With these other heavy DPV's what do you guys and gals do if the DPV floods or the battery dies. I have had this happen on my Sea Doo several times and it was not that difficult to tow it back to shore. I could not imagine a much larger DPV being pulled. Do you practice drills incase you get to far from shore, or if you are in a strong current? So far with my DPV I have not used it in conditions that I would not normally dive. If all else fails I can ditch my DPV and could back on another day and recover the DPV. Your thoughts anyone.
This probably ought to be split off as a separate thread, as it's a good learning point in and of itself. Mods?
As a general rule, tech grade scooters are built a lot more better than Sea-Doo type units, so when properly maintained, the risk of flooding or catastrophic failure is a lot lower...but we all have to plan for contingencies nonetheless. Plan for the worst, and expect things to go better
If you plan a dive where you absolutely need the scooter to get in and out safely, you simply take a spare. Usually one per team is enough, but dive plans need to be examined and decisions made case by case. Otherwise, you plan your dives to swim the scooter out if you have to... and swimming a scooter sucks, even when properly clipped off and floating behind you. Riding with your mask tucked in your buddy's crotch is also not a lot of fun, but it works...
You burn test your scooters so you know how much battery you have, and you watch your times properly when using them. Think about it like this: no good diver would even think of diving without obeying the rule of thirds on his gas, and with scooters, it's basically similar for your burn time and battery consumption. Pretty straightforward stuff.
For safety's sake, I dive with a small liftbag bungeed and stored in a pocket. If I need it, it can double as a delayed SMB on a dive if I miss the upline or am covering a large amount of ground with a live boat pickup since there are no bubbles when I dive to find me. If there's a catastrophic flood (highly unlikely), I clip the lift bag to the scooter, inflate to make it as close to neutral as possible, and deal with the bulk as appropriate. You either tow the scooter out, send it to the surface if that's an option, or clip it off to a guideline/railing/whatever, and come back with a bigger lift bag and retrieve it later.
