Instructor bent after running out of air at 40m

[wetb4igetinthewater]

So all your dives go perfectly to plan and you plan every dive? You never find unexpected circumstances that increase consumption? You never get narced and fail to check your gas? You never get distracted by looking after a buddy? Immune to task obsession?.

If I'm "pushing my limits" my task obsession is to follow the dive plan and that plan includes minimum cylinder pressures at key points. So no, I don't fail to check my gas. If I am pushing a END beyond 30 meters by not diving trimix, then I know I will be impaired and tracking my cylinder pressures are paramount to my safety. Maybe I'm too inexperienced as a technical diver to be complacent, but right now, that's how I roll.

 

[shawnhar]

Sadly, this guy may have become a much better diver/instructor as a result of his injury and we keep picking at the scab...

Seems to me there are a number of possible explanations for what happened here, and no way to know for sure. It's certainly possible (even likely) that he could have learned from the experience and now be a great instructor.

The part that doesn't sit well with me, though, is the implausibility of his explanation for what happened. Whether they attempted a deep bounce, or just got narced and failed to monitor SPG until they all ran out, describing this as just one of those unpredictable things which happens sometimes is pretty extreme minimization/deflection behavior.

Not wanting to talk about a past bad experience is completely understandable, but when someone has truly internalized and learned from it, plus is continuing to teach in the same field, they usually DO want to share details.

 

[dmaziuk]

It doesn’t matter if you have an accident or not, driving while drunk is illegal. It is still an accident though.

Uh-huh. And then you come out and tell a clueless reporter "me and mates, we were sitting in this pub eating nuts and such, and we thought we'd push the blood alcohol limit a little, you know, all the way to .05, and the speed limit to whooping 65 mph, we checked our breath and planned our route but then... there was a, you know, discrepancy, with our actual rate of speed and stuff..."

And everybody takes your story on face value because sure, that is exactly what happened. Only there was this tiny little nuance that everybody is screaming about..

 

[dmaziuk]

I personally don’t think you should go past 30m on a single tank especially Ireland / UK cold water diving with no vis

I wouldn't go below 20m without redundancy in the UK but I'm a pussy.

This was in Cyprus though. Anyone knows what the site's like?

There's a wreck on Roatan sitting on a sand at about 35 m. SB's @The Chairman once called it the easiest 130' you'll ever do: everyone does it on a single Al80, nobody gets nacrced. As a no-stop dive, after your 5-ish minutes at the bottom you follow the reef slope up to SS depth and get the total dive time in the 50 minutes ballpark.

OTGH, say, most anywhere on Curacao I wouldn't drop deco bottles between coral heads and expect to find them easily... Or ever.

 

[Storker]

there's a wreck on Roatan sitting on a sand at about 35 m. [...] nobody gets nacrced.

"Nobody" gets narked at 35m? Allow me to thoroughly distrust such a blanket statement.

 

[Efka76]

"Nobody" gets narked at 35m? Allow me to thoroughly distrust such a blanket statement.

I was doing my PADi deep dive specialty and was in 40 m depth.... I did not feel any gas narcosis and even did mathematical calculations on 40 m. depth faster than I did on surface I guess different people have different tolerance levels. GUE considers that diving deeper than 30 m should be with trimix. I think that due to different body composition and, of course, bottom time, there might be gas narcosis cases even at 35 m depth.

 

[scubadada]

I was doing my PADi deep dive specialty and was in 40 m depth.... I did not feel any gas narcosis and even did mathematical calculations on 40 m. depth faster than I did on surface I guess different people have different tolerance levels. GUE considers that diving deeper than 30 m should be with trimix. I think that due to different body composition and, of course, bottom time, there might be gas narcosis cases even at 35 m depth.

Or experience?

 

[Storker]

I was doing my PADi deep dive specialty and was in 40 m depth.... I did not feel any gas narcosis and even did mathematical calculations on 40 m.

Narcosis -- insidious and subtle

Depth nark is insidious. One day, you're just fine, another day you're about as smart as a beef steak. And then there's individual variations. On any given day, you may be bovine stupid at 30m, or you may function just fine at 40m.

EDIT: IME, YMMV, etc., etc.

 

[100days-a-year]

Some people appear and act narced @ 1 bar/sea level ambient .Others conduct thousands of successful and enjoyable dives @ 6 bar . The secret is to know which you are on any given day or situation.

 

[boulderjohn]

I did not feel any gas narcosis and even did mathematical calculations on 40 m. depth faster than I did on surface

This is so common that PADI removed that requirement from the AOW deep dive because people came to the conclusion that narcosis was no big deal. The likely explanation might be that doing it on the surface provided a mini refresher course and practice that enabled you to do it faster when you did it at depth.

The secret is to know which you are on any given day or situation.

And understanding that you could be one of those one day and the other on another day.