Whats the dumbest thing you've done?

[CamG]

Greetings all my memory was just jarred by Saspotato's post and I just had a simular dive. We were doing a light deep dive with a hard bottom of 85' for 20 min.
In the pre-dive I had set my Nitek Duo for the 28% mix I was diving. Apparently while gearing up I had bumped the mix selection button and started the dive on 99% well you can imagine at 21' my computer went CRAZY! Needless to say everyone on the dive was looking at me wondering what in the world was going on. I verified that everyone was ok and my secondary timing device was functioning and continued with the planned dive. I learned that my computer really does track PO2 and you will not exceed 1.6 and not know about it. I chose to watch it carefully to see just what and how it responded.'
I was very pleased with its performance and the dive went on with out a hitch.
The warning indicator went off immediately after reaching 20' for our 5 min. stop.
Foolish yes but enlightening as well. Had it been a deco or deeper plan with out redundant time / computers I would have aborted the dive no exceptions. Live to dive another day so to speak.
Safe diving all and keep the stories coming.
CamG Keep diving....keep training....keep learning!

 

[Water Monkey]

Ok, over 100,000 SB members and only 57 have stepped up and admitted to doing something dumb!

Come on, belly up to the bar and lets have some more stories!

We need some stories from some long time SB members.

My favorite so far is WOOKI

 

[diddydidit]

Join scubaboard.............cause I'm totally addicted............But seriously I have done ,many dumb things in my life but fortunately none when it comes to diving yet, knock on wood. I credit this to the excellent teaching and mentoring I got from The Edge

 

[hockeydad]

Mine is out there, jumped into the water with my torch in hand, but not secured. Then, used my hand to adjust my mask when I realized that to do that I had just let my torch go. We went on with the dive, a wreck dive, but I decided to head back, on my own to find my expensive torch. The DM thought I was going up, not around, which was not safe, a bit dumb. The positive end is that I was able to find the torch at the bottom, next to the wreck, at about 38m; and then rejoined the group just in time to head back to our line and resurface. Of course, my lovely wife was not happy at all as she did not expect to see me again since, she said, I signaled her that I was going out. Lesson learned, secure your torch before going in, and check, and recheck.

 

[Texasdivechick]

Dumbest scuba move by far is an incident I caused while diving in the Dry Tortugas. I had recently torn my ACL and while I was given the okay to dive by my surgeon, I was very much aware of having a gimpy knee during this liveaboard trip. I mentioned to my buddy that my knee was sore so he told me to lead the dive and set the pace. That was mistake #1- I'm severely challenged when it comes to navigating. I can't find my way out of my own house without a GPS. Mistake #2 came when I failed to hear my buddy banging on his tank, nor did I check on him while I furiously tried to kick down out of the current towards the reef. Mistake #3 came when I finally realized that the reef was no where in sight and that I was at 90fsw doing a 360 looking for some landmark in complete blue water. My buddy and I finally made contact and we began a very slow blue water ascent without any visual guideline, not realizing that the current had picked up and was sweeping us way beyond the reef and boat. We neared the surface and I thought it would be easier on my knee if I hovered just 2-3 feet below the surface. My buddy repeatedly tried to get me to surface but I was hell bent on swimming toward the boat just under the surface. What I didn't realize was that we had been swept about a 1/2 mile from the boat and the crew only saw my buddy, not me. We were picked up in the dingy and took the ride of shame back to the boat. I learned a great deal that day once I overcame my embarrassment and humbling shame. I'm actually surprised that my buddy wanted to do subsequent dives with me after this incident.

Lessons Learned:

1) Never let me lead a dive.
2) Always, always, always have good buddy awareness (I'm now compulsive about it).
3) Practice navigation (although it hasn't helped much so far)
4) Let the crew know that you're okay and surface when your buddy tells you to do so.
5) Learn from the mistakes and never repeat them.
6) Pass the lessons learned on to others.
7) Know thy limitations. I probably should have skipped this dive since the current had increased and my knee was too weak to kick effectively. In hindsight, I would have swallowed my diver pride and stuck to the easier dives on the trip.

 

[Atom]

OK let's see... (I'm not proud of some of that stuff)

1. Did a scuba course during college, but never did the certification dives. Of course I had no money, no car & no buddy to go diving with but, I took me 13 years to correct that mistake. I might also have been afraid of not being able to equalize properly since I could do it in the pool but with some difficulties (I was doing it wrong, but it was shallow so...). And it was actually good a course I think (I'm not sure since it was a while ago), the teacher had all semester, 2h x 15, the pool section got us doing more skills than in my OW cert.
2. I was doing a jump-forward-roll-and-land-on-the-back entry (it probably has a real name) from a boat and one of the fins decided to thumb the dive and stay on the deck (full foot fins), the dive master was quite amused.
3. Spent a whole safety stop fining downward, since I lost total control of my dry suit, I could roll to get my feet down, but not vent enough air quickly enough to stay in control. That was dumb (and a lot of work), I could have gone deeper to compress the suit and work with up slowly, or I could have swan to the peer and grab one of the many planks that are there at various heights. Of course vis wasn't great so I wasn't seeing the peer but I knew where it was, I just forgot about it because I was too busy fining ; ( To make it more interesting the sunnto decided to give me a 1 minute stop on top of the safety stop because I had got up a bit too fast while doing one of the rolls, which I also did fining feet up and face down.
4. And now the dumbest thing I've done..... unplanned dive to 165 feet.... how stupid can I be? Well plenty stupid... I was following my buddy... who was following the guy in front of him... who elected not to follow the guide....who followed the plan...the plan was to hit 40ish meters and work our way up from there...my computer was set in imperial... so when I got to 130 feet, I was thinking "aren't we at 40m? shouldn't we start going up", but I figured my conversion was wrong (I was narced, I can tell you that) and didn't see the guide stop there... after a while (30 seconds according to the computer log) I decided this was wrong, looked up and saw the guide signaling us, at about the same time the other 2 did the same thing. So in the end we all rejoined the guide, had a very nice 43min dive, nothing bad happened, and I got out with plenty of air (850psi), but I'm still angry at being foolish enough to continue to that depth on air, I knew better than to do that, and there's no justification for what I did. Good thing is, this is a mistake I'm not likely to repeat.
   

 

[Tortuga68]

I posted a "deep air" thread on scubaboard thinking I might get non-judgemental responses

 

[garrett58]

i once backrolled off the boat wearing my sunglasses instead of a mask

 

[DiverLS]

About a year since AOW certified I was on a boat in the Northern Channel Islands in November (Thanksgiving) I was trying to talk another lady into being my buddy. She seemed reluctant especially since the skipper told us there was current and explained the current line.

So we jumped and I signaled her to swim into the current. Insead she turned and swam with the current. I felt I had to follow. Well, then she dove down and squeezed her ample body through a tight hole, scraping her tank on the top and dislodging part of the rocks.

After about 20 minutes going in circles, she signaled up. So I tried to get her to do the hand crawl, rock to rock agains the current to get back to the boat. She refused. So we surfaced a LONG way from the boat. We got the OK sign from the boat and I signaled OK - we could make it to the current line. No dice for her. She signaled help. That confused the boat. They tried again and got the same conflicting information. So they sent help (the inflatable) and we were hauled aboard for the ride back to the boat.

What I learned. If the potential buddy shows ANY reluctance to dive. Don't try to convince them to decide. Listen to them.

And why she refused to do the hand crawl to get up current? She didn't want to harm the reef.

 

[BettyRubble]

Did it recently . . . jumped in without fins. . . the kicker was, I was 2nd one in so the whole boat saw it and my climb of shame back onto the boat. .. OY VEY