Diving fatality in Guam

[cruiser]

Nope. Diving with one of those can give you a false feeling of buddy contact encouraging you to get too far apart. Stay with your buddy. And if you're thinking of using one to summon help, don't count on that either - as you and your buddy are often all the help you can hope for.

And once buddies start drifting apart, even though you can hear the horn, if viz is low you can't tell where the sound is coming from and at that point it's like having no buddy at all. You are on your own.

 

[Yosemite Sam]

What motivated the buddy who surfaced to get out of the water while his partner was still diving down below? Had he run low on air in his tanks?

Also, should it be anticipated on a group dive that all divers are equipped with about the same amount of air in their tanks before diving in and should consequently all be expected to surface at more or less the same time?

Lastly, does the lack of nitrogen in the victim's bloodstream imply that she drowned at a relatively shallow depth and then sank to the bottom?

My apologies for asking novice questions...

 

[kaerius]

What motivated the buddy who surfaced to get out of the water while his partner was still diving down below? Had he run low on air in his tanks?

Do note that standard procedure if you lose your buddy, as taught by PADI and probably most/all agencies is look around for one minute, then surface(no safety stop). You either meet up at the surface, or get help because your buddy didn't surface.

As for same amount of air, different people go through their air at different rates(often the more experienced diver will be the one that uses less, though I've seen some small women who use less than their instructor on open water course, and big men tend to be air hogs).

Lack of nitrogen bubbles in her bloodstream means could mean it was shallow or early in the dive, but it's not conclusive. Mainly it means she probably was within the recreational limits.

 

[kaerius]

double post...

 

[Banyan]

Also, should it be anticipated on a group dive that all divers are equipped with about the same amount of air in their tanks before diving in and should consequently all be expected to surface at more or less the same time?

As for same amount of air, different people go through their air at different rates(often the more experienced diver will be the one that uses less, though I've seen some small women who use less than their instructor on open water course, and big men tend to be air hogs).

I sometimes get the feeling that small women have gills and just refuse to tell us. Besides body size, other things that affect air consumption include experience/anxiety (the anxiety of new divers tends to make them breath more rapidly and shallower), depth (as your OW coursework explained, you need to breath more volume the deeper you are), and exertion (divers who feel the need to sprint from place to place burn through air faster than those in a slow cruise). I've been on dives where new-ish overweight male divers sprint straight to the deepest part of the dive and swim around in circles, only to have to get out the water when the rest of the group is at half air. Conversely, I've had a (small female) buddy be at half air as I was exiting. On a shallow dive, the difference between the least and most efficient breathers can easily reach 30 minutes. I've certainly been buddied with divers who force me to end my dive 10-15 minutes before I would have come up on my own.

Bringing it back to this incident, I understand that the victim was female and the buddy was male. One scenario I've imagined as to why they separated is that the victim was more air efficient and decided to extend her dive, though that's sheer speculation on my part.

On a side note, I dove off Jim Miller's boat this weekend and his assistant was clearly still processing the incident. He was perhaps more stressed out than he otherwise would have been by a diver who bounced between 20' and 80'. Reminder to some: The boat crew isn't annoyed at your lack of buoyancy control because they're mean people, but because they don't want you to die.