Sorry for what I'm sure will be sort of a long story. I'm still sort of debriefing myself.
Monastery's been a somewhat elusive dive for me so far. Most of the time I try to dive Monterey I head down to Monastery, decided it looks suicidal and go to a more reasonable site. Before today I'd only managed one Monastery dive (North), which was pretty amazing. Today we got down there and the waves were seriously under a foot high. After watching for a half hour or so, we decided it was probably going to stay that way, and figured we'd get wet.
For a bit of background, I'm at University of California, Santa Cruz, and I dive with their clubs/classes. I've been basically taking classes since my OW because there's always time for more classes in college, and that covers our hard gear and air. I'm currently in the Rescue class, having taken OW in the fall and AOW in the winter. As part of the rescue class, the instructors require us to tag along on the AOW dives and the OW skin & checkout dives in addition to the RQ dives. Today was the 3rd and 4th AOW dives, the first two having been yesterday at the Breakwater.
I buddy up with this AOW student I don't know who did his OW outside of the university program. I think he was certified at some summer camp in high school, but we didn't talk too much about it. By the time we get to the water I'm a bit sketched out about him, and in retrospect I realize that I'd sort of accepted the idea that this was going to be a solo dive with a partner for me, because I didn't really trust that he'd be able to get me out of anything serious. And while I'm usually pretty terrified of Monastery, with the 1' waves I guess I figured that even though "Monastery will kill you", I figured it wouldn't be today. I'll admit that at this point, I really already should have called it.
I have a lovely entry and we kick out to the edge of the kelp. The water was stupid warm and I was really comfortable and super excited. I think I read 55 degrees, but my thermometer's a bit off (reads 85 in the 82 degree pool). We drop down in about 30' or so and I can still see the ripples on the surface. I was really pleased with myself at this point because I managed a reasonably horizontal descent and managed to level off a couple feet off the bottom, and as a fairly inexperienced diver, this constituted the best buoyancy control of my life. I then noticed my buddy in the midst of what I sure hope was not the best buoyancy control of his life.
He's lying in the sand messing around with something, when I realize that his weight belt has come off. Apparently, in the process of cinching it up he undid it and couldn't get it back on. He looked like he might drop it altogether at any point, so I grabbed his dumps and my own (bye-bye perfect descent), then helped him get it back on. It actually took sort of a while, and by the time we got set back up and re-neutralled, I'd already used up 400psi (although my SAC is stupid high still). This would have been another fantastic time to call the dive.
However, I of course don't thumb the dive, and we have a lovely tour. I took a bearing before we got started, but we don't follow any sort of consistent heading going out. I didn't see this as a huge problem because the sand ripples at Monastery are as tall as my car, so those plus "the beach is southish" I figured would end me up in the right spot. The whole time he's flapping around with his arms, kicking starfish, etc. so I'm not able to be as close to him as I'd normally like, but with the ridiculously good vis I didn't really mind being 6-10' away from him. I think probably some of that was because I'd internally decided that I wasn't going to rely on him. Not that I usually rely on my buddies, or that I was actually specifically thinking this. We saw a ton of really cool stuff, nudies, crabs, starfish in sexually suggestive poses, kelp mats changing the light making it down etc, and had a great dive. I was trying out some of the techniques one of my instructors had suggested too. All in all, pretty cool dive. I call for a safety stop around 1200 psi at 20', but to be honest it was mostly because I wanted an excuse to watch these two hermit crabs battle it out for a bit.
We toddled around at 20' until I get to about 800 or 900 psi and figure it's time to head up. This is a little more conservative that I'd normally do at Breakwater, but it's still Monastery and I want some air for the surf zone just in case the Mavericks suddenly decided to show up. At first my buddy misunderstood my signal (I think he saw a "shall we?" rather than an "i want to") because he signed that he was fine on air and kept swimming. I caught up with him, resignalled and we surface.
At the surface, stuff goes downhill fast. The weather's still not awful and the swell's actually decreased. We are, however, in the middle of a kelp bed. I'm comfortable (psychologically) crawling over kelp and I kept air to duck it, so I wasn't really concerned. I check for an OK with my buddy and get it, so we both sign to the beachmaster that we're cool. About two seconds later, my buddy indicates that is is in fact not at all cool. His inflator had a slight leak in it, so that when he inflated it would leak a small amount of air. He was utterly convinced that the BC was leaking and was going to all disappear. I took a look at it, figuring there was just a stone stuck under the button, but wasn't able to make it stop whistling after an inflate. Additionally, it really was a tiny amount of air that was being lost. If I reinflated after it stopped leaking, it barely put any in before the overpressure valve blew. Figuring I'd settled that, I asked him if he was ok, and he said "no, I'm not okay, I'm stuck in kelp." Without wanting to sound too dramatic, I looked in his eyes and he looked like he was on the verge of panic.
I cleared the kelp from... well, everywhere. It was wrapped around his first stage, arms, etc. and started talking him down. He was able to maintain eye contact, nod, etc, but nothing more. I started talking about how we were going to swim out, around major kelp areas, into a smooth part of the beach, etc. and he responded with a cough and "tow me." We were probably a hundred or so yards off shore, with huge kelp mats in front of us, but I figured it wasn't that big of a deal. I briefly tried to wave down our beachmaster, but I didn't try too hard and he was watching someone else at the time, so I figured again that it wasn't a big deal and started to tow him. I grabbed in with the dosey doe thing they teach you in OW until he calmed down enough that he was floating okay on his own, then towed him by his first stage so I could control the kelp better with my forward arm.
At some point he asked me if he should drop his weight belt, and I took the total cop-out answer of "if you're not comfortable right now, you should drop your weight belt." In retrospect, "yes" would have been a better answer. If I'd known how much weight was on the belt, I'm sure I would have just said "yes", or told him to ditch it before then. Throughout my classes, they've told us that people are reluctant to drop the weight belt because of cost, but I didn't even think of that. To start with, they're borrowed weights and we have no financial responsibility towards any weight we ditch in an emergency. However, it seemed that saying "yes" was accepting that this was a serious emergency, rather than just my buddy being a bit tired. I've done a fair bit of sailing, and the rule in sailing is "if you consider whether you should reef the sails or not, you definitely should." I should have applied something similar here. So even though I knew that I was at Monastery, where people drown all the time with their weights still on them, I let him keep the weights on. I mean, I even had a spare weight belt and lead in the car--it wouldn't have even prevented a second dive.
Now funnily enough, there was a lifeguard training or workout session or something going on at the same time. I'd tried to signal to the beachmaster earlier, but having not gotten his attention, I didn't think to give an OK after stuff was calmer. Turns out, some of the lifeguards had seen me wave over earlier and had headed over. By the time he made it over, my buddy was calm and swimming on his own again. I probably should have had him swim my buddy in at that point, but I figured I had it under control. I had a rough time talking my buddy in, he sort of swam in weird directions instead of coming straight in, but he was doing okay with the floating and not dying thing. The lifeguard wasn't really dressed for the swimming around, so he headed in. I think he watched us from the beach though.
I carried his weights up the beach and he mentioned that he realized that he forgot to remove a 5lb weight from his BC from the dive the day before. "Oh, so you had 35lbs, that explains it." "No, 45," he says. I look at the weight belt and sure enough, there are four 5lb weights and two 10lbs weights. A lot of the people I dive with wear 25-30lbs, but I always make sure to grab one of the few neutral tanks we have so that I can get away with 19lbs. He had 45lbs and a neutral tank. He did have on a couple layers of neoprene, but he was clearly severely overweighted because even with a full BC he wasn't struggling to keep his eyes above the surface.
Anyway, long story short, nothing too serious really came of it, but I'm a little alarmed at how casually I took a lot of the situation. Here's my rundown of my mistakes:
* I shouldn't have even started the dive with him, simply because I wasn't confident in his abilities. Even if he'd turned out to be an amazing diver, I shouldn't hard started out uncomfortable in this regard, especially at Monastery.
* I should have checked his weight in the buddy check. I didn't even know about the 5 pounder in his BC. Additionally, I had no idea he was wearing 40lbs. He was new to our gear (1 pool, 2 OW) and that I'd been certified in the same gear (14 pool, 10ish OW), and I was certain that BC wouldn't float 40lbs even if you had a dirigible attached to it, so I'm sure I would have at least queried it.
* I should have noticed how much weight was on his belt when we were messing around after the descent. I know I saw six bricks--how I didn't notice two of them were twice as big as the others I have no idea.
* I should have probably called the dive when he was struggling with the weight belt after descent anyway. I'm not sure what he was trying to do, but it looked like he was trying to do a weight-belt roll while lying on the bottom.
* I should have maintained a course that would have let us return reciprocally so we wouldn't have surfaced in the middle of a kelp forest.
* After we surfaced and he was no longer okay, I should have made sure the beachmaster noted it. We keep a beachmaster exactly for stuff like this, and they're suited up in full skin gear exactly for stuff like this. It wouldn't have killed me to shout a little.
* I definitely should have had him drop his weight. In this case it didn't matter, and although I figured if stuff got worse we could drop it then, I'm sure that's exactly thinking that gets people killed. I'm gonna do the "if it crosses your mind, it's time" thing if this ever comes up again.
* I should have let the lifeguard tow him in. He had a little floatie thing on a rope, he wasn't tired, he wasn't wearing 40lbs of gear and he didn't have his own first stage to get stuck in the kelp, and he was already there. The crisis seemed over though, and I felt like I'd already handled the rough bit and I could get the rest okay. I'll give this one 50% ego and 50% not wanting to make it a Real Emergency™.
* This one's the worst though: we did a 1:15 SIT then I did a second tank with the same guy. My excuse? "I haven't seen South Monastery yet".
In the end though, everything turned out okay, except we busted off the exhaust tee of my SP R109 octo. Actually I'm pretty irritated about that, but it really could have been a lot worse.
Any more screwups that you see that I missed?
Monastery's been a somewhat elusive dive for me so far. Most of the time I try to dive Monterey I head down to Monastery, decided it looks suicidal and go to a more reasonable site. Before today I'd only managed one Monastery dive (North), which was pretty amazing. Today we got down there and the waves were seriously under a foot high. After watching for a half hour or so, we decided it was probably going to stay that way, and figured we'd get wet.
For a bit of background, I'm at University of California, Santa Cruz, and I dive with their clubs/classes. I've been basically taking classes since my OW because there's always time for more classes in college, and that covers our hard gear and air. I'm currently in the Rescue class, having taken OW in the fall and AOW in the winter. As part of the rescue class, the instructors require us to tag along on the AOW dives and the OW skin & checkout dives in addition to the RQ dives. Today was the 3rd and 4th AOW dives, the first two having been yesterday at the Breakwater.
I buddy up with this AOW student I don't know who did his OW outside of the university program. I think he was certified at some summer camp in high school, but we didn't talk too much about it. By the time we get to the water I'm a bit sketched out about him, and in retrospect I realize that I'd sort of accepted the idea that this was going to be a solo dive with a partner for me, because I didn't really trust that he'd be able to get me out of anything serious. And while I'm usually pretty terrified of Monastery, with the 1' waves I guess I figured that even though "Monastery will kill you", I figured it wouldn't be today. I'll admit that at this point, I really already should have called it.
I have a lovely entry and we kick out to the edge of the kelp. The water was stupid warm and I was really comfortable and super excited. I think I read 55 degrees, but my thermometer's a bit off (reads 85 in the 82 degree pool). We drop down in about 30' or so and I can still see the ripples on the surface. I was really pleased with myself at this point because I managed a reasonably horizontal descent and managed to level off a couple feet off the bottom, and as a fairly inexperienced diver, this constituted the best buoyancy control of my life. I then noticed my buddy in the midst of what I sure hope was not the best buoyancy control of his life.
He's lying in the sand messing around with something, when I realize that his weight belt has come off. Apparently, in the process of cinching it up he undid it and couldn't get it back on. He looked like he might drop it altogether at any point, so I grabbed his dumps and my own (bye-bye perfect descent), then helped him get it back on. It actually took sort of a while, and by the time we got set back up and re-neutralled, I'd already used up 400psi (although my SAC is stupid high still). This would have been another fantastic time to call the dive.
However, I of course don't thumb the dive, and we have a lovely tour. I took a bearing before we got started, but we don't follow any sort of consistent heading going out. I didn't see this as a huge problem because the sand ripples at Monastery are as tall as my car, so those plus "the beach is southish" I figured would end me up in the right spot. The whole time he's flapping around with his arms, kicking starfish, etc. so I'm not able to be as close to him as I'd normally like, but with the ridiculously good vis I didn't really mind being 6-10' away from him. I think probably some of that was because I'd internally decided that I wasn't going to rely on him. Not that I usually rely on my buddies, or that I was actually specifically thinking this. We saw a ton of really cool stuff, nudies, crabs, starfish in sexually suggestive poses, kelp mats changing the light making it down etc, and had a great dive. I was trying out some of the techniques one of my instructors had suggested too. All in all, pretty cool dive. I call for a safety stop around 1200 psi at 20', but to be honest it was mostly because I wanted an excuse to watch these two hermit crabs battle it out for a bit.
We toddled around at 20' until I get to about 800 or 900 psi and figure it's time to head up. This is a little more conservative that I'd normally do at Breakwater, but it's still Monastery and I want some air for the surf zone just in case the Mavericks suddenly decided to show up. At first my buddy misunderstood my signal (I think he saw a "shall we?" rather than an "i want to") because he signed that he was fine on air and kept swimming. I caught up with him, resignalled and we surface.
At the surface, stuff goes downhill fast. The weather's still not awful and the swell's actually decreased. We are, however, in the middle of a kelp bed. I'm comfortable (psychologically) crawling over kelp and I kept air to duck it, so I wasn't really concerned. I check for an OK with my buddy and get it, so we both sign to the beachmaster that we're cool. About two seconds later, my buddy indicates that is is in fact not at all cool. His inflator had a slight leak in it, so that when he inflated it would leak a small amount of air. He was utterly convinced that the BC was leaking and was going to all disappear. I took a look at it, figuring there was just a stone stuck under the button, but wasn't able to make it stop whistling after an inflate. Additionally, it really was a tiny amount of air that was being lost. If I reinflated after it stopped leaking, it barely put any in before the overpressure valve blew. Figuring I'd settled that, I asked him if he was ok, and he said "no, I'm not okay, I'm stuck in kelp." Without wanting to sound too dramatic, I looked in his eyes and he looked like he was on the verge of panic.
I cleared the kelp from... well, everywhere. It was wrapped around his first stage, arms, etc. and started talking him down. He was able to maintain eye contact, nod, etc, but nothing more. I started talking about how we were going to swim out, around major kelp areas, into a smooth part of the beach, etc. and he responded with a cough and "tow me." We were probably a hundred or so yards off shore, with huge kelp mats in front of us, but I figured it wasn't that big of a deal. I briefly tried to wave down our beachmaster, but I didn't try too hard and he was watching someone else at the time, so I figured again that it wasn't a big deal and started to tow him. I grabbed in with the dosey doe thing they teach you in OW until he calmed down enough that he was floating okay on his own, then towed him by his first stage so I could control the kelp better with my forward arm.
At some point he asked me if he should drop his weight belt, and I took the total cop-out answer of "if you're not comfortable right now, you should drop your weight belt." In retrospect, "yes" would have been a better answer. If I'd known how much weight was on the belt, I'm sure I would have just said "yes", or told him to ditch it before then. Throughout my classes, they've told us that people are reluctant to drop the weight belt because of cost, but I didn't even think of that. To start with, they're borrowed weights and we have no financial responsibility towards any weight we ditch in an emergency. However, it seemed that saying "yes" was accepting that this was a serious emergency, rather than just my buddy being a bit tired. I've done a fair bit of sailing, and the rule in sailing is "if you consider whether you should reef the sails or not, you definitely should." I should have applied something similar here. So even though I knew that I was at Monastery, where people drown all the time with their weights still on them, I let him keep the weights on. I mean, I even had a spare weight belt and lead in the car--it wouldn't have even prevented a second dive.
Now funnily enough, there was a lifeguard training or workout session or something going on at the same time. I'd tried to signal to the beachmaster earlier, but having not gotten his attention, I didn't think to give an OK after stuff was calmer. Turns out, some of the lifeguards had seen me wave over earlier and had headed over. By the time he made it over, my buddy was calm and swimming on his own again. I probably should have had him swim my buddy in at that point, but I figured I had it under control. I had a rough time talking my buddy in, he sort of swam in weird directions instead of coming straight in, but he was doing okay with the floating and not dying thing. The lifeguard wasn't really dressed for the swimming around, so he headed in. I think he watched us from the beach though.
I carried his weights up the beach and he mentioned that he realized that he forgot to remove a 5lb weight from his BC from the dive the day before. "Oh, so you had 35lbs, that explains it." "No, 45," he says. I look at the weight belt and sure enough, there are four 5lb weights and two 10lbs weights. A lot of the people I dive with wear 25-30lbs, but I always make sure to grab one of the few neutral tanks we have so that I can get away with 19lbs. He had 45lbs and a neutral tank. He did have on a couple layers of neoprene, but he was clearly severely overweighted because even with a full BC he wasn't struggling to keep his eyes above the surface.
Anyway, long story short, nothing too serious really came of it, but I'm a little alarmed at how casually I took a lot of the situation. Here's my rundown of my mistakes:
* I shouldn't have even started the dive with him, simply because I wasn't confident in his abilities. Even if he'd turned out to be an amazing diver, I shouldn't hard started out uncomfortable in this regard, especially at Monastery.
* I should have checked his weight in the buddy check. I didn't even know about the 5 pounder in his BC. Additionally, I had no idea he was wearing 40lbs. He was new to our gear (1 pool, 2 OW) and that I'd been certified in the same gear (14 pool, 10ish OW), and I was certain that BC wouldn't float 40lbs even if you had a dirigible attached to it, so I'm sure I would have at least queried it.
* I should have noticed how much weight was on his belt when we were messing around after the descent. I know I saw six bricks--how I didn't notice two of them were twice as big as the others I have no idea.
* I should have probably called the dive when he was struggling with the weight belt after descent anyway. I'm not sure what he was trying to do, but it looked like he was trying to do a weight-belt roll while lying on the bottom.
* I should have maintained a course that would have let us return reciprocally so we wouldn't have surfaced in the middle of a kelp forest.
* After we surfaced and he was no longer okay, I should have made sure the beachmaster noted it. We keep a beachmaster exactly for stuff like this, and they're suited up in full skin gear exactly for stuff like this. It wouldn't have killed me to shout a little.
* I definitely should have had him drop his weight. In this case it didn't matter, and although I figured if stuff got worse we could drop it then, I'm sure that's exactly thinking that gets people killed. I'm gonna do the "if it crosses your mind, it's time" thing if this ever comes up again.
* I should have let the lifeguard tow him in. He had a little floatie thing on a rope, he wasn't tired, he wasn't wearing 40lbs of gear and he didn't have his own first stage to get stuck in the kelp, and he was already there. The crisis seemed over though, and I felt like I'd already handled the rough bit and I could get the rest okay. I'll give this one 50% ego and 50% not wanting to make it a Real Emergency™.
* This one's the worst though: we did a 1:15 SIT then I did a second tank with the same guy. My excuse? "I haven't seen South Monastery yet".
In the end though, everything turned out okay, except we busted off the exhaust tee of my SP R109 octo. Actually I'm pretty irritated about that, but it really could have been a lot worse.
Any more screwups that you see that I missed?
