K
KeithG
Guest
Thought I would contribute a recent incident.
My dive buddy's hose split at the regulator. We were 35 minutes into the dive and so had already turned back to the boat and were at about 30 feet when it happened.
She came over to me and pointed at the air spewing out the side of her reg. I pointed at her octo and wondered why we spent all that extra money if she was not going to use it. She had already determined that her reg was still delivering all the air she could pull and was in no panic. She gave the "let's go shallow" sign as she switched to her octo.
I immediately started asking for pressure updates as we slowly ascended. I realized I had no idea how fast her tank could be draining. Worst case would be a surface swim with no wind, no current and no chop. We quickly established that although visually impressive, the leak was not that severe.
In the end we took about 5 minutes to swim back to the boat at about 10 feet. In that time she lost about 400 psi.
We talked the incident over afterwards (I yelled at her for not switching to her octo sooner) and strangely, neither of us considered buddy breathing. We were shallow enough that we both considered going to the surface as the simplest solution if things got worse. We dive conservative profiles and generally do not spend much time deep.
Once home I did do a search here and discovered that a severe LP hose failure could empty a tank rather quickly (I forget the numbers, but something like only a few minutes) while a HP hose failure could go un-noticed.
My dive buddy's hose split at the regulator. We were 35 minutes into the dive and so had already turned back to the boat and were at about 30 feet when it happened.
She came over to me and pointed at the air spewing out the side of her reg. I pointed at her octo and wondered why we spent all that extra money if she was not going to use it. She had already determined that her reg was still delivering all the air she could pull and was in no panic. She gave the "let's go shallow" sign as she switched to her octo.
I immediately started asking for pressure updates as we slowly ascended. I realized I had no idea how fast her tank could be draining. Worst case would be a surface swim with no wind, no current and no chop. We quickly established that although visually impressive, the leak was not that severe.
In the end we took about 5 minutes to swim back to the boat at about 10 feet. In that time she lost about 400 psi.
We talked the incident over afterwards (I yelled at her for not switching to her octo sooner) and strangely, neither of us considered buddy breathing. We were shallow enough that we both considered going to the surface as the simplest solution if things got worse. We dive conservative profiles and generally do not spend much time deep.
Once home I did do a search here and discovered that a severe LP hose failure could empty a tank rather quickly (I forget the numbers, but something like only a few minutes) while a HP hose failure could go un-noticed.
