Air sharing on ascent

[coldsmoke]

i'm not diving with someone who's using red hoses blackwood.

And I'm not diving with anyone who forgets their fins.

On a serious note regarding the free ascents (just in case the original poster is still tuned in). Watch the particles. I find it much easier than watching the bubbles and as long as you have plenty of air slower is almost always better. And don't worry so much about a constant speed ascent. Start off neutral, take a slightly bigger breath and as you start to rise dump exactly one glug from your bc. (You'll actually learn to kinda feel how much air you dump) As you approach about 10 feet higher breath shallower and halt your ascent. Stop here, make sure you are neutral and repeat. Do this all the way to your safety stop or the surface. I try for a 30 second stop and a 30 second slide. Of course that's being anal but it give you a 10'/minute ascent with you might find you like.

Good luck and keep practicing.

Hunter

 

[J.R.]

What a disaster! We started our free ascent at 15m and as soon as my wife took my octo, she became a cork. I'm sure it has nothing to do with using my octo but just that she forgot to mind her buoyancy. I grabbed her by the fin and pulled her down and at the same time dumped all the air from my BC.

Isn't one of the fundimental steps in sharing air to "hold on" to your buddy (or buddy's BC) to start with? If she went bouyant the extra drag (you) could have helped slow and stabalize... just a thought...

 

[Soakedlontra]

And I'm not diving with anyone who forgets their fins.

On a serious note regarding the free ascents (just in case the original poster is still tuned in). Watch the particles. I find it much easier than watching the bubbles and as long as you have plenty of air slower is almost always better. And don't worry so much about a constant speed ascent. Start off neutral, take a slightly bigger breath and as you start to rise dump exactly one glug from your bc. (You'll actually learn to kinda feel how much air you dump) As you approach about 10 feet higher breath shallower and halt your ascent. Stop here, make sure you are neutral and repeat. Do this all the way to your safety stop or the surface. I try for a 30 second stop and a 30 second slide. Of course that's being anal but it give you a 10'/minute ascent with you might find you like.

Good luck and keep practicing.

Hunter

Well so far I have been practicing the ascent in 20 ft of water and I do not do a safety stop in the water column. I guess I am taking 'baby steps' and it is going to take a while before I actually begin to practice a safety stop in mid water.

Everybody talks about being neutral before beginning the ascent. However I have found that being slightly negative gives me more control somehow. Is there any truth in this or it's just a 'false' impression?

---------------------------------------------------
Open Water Bubbles

 

[TSandM]

Soakedlontra, the thing we all fear with ascents is getting too positive and losing control. If you do your ascent negative and vertical and swim upwards, this won't happen (or it's less likely). There are some problems, though -- It's harder to do a safety stop and hold it, if you are negative and constantly finning to maintain your depth. You can't get to your buddy very readily, if you are vertical and he has some horizontal displacement away from you. If you get distracted or something makes you stop finning for a moment, you will sink.

Doing your ascent in a horizontal position, and keeping your buoyancy always very close to neutral (getting just a little positive to rise, and then back to neutral to stop) means you are always in good control of your position in the water. It takes a little more practice, for sure, to get the sequence down, but I got a great piece of advice from jonnythan here on SB three years ago -- Take a deep breath and begin to rise, and then exhale it; if you don't stop, then vent something. Using this approach gave me my first foothold on a good, controlled, and close to neutral ascent. From this kind of ascent, stops are relatively easy to do, although getting them precise on depth and holding that precision still isn't easy for me today.

 

[Soakedlontra]

Soakedlontra, the thing we all fear with ascents is getting too positive and losing control. If you do your ascent negative and vertical and swim upwards, this won't happen (or it's less likely). There are some problems, though -- It's harder to do a safety stop and hold it, if you are negative and constantly finning to maintain your depth. You can't get to your buddy very readily, if you are vertical and he has some horizontal displacement away from you. If you get distracted or something makes you stop finning for a moment, you will sink.

Doing your ascent in a horizontal position, and keeping your buoyancy always very close to neutral (getting just a little positive to rise, and then back to neutral to stop) means you are always in good control of your position in the water. It takes a little more practice, for sure, to get the sequence down, but I got a great piece of advice from jonnythan here on SB three years ago -- Take a deep breath and begin to rise, and then exhale it; if you don't stop, then vent something. Using this approach gave me my first foothold on a good, controlled, and close to neutral ascent. From this kind of ascent, stops are relatively easy to do, although getting them precise on depth and holding that precision still isn't easy for me today.

I have finally managed to practice ascending horizontally during my last two dives. They were my first boat dives. My buddy and I ascended along the anchor line. It went pretty well. Still I keep following my buddy's ascent rate instead of trying to figuring it out by myself by looking at bubbles or stuff suspended in the water. My buddy has the computer so it is inevitable that he becomes 'the ascent-rate leader'. I don't know how to solve this 'problem' a part from buying a computer...

Cheers

 

[TSandM]

Well, if you are diving without any sort of depth gauge at all, you can't control your ascent rate, because you don't know what it is. I would highly, highly recommend obtaining some sort of depth gauge that gives you depth and elapsed time, even if it's just a watch. Then, if you know your depth, and you know the time, you can play to go up 10 feet in one minute, and if you get up ten feet in less than one minute, you wait there until a minute has elapsed, and then move up again.

BTW, even very experienced divers succumb to the trap of matching their buoyancy to their buddy's, or to anything else they are watching. I was watching a lobster climb a wall in Southern California and was horrified to discover I had gone up about 15 feet without even noticing it! And I have caused a technical diver to flip over on his back by my poor buoyancy control, in my beginner days.

 

[Deefstes]

Alright, seeing as this was originally my thread ;-) I guess I am allowed to revive it.

Last weekend my wife and I did some skills practice again and stepped it up a notch. We seem to have gotten the air sharing on ascent part sorted out now so we decided to try something else. In retrospect I think it was a stupid exercise as a situation in real life that would warrant it, would be far more catastrophic than we have training for anyway.

At any rate, what we decided was to do air sharing but leaving the entire ascent up to one diver - bit like a rescue situation. We took turns, one of us would act all limp and be dead weight while the other one would take him/her to the surface in a controlled fashion. We repeated the exercise once with the constraint that the "incapacitated" diver's BC could not be used to adjust buoyancy and once without that restriction. The restriction was intended to "simulate" a situation where the diver had complete equipment failure. The "incapacitated" diver would at least bite down on the octo so the "rescuing" diver didn't have to keep it in his/her mouth.

As I said, silly idea. We did discover a few things though and I just desperately hope that we will never find ourselves in such a situation in real life and that, if we did, there would be a properly trained rescue diver with us. It's not a trivial task!

1. We decided to do the ascent in a horizontal posture, facing each other. Totally impossible. The dead weight diver messed up the posture so quickly that it was pointless for the "rescuing" diver to try maintaining horizontal. We eventually did the ascent face to face but even so the "incapacitated" diver tended to slide under the "rescuing" diver so to speak.

2. We tried once with the "rescuing" diver behind, or in horizontal trim on the back of the "incapacitated" diver. This seemed to work better but this is certainly one situation where long hoses would be a great benefit. We don't have long hoses.

3. We decided that it was a futile exercise as a situation where one diver is incapacitated really is beyond our training and that we'd be better off practicing various OOA type scenarios but with two perfectly fine divers.

4. My wife hasn't bought into the idea yet but I certainly would like to do a rescue diver course. That won't happen very soon though as I should first try to get a lot of dives under the belt as AOW. By then my wife will probably agree to also do it.

 

[DBailey]

I know mnay people learn this skill directly face-to-face. This leads to a couple of issues:

1. The "double back" effect of the alternate hose and regulator.
2. The space between the two divers gets really crowded with arms reaching across, kicking each other, etc.
3. The alternate hose all of a sudden gets a lot shorter.

Staying with the normal recreational gear set-up (i.e. short hose primary, donate the secondary), here is what I like to do...

1. The face-to-face aspect is great for the initial contact. Looking the OOA diver in the face and help calming them down in invaluable. But nothing says you have to stay in this position.

2. For the ascent, don't be face-to-face, but be offset a little to your left. Each diver should slide a bit to his/her left until each diver's right shoulder lines up.

3. For the grasping of the BCD or the "Roman handshake", each diver is now reaching straight out to the other diver's right side, instead of crossing over each other's body.

4. This alignment lessens the effect of the "double back" on the alternate hose. This alignment also lessens the amount of kicking into each other on the ascent if vertical. This position also frees up each diver's left side for bouyancy control and checking gauges.

Give this a shot and see if it helps some of your positioning.

For those that use the long hose, if I am reading the posts correctly, is there any physical contact between the divers once the air sharing begins?

 

[Reg Braithwaite]

As you know, I have as little experience as you do. All I can say is that I've done a few of these drills to sort things like this out, and a HUGE congratulations to you and your wife for practicing together! My wife and I did a few pool sessions before a recent trip to Cozumel, and while OW practice would be better, it's amazing how much you benefit from doing the drills together. My wife and I practiced sharing on alternates AND sharing a single regulator. While this shouldn't be needed in the field, it's a fabulous drill for working out buoyancy kinks. I confess it humbled me the first time a training partner got me to do this drill while we hovered a foot off the bottom of the pool. It was so hard to maintain my position while passing a regulator back and forth!

Anyhow, right off the top I'll say that there is training you can get on this sort of thing fro UTD and GUE. They both have recreational programs, and the UTD folks will let you use most of your existing gear. UTD sells DVDs showing air sharing and ascents and so forth. Consider watching them as well.

A few things to think about. I was taught to ascend horizontally. A little googling will reveal that many people think this is important for preventing DCS, and as a bonus at no extra charge, it is much easier to control your depth. An air sharing ascent in the horizontal position would be much easier with a 1.6m or 2.1m long hose. Insert debate here.

Ascents are easier when you have a reference line. I was taught to use an SMB. A little practice with it quickly reveals that buoyancy control AND managing a string that can entangle you AND dealing with it bobbing on the surface is more task loading than just looking at a gauge. That's without tossing in air sharing.

The aforementioned training and videos will reveal that some people advocate sharing responsibilities: one person deploys the SMB while the other tracks depth and stops. Debate this point: Do you need two people staring at their computers? If they are off by a few feet, is it lower risk for each person to stop where their computer says to stop or is it lower risk to pick one and have both people stop together as a buddy team? In the case of air sharing, of course, there is no debate, both people ascend as a team, so only one need look at the depth gauge and signal when to rise and where to stop.

It's true that an OOG diver may be panicked at the outset of the situation, but if your practice this I would hope that you get to a place where if it happens for real, you are able to calm down once air sharing has begun and the OOG diver might be the best person to track depth so that the donor is free to manage the gas and possibly an SMB.

Just a few thoughts here, no advice to speak of :-;

p.s. Should you choose to investigate long hoses, you will find that they work just fine with all your existing gear and it's really very cheap to make the switch. You need not invest kilorands in back plates, wings, and canister lights.

 

[TSandM]

Don't feel bad! Managing an unresponsive diver was one of the hardest drills for me in Rescue class, and remained challenging once I moved into doubles and "tech-ish" training. But there is nothing wrong with practicing this, and you learned a lot about ways that don't work very well, even if you didn't discover any that you thought worked better.

What I've been taught: Control buoyancy with the incapacitated diver's equipment. Managing your gear and theirs is too much, and you want them so that, if you get separated from them, they will not sink.

So, if you start with the position that the unconscious diver is positive and you are negative, one way to meld you two together is to put the unconscious diver UNDERNEATH you. If you jam their regulator(s) into about your solar plexus, they won't flip in front of you or twist around too much. You can grasp the tank with your knees, if they are in a single tank, and that gives you more control. Most unconscious people's feet will sink, which, if you are in a drysuit, helps you keep their shoulder vent high so their suit will empty as you ascend. Staying in a roughly horizontal position will allow you to swim forward as well as to rise, should you wish to get closer to shore or closer to the upline while you are ascending. Close to the surface, you let your feet drop and wrench the person onto their back and inflate their BC or suit or both, depending on what you have available, so they will float face up on the surface.

It's a good skill to learn, and a good one to practice, and I have to admit I don't practice it nearly often enough. That's probably because it IS hard to do, and we tend to avoid things that don't go well. But as Danny Riordan told me before our first cenote dive together, "Just because you don't do something well isn't a reason to avoid doing it. It's a reason to do it more often."