Rangiroa Trip Report - Canyons Dive

[Diver Dave1]

I agree with comments above.
If the DM was planning such a technical dive, the dive boat should have had regulators at 15ft connected to a fresh tank on the boat. One reg per diver would seem appropriate. At least one reg at 15 ft as a minimum.

 

[yle]

Writing this makes me want to go back to Rangiroa and do it all over again, albeit a little bit differently.

Would be interesting to hear from the OP what aspects of this dive she would want to do "a little bit differently"... and which she would keep the same.

 

[rsingler]

What the OP describes is physically impossible. Out of 300 psi left in a tank, only 250 are usable by the very best balanced regulators. 250 psi in a low pressure 100 cu ft tank is 9.5 cu ft. Two magnificent divers with RMV's of 0.35 cu ft/min (very unlikely) are consuming 0.9 cu ft/min at 10 ft depth. That is eleven minutes of remaining tank time.

On so many levels, both the dive description and the OP's assessment of this dive are fanciful, if not extremely self-deluded.
It is impossible to be polite about this.
Do not try this at home.

 

[doctormike]

Wow. Sorry, no way to sugar coat this one. What a spectacular failure of judgement, planning and situational awareness. OP, I appreciate your write up, but I'm worried that you are normalizing deviance a bit here based on the tone of the report.

Don't mean to pile on, but I think that any new divers reading this thread should understand that the correct response to surviving a CF like this is not "that was one of the funnest dives ever".

Other things that stand out:

"I checked my air-I had blown through 500 psi. There was not enough time to worry about that, however. All around me were innumerable banner fish, surgeonfish, and butterfly fish taking shelter from the current and I swiveled around to take it all in."

No, when you realize that you are blowing through your only gas supply at a higher than anticipated rate (and approaching NDL), that is EXACTLY what you need to worry about. The last thing that you should be paying attention to are the banner fish.



"Mark, who was already buddy-breathing at this point with the divemaster, showed us his wrist-mounted dive computer. He still had 30 minutes of decompression left."

Not sure what happened here. At some point Mark blew right past the NDL on his computer? Why didn't he ascend to some degree, long before this point?



"I feared that Mark would be traumatized, or even ashamed about being low on air, when in fact, it wasn’t his fault."

Unless someone was sneaking up behind him and breathing off his backup reg, it was absolutely his fault to be low on air.



"At this point, the divemaster asked that Mark breath from my octopus, since he was too low on air to continue buddy-breathing. I was down to 300 psi, nearly empty with 15 minutes left to go, but offered my octopus to my husband."

This is just insane. Not sure if the DM should have surfaced quickly and asked for a tank and reg to be sent down, or if he was afraid to leave you two for a few seconds (admittedly a hard choice), but a plan that involves two divers finishing off 15 minutes of deco on a single tank with the gauge reading 300 PSI is crazy. SPGs are inaccurate at low pressures, you might have both been completely OOG.

You could make a case for blowing off deco, surfacing, and either getting new tanks and doing a redescent with skipped deco protocol, or observing you on surface O2 if there was a chamber nearby. All bad choices at that point, but having two divers in the water with no gas and a deco obligation is a situation that no one should ever be in.


"Antoine apologized for taking us on such a “technical” dive."

He didn't take you on a technical dive. A technical dive involves planning your dive including ascent profile and gas management so that you can complete your decompression obligation, ideally even in the case of a lost gas scenario. I don't know what to call what he took you on, but it sure wasn't a tech dive.

 

[yle]

What the OP describes is physically impossible.

To be fair, I don't think accuracy was the point of her story. I got the impression the main theme was how much "fun" the dive was and how everyone should go do it if they get the chance.

A truly objective account of the dive would be incompatible with that theme.

I'm not defending the OP, just pointing out that she was inspired to dive this location by a story written by a well know novelist of fantasy fiction. Seems some details of her story were similarly inspired.

 

[Dogbowl]

To be fair, I don't think accuracy was the point of her story. I got the impression the main theme was how much "fun" the dive was and how everyone should go do it if they get the chance.

A truly objective account of the dive would be incompatible with that theme.

I agree with this...to bring visitors to your blog, you might have to stretch the truth a little and bring danger, excitement and fun to it. Maybe that’s what her intention was and lost sight of how dangerous and irresponsible her story would appear to real divers.

Kinda reminds me of those people who scale skyscrapers to take a selfie to post on social media.

 

[rsingler]

"You just don't know what you just don't know..."

Or, phrased rather more elegantly,
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."
- Sec Def Donald Rumsfeld, Feb 12, 2002

 

[WetPup]

Also, I thought FP had very strict rules about cert levels for diving. By government regulation, unless you are rescue diver (minimum) certified, you are restricted to a maximum of 30 m in French Polynesia. This isn’t a dive op policy, it is local law. I know we like to joke about it as a dive community, but there are actual literal scuba police in FP. And they check. There are enough warnings about it online.

So the following comment in the OP’s post?

As we neared our 120’ max depth...

I call BS. If you are as inexperienced as your post indicates, you would, by law, not have been allowed below 30 meters. And it would have been enforced. No dive op in FP would risk it by doing “trust me” dives with insufficiently certified passengers.

 

[Dogbowl]

Oh, boy! This was NOT the first time of such irresponsible behaviour. I read through some of OPs earlier blog posts and here’s another incident:

I posted this particular day’s dive profile on Scubaboard, a popular dive bulletin board, and got lambasted by several senior members, including Christi, the owner of a successful dive shop on Cozumel Island. She and others said that I and the divemaster had been irresponsible, and that we had better conduct a review of basic diving fundamentals. Here is a link to that thread:

http://www.scubaboard.com/showthread.php?t=196513 (Unfortunately, this link no longer works)

Here’s the blog post the above excerpt was taken from:

Mina's Dive Blog, Life Blog and Travel Blog: Cozumel Dive Trip, July 2007

See: Epilogue

I suppose it’s a pattern of behaviour...SB folks like to call it normalization of deviance?

Scubaboard hasn’t changed and neither has the OP!

 

[Shasta_man]

this section seems to describe how ignorant of the danger. Equating flooding the GoPro with "I'm about to get the bends"!

<<Feelings of fury and grief washed over me, with tears almost welling out of my eyes. I had already watched Mark’s GoPro camera flood on one of our earlier dives, which had him reduced to lugging it like a useless appendage for the rest of the dive. I was already heartbroken for my husband’s disappointment. And now this? I feared that Mark would be traumatized, or even ashamed about being low on air>>