Australian GBR: Almost Died

[Soloist]

I’m a big fan of redundancy in appropriate settings, but the easiest and safest solution in this particular case would have been dive planning and situational awareness.

Agreed. This “seasoned diver” was oblivious. He lost his bearings and ran low on air, so he should have thumbed the dive and surfaced.

 

[Landlocked123]

Absolutely agree and again as I stated....I would have done many things differently...but what I am driving at is when we get it wrong and it does happen...what a difference it makes mentally and literally to know that you have brought extra air, which was not part of your dive plan, in a fully redundant supply.

 

[Landlocked123]

When you fly you give over control of your life to the pilot, the mechanics and etc 100%. Carrying a bail out makes sense. Period. No one that I have ever dove with has complained about having too much air on a dive or having a redundant air supply. I think you are comparing apples to oranges.

 

[doctormike]

Absolutely agree and again as I stated....I would have done many things differently...but what I am driving at is when we get it wrong and it does happen...what a difference it makes mentally and literally to know that you have brought extra air, which was not part of your dive plan, in a fully redundant supply.

I know where you are coming from, and I often recommend an alternate gas supply on SB in appropriate settings. Don’t take this the wrong way, I think that we are thinking alike for the most part.

But by recommending an AGS in this particular accicdent analysis, I think that you are doing the OP and other new divers reading this thread a disservice. This would be the classic definition of a gear solution to a skills problem.

AGS is primarily for catastrophic gas loss (e.g. blown LP hose). The problem here was planning and situational awareness. I don’t want the OP to think that they can sling a pony and go on being an adrenaline junkie...

One more thing - they exhausted themselves swimming upcurrent for the anchor line. The drag from a slung pony would have added to that problem.

 

[Landlocked123]

Again we are saying the same thing. Agree that the bailout is not a replacement for proper gas planning... Planning a dive and diving your plan... custom greeting I have on my petrel reads " HI George. Dive your plan" when it turns on.. so I get it. All I am saying is that when we get it wrong and it does happen having a secondary air supply can make a big difference in our mental state. We should not push the limits, alter a dive plan, dive without one "because i have a pony bottle". But again it gives us an alternate option to buy us time to sort things out, think more clearly about the next thing we do so we dont compound a situation and make it worse. Not sure how I am doing anyone a disservice by stating that.

 

[Landlocked123]

extra drag? really? Mine is streamlined and tight to my wing. I doubt its creating that much extra drag. I have dove in very strong current. if the current is so strong that I cant stay on a wreck even on the backside of it its time to abort the dive. Never has my pony been the reason I made a decision to abort a dive. Makes no sense to me.

 

[boulderjohn]

I moved the thread into Near Misses and Lessons Learned because the incident was a near miss rather than an accident.

Now it is time for the "lessons learned" part.

The description seems to indicate that through this experience, the diver learned nothing more than that he loved the adrenaline rush of the experience and looked forward to experiencing it again. If no lessons are learned from this, then the writer should indeed look forward to more such experiences. For most divers, this experience would have been a routine dive. In this case, though, a cascade of diver errors led to the adrenaline rush.

The diver needs to understand that while reading this description, the readers who have already posted were almost certainly adding up the diver errors, paragraph by paragraph. The writer does not seem to know those errors were made. His description of himself ("We are both seasoned divers") implies a belief that neither he nor his buddy has anything to learn, and that is the biggest of the errors. From the time of the initial descent, when the "seasoned diver" buddy did not seem to know that you cannot use the inflator hose to dump air while you are in a head down position, the story describes two novice divers with much to learn. The first step to that learning is accepting that fact and opening their minds to those lessons so that this sort of thing will never happen again.

 

[boulderjohn]

Some lessons to learn:

1. We were not told the nature of the dive briefing. The currents in the GBR can be very strong, too strong to swim into at all. That should have been addressed in a dive briefing. If you are going out one way and then back to the boat, you generally want to swim into the current at the beginning of the dive so that it is behind you in the second half of the dive.
2. It is very unusual for a veteran dive boat captain to position the boat such that divers need to fight a strong current to return to it. A dive briefing will usually tell you what you need to know in order to avoid it. It appears as if the other divers did not have this problem.
   
3. If you turned the dive with 1500 PSI, I assume you were using something akin to the rule of halves for dive planning. the rule of halves starts with the idea of turning your dive at the halfway point, but the actual turning point varies by conditions.
   1. It assumes you will be increasingly shallower on the second half of the dive and thus using less gas. If not, you need to turn sooner.
   2. It assumes you will returning with either no current or with the current behind you. If not, you need to turn sooner.
   3. It assumes you do not absolutely need to return to your starting point and can therefore surface at any time if necessary. If you absolutely must return to the starting point, you should be using the rule of thirds for dive planning instead.
4. Wind-driven currents are usually stronger near the surface, but the serious currents in the GBR are not wind-driven. As the name suggests, the GBR is a barrier reef separating the shallower inner ocean area from the outer ocean. When the tides shift and the depth of the water changes, the in-coming or out-going water is funneled through the openings in the reef, and it can create very strong currents. These currents will likely not be any greater nearer the surface
5. You cannot count on a tank having more gas than the pressure gauge indicates. Those gauges are not built that way. Any inaccuracy can go either way. More importantly, the deeper you are, the more critical this accuracy becomes. In order for your regulator to work, it must be able to deliver air to you at about 140 PSI MORE than the pressure you are under because of your depth. The deeper you are, the more pressure needs to be in the tank in order for you to get anything out of it. In other words, you can be essentially out of air at a deeper depth when there is still enough gas to breathe at a shallower depth.
6. There is no sense fighting a tough current unless you absolutely have to, and you did not absolutely have to in this case. Working hard dramatically increases the rate at which you go through your air, and that is not what you want to do when low on air. the simple solution once you were low on air was to begin a calm ascent, do a safety stop, surface, and then take a surface swim toward the boat. There is plenty of air for everyone on the surface.
7. It is hard to say why you were getting salt water when you breathed from the safety bottle, but it was certainly not filling your lungs. You would have begin drowning instantly if it were. Even if you had inhaled sharply with a wet regulator, you would have started a gag reflex that would have probably put you into coughing spasms. More likely, the regulator was breathing wet, possibly from a damaged or folded diaphragm. In that case, simply breathing slowly will enable you to spit out any water that enters the mouth with the air. Divers have done enture dives with a wet breathing regulator.

 

[hammet]

Carrying a bail out makes sense. Period. No one that I have ever dove with has complained about having too much air on a dive or having a redundant air supply.

One of the the most amazing, fantastic, beautiful, and zen like aspects of diving is experiencing the feeling of virtual weightlessness. This is something that cold water, technical divers, photographers, and other specialists sometimes forget in their quests to accomplish whatever 'mission' they set out to complete. In my most humble opinion, there is nothing more perfect in life than to find yourself in complete bliss while hovering over a reef filled with so many types of technicolor fish, plants and invertebrates, in soothing temperate water, like a ghost haunting over the goings on of life in another world, as if you are just an invisible observer to a world that is completely alien to your own. The freedom to float higher or lower with just a breath of air or a blow from your mouth, to turn sideways and upside down and float with your own bubbles, to quietly inch up to a fish who eyes you curiously as if you were some strange visitor to his world, and just not sure what to make of you.... all off this wonderful pleasure is so diminished by encumbering oneself with excessive and unneeded gear. Too much weight and the thick wet suits that require them, redundant air and safety equipment that is never, ever used, huge cameras and light systems to take pictures of the same marine life that countless others have documented before you.

I'm a vacation diver. I spend a few days a year treasuring the freedom thrills of diving for the sake of diving. I've been doing some hunting too as of late, but despite being task oriented during those dives, I still have not lost the appreciation of just being neutrally buoyant in the water column while the scenery does it's thing around me to delight me and make me feel at peace. I love being light... a simple BCD with few extras. Just the right amount of weight in my pockets. No humongous dive knife. Just a small knife to dispatch any fish I score and maybe cut a bit of mono line fouling the reef or wreck I'm on. When I'm in my zone, I can't even feel the tank on my back. My breathing is slow and my mind is empty. It's just me and the world beneath the surface.

So to me, there IS such a thing as TOO much air on a dive. Plan your dive accordingly and you don't need extra tanks to laden you down. Diving with the minimum amount of equipment simply enhances every dive you do and should not be discouraged as long as you are prepared to handle any unforeseen event.

 

[Steelyeyes]

When low on air do a normal ascent. You can skip a safety stop if you need to but heading up with 1000 psi should allow for one if you don't fight the current. Being low on air while underwater is your primary concern. Getting back to the boat is a secondary problem to tackle once safely and securely surfaced with your buddy. SMBs and signaling devices like an Air Alert should be in every diver's kit for that situation.