I did ask my husband, and he said he had lots of times he ran out of gas in the pre-gauge days, but they buddy-breathed instead of doing CESAs.
Redundant air sources and the new diver
- Thread starter Dr Wu
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The general order of preference (at least amongst the folks I dove with on the Northern California Coast) was:
1. Nurse your regulator the surface, hoping to get a few sips on the way up.
2. Spit it out (yup!) and blow bubbles all the way to the surface.
3. Buddy breathe to the surface.
BB was really only done when you were in the kelp, there was a canopy above, and thus you needed to travel some distance horizontally for a clear shot to the surface. Even so, BB was practiced at the start of every dive. A lot of dives ended with breathing getting hard while deep, coming shallow and getting a little more air, a nd finally having to do a free ascent from thirty or forty feet when the regulator just stopped delivering any air at all. Why we spat the regulator out is beyond me, I suspect that if we had kept it in, the laws of physics being what they are, we'd have gotten more air back in the shallower range.
1. Nurse your regulator the surface, hoping to get a few sips on the way up.
2. Spit it out (yup!) and blow bubbles all the way to the surface.
3. Buddy breathe to the surface.
BB was really only done when you were in the kelp, there was a canopy above, and thus you needed to travel some distance horizontally for a clear shot to the surface. Even so, BB was practiced at the start of every dive. A lot of dives ended with breathing getting hard while deep, coming shallow and getting a little more air, a nd finally having to do a free ascent from thirty or forty feet when the regulator just stopped delivering any air at all. Why we spat the regulator out is beyond me, I suspect that if we had kept it in, the laws of physics being what they are, we'd have gotten more air back in the shallower range.
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elmer fudd
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I don't think the CESA would scare me as much as the possibility of being bent afterward. 80' or so really isn't that far to swim on a single breath, especially if you're a little bit positive already and just getting more so as you ascend and the air in your lungs and your tank is expanding as you go up. Doing regular emergency ascents from those depths just sounds like an invitation to get the bends though.
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Why would you get bent? We didn't. 60 fpm was the standard ascent rate, even for a 100 foot dive that just a minute and a half to the surface, but as I mentioned earlier it was more often 30 to 40 feet.
dumpsterDiver
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Some of this CESA stuff in the good old days is getting a little silly. People did use the J-valves frequently. Also if you are diving without a guage, you are going to be very attentive when it starts to get hard to breath.
(You can test impending low tank pressure by simply sucking hard at the END of the inhalation phase. If the tank is low, you will feel it then pretty early.)
Just because the tank is low and it becomes "hard to breath", it doesn't mean you need to do a CESA! All you had to do is come up and breath slowly! If you have a crappy regulator, you will get an earlier warning that the pressure is low.
The idea that you are going to commonly buddy breath off another guy's tank (which is not fitted with a guage) and WILL go empty fast if two people are using it, is also not representative of the way sport diving was done. Why would you assume that your buddy has significantly more air than you do?
If you weren't using a j-valve, then at the very first sign of resitance in the reg, you began to swim up, immediately. It is not really an emergency unless you are out of breath, very deep or very negative or in deco
(You can test impending low tank pressure by simply sucking hard at the END of the inhalation phase. If the tank is low, you will feel it then pretty early.)
Just because the tank is low and it becomes "hard to breath", it doesn't mean you need to do a CESA! All you had to do is come up and breath slowly! If you have a crappy regulator, you will get an earlier warning that the pressure is low.
The idea that you are going to commonly buddy breath off another guy's tank (which is not fitted with a guage) and WILL go empty fast if two people are using it, is also not representative of the way sport diving was done. Why would you assume that your buddy has significantly more air than you do?
If you weren't using a j-valve, then at the very first sign of resitance in the reg, you began to swim up, immediately. It is not really an emergency unless you are out of breath, very deep or very negative or in deco
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