feet now.

I am getting super frustrated that he is not looking at his computer intently and bringing us up slowly and uniformly. In reality, I can do it with no computer in clear water, but I am trying to make a point and make him the leader and give him the opportunity to manage the ascent.

Then I grab his gun and hold it and signal that he should deploy his smb which is on a line. He can use the practice and it will help me to ensure my depth is uniform. The three of us do our safety stop of maybe 4 minutes and we get to the surface and there is no boat. I have no snorkel, my BP/W is partially inflated (orally) and is somewhat pushing me face down and I get my son to shut my tank off, because I am on E.

So we inflate two more SMB’s one for each and float and wonder why the guys can’t figure we must be down current. Sure wish I had a snorkel, sure wish I had my marine radio to call them, sure wish I was wearing a nice comfortable scuba pro Stab jacket which holds me nice and vertical and lets me look around for the boat in the choppy conditions.

We drift for a little while, this is the first time my son has experienced drifting in the open ocean and being lost from the boat. I decide to mention not a word about how pissed I was about his failure to modulate the ascent (at least until we are on the boat). He comments about how hard it is to hold the smb vertical at the surface in the wind.. LOL..

We can not see our dive boat, but there is a fishing boat within visual range so I scream for help for a little while but they are kite fishing and are ignoring us or can't hear me. I quickly give up on screaming.

It is pretty much my failure, because I have had him diving now for 3 years without a watch or computer or using tables.. He just follows my computer and he can control his buoyancy and ascend PERFECTLY .. but he has pretty much just played “follow the leader” (i.e., stick with dad or he gets pissed). He’s not had much (any) practice where he is responsible for setting the ascent rate. So for the next few dives we do, he is going to be leading the ascent and I am going to follow. I was really surprised how lax he was about not maintaining a close eye on the computer and keeping the ascent uniform. A good lesson for me I guess, I was cheap and never got him his own computer until like 6 months ago.

Oh yeah, in about 12 minutes or so the boat must have figured where to look and comes and picks us up. Not a bad day of diving, it was cold and windy so we didn't do a second dive.

But did I mention the scary part of the day? I let him practice driving on I-95 on the way to the dive. Damn if the 15 yr old didn’t drift across a lane, over corrected in the wrong direction (as I provided strong vocalizations), and just missed clipping another car at 60 mph. Driving scares me sometimes.

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TONY CHANEY:

we all know that the above is a joke.

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