Make sure you breath in when you check your SPG

[Luc Dupas]

Grin... women and opening/closing valves (or bottles or jars or whatever with a screwthing...), it's so damn easy however... it is ALWAYS in the OTHER direction... :14:

 

[cool_hardware52]

I had an unsettling experience on a dive a few months ago, It was a shore dive and everything was ok in the beginning but after a while I noticed a definite resistance when drawing a breath. I checked my gage while inhaling and saw the pressure drop from 2000+ psi to less than 500! I quickly turned to my wife and signalled that I was having a regulator problem and asked her to check that the valve was fully open. She went around behind me but on my next breath I got nothing and the pressure dropped to zero. Assuming that the octopus would not help since the pressure read 0 I gave the out of air signal and started breathing through her octo. We surfaced and started swimming in to shore. I figured that I had a failure of my first stage.

Suddenly a thought occured to me and I asked her to turn the valve the other way. Sure enough the pressure came back.

Lessons learned:
1 - Be careful when openning your valve that you open it fully
2 - Understand that my wife just doesn't get the whole righty tighty thing and
3 - NEVER let her touch my valve while under water

Hope she doesn't read this.

You might want to hire a food taster.


Tobin

 

[WarrenZ]

I had a person who had just done his AOW deep dive come to us and say that he noticed the same thing (gauge dropping and refilling with each breath). He assumed this was because of the depth. We showed him how the valve was barely on.

Just proof it is good to ask questions; you never stop learning and with the group we were with (jokesters, Wise *******, and divemasters) it is always good practice to check your gear toughly before you get into the water with a tank that has been turned off, a hot dog wedged between your tank and BP, or something I am saving for a certain Instructor I know.