siltout?

[Dive-aholic]

Heads Up Display

On a rebreather, it alerts you to when your ppO2 level has dropped too low. Red is the color you want to see flashing. As comforting as the HUD would be, I'll take an eCCR and run it manually. I've been in siltouts in which the HUD wouldn't be visible and having the backup of electronic control would be very comforting.

 

[Meng_Tze]

That must have been quite the siltout. Some guys have actually put a HUD in pea soup to see if it could still be read, it could. In order to NOT see the HUD right in front of your mask (2"-3"), there would have to be a physical barrier, a silt out thicker than pea soup. There was a thread about it on RBW.

 

[brockbr]

Cave siltouts, HUDs and pucker factor?

I was over 4,200' back exiting from the Banana Room at JB. This area is a very low bedding plane with a clay floor. My buddy hooked a cylinder on the ceiling while scootering (both of us on CCR).

The problem? He never let go of the trigger - He bowed up, then powered towards the clay.

I was only a few feet behind him when he caused the mess - I had about a second and a half to let go of my scooter and grab the line. What made this even tougher is the line in this area is practically laced into the ceiling.

I grabbed the line and was enveloped by absolute zero viz.

This area of JB is very wide and has very little flow, so the chances of it settling out in the next 4 hours was slim to none.

The only part of my HUD that could be seen the the faint color flashing - But it was really faint. I had to rotate the HUD to make contact with my mask in order to really use it.

I stayed motionless for a couple of minutes. The last thing I saw was my buddy disappearing behind the cloud on the exit side.

As I sat in the darkness with my hand holding the line in the ceiling, all I could do was chuckle to myself, and I literally asked myself (out loud) "Do I really need to be here? Is this really worth it?"

I stowed my scooter, and worked my way along the line, and it took me about 12 minutes to swim ahead of the silt cloud. Part of the problem is that the line is very hard to follow when it's in the ceiling like that.

In hindsight, I think about the fact that many of the techniques we would use if I had gotten off the line would have been rendered useless where I was...

a) The line was in the ceiling, so finding it with another spool wouldn't work

b) Tying off to my current location prior to moving would've have been damn difficult - Not because of the tie-in to the ceiling, but because of the potential of getting hung up in my own line.

c) There was little to no flow - Determining a way out by flow alone would have been a complete guess.

d) Yes. I am one of "those" guys that carries a compass in a cave, and I had a general idea of which way to go, but of course, that was rendered useless by the viz too.

My HUD was a comfort for sure. At that time I was on my CK, and always dive using min-loop, so I could have gone pretty far at a constant depth and been able to add o2 as well if I didn't have the HUD, but that would've been last-ditch.

Outcome? I won't scooter behind someone through that section anymore

b.

 

[ScubaDocER]

I was gonna add my siltout story, but after reading Brock's, I just feel like a wuss. Nevermind

 

[Dive-aholic]

Cave siltouts, HUDs and pucker factor?

I was over 4,200' back exiting from the Banana Room at JB. This area is a very low bedding plane with a clay floor. My buddy hooked a cylinder on the ceiling while scootering (both of us on CCR).

What made this even tougher is the line in this area is practically laced into the ceiling.

I'm not too fond of that area of JB!

I'm happy to say nothing like what happened to you back there happened to me! But I won't scooter back there. I haven't been there enough to know it real well and that line is very difficult to see. The one time I did scooter back there I ended up scootering off the line onto another line. Fortunately, I realized my error and was able to correct it. But it was an eye opening experience!

 

[GLENFWB]

Brock,

Thanks for the account of your siltout. As an Intro. diver, a line on the ceiling is kind of spooky, for lack of a better word. Is the line on the ceiling because of the heavy silt on the floor of the cave?

 

[Mr.X]

Cave siltouts, HUDs and pucker factor?

I was over 4,200' back exiting from the Banana Room at JB. This area is a very low bedding plane with a clay floor. My buddy hooked a cylinder on the ceiling while scootering (both of us on CCR).

The problem? He never let go of the trigger - He bowed up, then powered towards the clay. ....

As I sat in the darkness with my hand holding the line in the ceiling, all I could do was chuckle to myself, and I literally asked myself (out loud) "Do I really need to be here? Is this really worth it?" .....

Outcome? I won't scooter behind someone through that section anymore

b.

Thanks for sharing this story. I can just imagine the clouds of gunk as your buddy hit the trigger with the bottle banging the ceiling. Not so good fer' sure.

That being said - the last penetration had me asking the same thing - "Is it really worth it?" When things go ugly that little fella' on your shoulder reminds you "what are you doing", or "is it purposeful." The last series of dives in the muck for me certainly brought that home as I thought about the family, my dog and about driving the new motorbike (just purchased before the project).

As per Meg HUD - pretty darn good tool to have. Sure beats the handsets in muck. I liked the original HUD on Cis Lunar MK5. It was handy, and the buddy light on the back of the unit equally so from a distance. Though - you need some viz. to make out the color.


X

 

[brockbr]

Brock,

Thanks for the account of your siltout. As an Intro. diver, a line on the ceiling is kind of spooky, for lack of a better word. Is the line on the ceiling because of the heavy silt on the floor of the cave?

The floor from the Elbow (2,300'p) back is pretty much all clay. The line runs generally along a wall, or it propped by small rocks.

In the bedding plane, there are no walls for the line to be on, and the floor isn't an option, so it's on the ceiling. "On" isn't really the right word - more like "in". If you get even 5' offset from the line, it is extremely easy to lose, as it disappears into the cracks and crevices. The tie-off's are necessarily inside the ceiling, so this only makes things more difficult.

By the way, one thing I didn't mention (but becomes *painfully* obvious) is this: Ever tried to follow a line that is on/in the ceiling, in a low area, on a CCR? Talk about sloooowwww going. Consider too that you don't want to muck things up anymore than they already are because that crap is *going to follow you*

b.

 

[philliplehman]

I do mostly exploration diving here (dr) so almost all new cave penetrations involve pretty much zero viz exits every time. I actually enjoy silt outs, your senses change, hearing becomes more acute, the cave "sounds" different when in zero viz, it is very relaxing kind of like meditation, as long as you don't loose the line that is.

 

[TSandM]

When we did the Bone Room tunnel in Ginnie, having the line on the ceiling made me extremely nervous (but not nervous enough, it turned out). All I could think was how hard it would be to find if we lost it and the viz went down. I was also worried about entanglement -- I hate the line above my manifold.