Capable of recovering regulator while drowning?

[Doby45]

Or end up with the bungee IN my drysuit. I am feeling around like, where the hell is my necklace.. Lesson learned..

 

[TONY CHANEY]

I survived! I had a total out of body experience and could see myself and my buddy trying to don and receive the reg. Best advice, don't go up. The increased O2pp at depth will do you better served than heading to the surface where it drops and you hit the surface in a hypoxic situation and have a shallow water black out. I can testify that your urge to breath is kicking in more than you can believe. It is a "have to get on a reg than simply can I get to a working reg." I might post the story here. A well planned dive that went to crap at the worse time possible.

 

[billt4sf]

...I would like to read that story.

 

[Kevrumbo]

I have my backup regulator on a bungie necklace around my neck. It's pretty easy to find in an emergency.

Hypothetical worst case nightmare scenario is being on scooter/DPV and accidentally "clotheslined" at the neck by monofilament "ghost net" with resulting full head mesh entanglement: good luck getting to your back-up bungee'd necklace reg if your Primary was dislodged. . .

 

[Michael Guerrero]

If you are at the bottom of the ocean you have long since drowned. 20,000 feet is a long way down.

 

[CuzzA]

Drowning is a very quick process and even thou I have not tried this

It's often best not to try that.

 

[John C. Ratliff]

hey guys I got a quick question. If you were drowning in the bottom of the ocean would it be possible to recover your regulator even though you swallowed a good amount of water?

Luis,

I'm going to assume a few things here. First, you are a non-diver who is looking at the sport. Second, that you are quite young (14?), and perhaps are asking this question as kinda a way of determining whether you will get into the sport or not. So let me answer from my experience (I started diving in 1959 at age 13, and haven't stoped).

First, there is a big difference between "swallowing" salt water and "inhaling" salt water. What the others above were talking about was inhaling salt water. But swallowing it will give you a tummy ache, but that's about it (maybe some vomiting later too).

Now, about drowning, this is a situation where a person goes unconscious from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) while underwater. There may be a reflex inhalation of water (wet drowning), or there may be simply unconsciousness without such an inhalation (dry drowning). But, as mentioned above, you will have to be without a dive regulator, and/or out-of-air, for over a minute to go unconscious. If you have trained well (done what the certification requires, and a bit more now-a-days), practiced exchanging regulators with your buddy, and/or practiced accessing your octopus/spare air/alternate air supply, that can easily be done within a minute that you have. So actual drowning from not having your regulator/air supply is pretty remote.

And yes, it is possible, indeed quite likely, to recover your regulator after being engaged by a heavy wave. My buddy and I were "rolled" by about a twenty-foot wave (we were underwater and churning around for around 30 seconds, I estimate), and once back on the surface the first thing I did was to recover my second stage and start breathing on it (we were on the surface swimming for shore when this wave hit us). We had no masks, but we had our regulators. Our training had kicked in, as neither of us had inhaled water, but when we were finally picked up by the Coast Guard, when I bent over I had water run out of my sinuses. The Coast Guard personnel were really happy (as were we), as we were their first "live" pickups in quite some time. You can see the photos our girl friends, who called the Coast Guard, took of our dive that day so long ago (December 8, 1974; note in the first photo, by dive buddy Bruce has his helmet, and in the second it is gone!). From that dive on, one of my rules is that if a question comes into my mind about whether to dive or not, I scrub the dive and do something else. My mind was telling me something.

Granted, we were at the surface, and your question was about the "bottom of the ocean." Well, that bottom can be fairly shallow, or quite deep. Even recovering your regulator doesn't guarantee not drowning as we have had a very good diver die after getting caught in a down-draft of current, taking her way below where her training and equipment was designed to work. So if your are talking about extremely deep diving, then maybe not, as certain diving diseases (nitrogen narcosis, specifically, or oxygen toxicity) can preclude a diver from recovering a second stage at extreme depths. But, that is not where you will be diving, at least I hope you won't go there. If you stay within the recreational diving limits (usually thought of as 120 feet of sea water), then yes, you can recover your second stage even after swallowing some sea water, or even inhaling a bit and coughing it out.

SeaRat