Top Ten ways to fail your OW Course (courtesy Rodales)

[cantlogon]

had a dive guide (instructor) drive his 15-passenger van, a dozen or so intro divers (aka Discover Scuba) to the beach, about 20 miles away. Arrived there &....ahem...."discovered" that he'd left the trailer...which contained ALL the tanks & gear....back at the dive shop. He is no longer in the diving industry, as far as I know.

Chris
("iruka" until message board ate that name somehow)

 

[scubagirl15]

Zeina once bubbled...
An Advanced diver on a liveaboard boat in the Maldives ACTUALLY said:

I am not ascending fast enough, my computer keeps displaying "SLOW"

And she was dead serious, too!!

When I was on one of my AOW check-out dives, my buddy sank to the bottom of a wreck in 76' of water and couldn't get off the bottom. When we surfaced, I was told, "I didn't know I had to add air to my BC to achieve neutral buoyancy."

I have also seen quite a few OW students whose eyesight were poor enough to be unable to read their gauges. I have gently encouraged them to either wear contacts or get corrective lenses for their masks, to which the response is invariably: "Why? I'm only near sighted."

Go figure.

 

[FredT]

Scuba~dog once bubbled...
3. Spit in your wetsuit; pee in your mask.

While spit won't warm up the wetsuit, urine is a very effective defog. :brows:

FT

 

[coquito]

FredT once bubbled...


While spit won't warm up the wetsuit, urine is a very effective defog. :brows:

FT

I wonder how you figured that out. I know I am going to regret asking this...

 

[FredT]

It's all simple chemistry.

The purpose of a "defog" is to remove all oils and other contaminates from the inside of the mask to prevent the inevitable condensation from forming droplets on the inside of the mask, but to instead form an unbroken sheet or sheen of water. The sheen you can see thorugh, a few million hemispherical dropelets forming mini-lenses you can't. The "defog" can be done by removing contaminates, by depositing a surficant, or both.

Organic acids and surficants found in spit performs both these functions, so can the ureaic acid in urine. Urine from a healthy person with properly working kidneys is sterile, so theoretically it's better to piss in your mask to defog it than to spit in it, as spit is full of nasty critters.

I've never had anyone take up my offer to piss in their mask though.

FT