Who has been in a reall OOA situation, whether you or your dive buddy?

[boulderjohn]

As you did a CESA then, you kept the reg in your mouth because you might still get a little air as you got shallower. Imagine my surprise during a refresher course a few years ago when the instructor wanted me to drop my reg while I demonstrated CESA!

When you do the CESA today, you are also supposed to keep the regulator in the mouth. After a research study about dive accidents involving teaching CESA, it became a point of emphasis with pretty much all agencies. I am a PADI instructor, and it is heavily stressed in our standards. CESA is the only piece of instruction in which we are told every point we must tell the students, and one of them is that they MUST keep the regulator in the mouth. If the instructor with whom you worked was PADI or really any of the major agencies, his telling you to drop the regulator was a major standards violation, and if there had been an incident as a result, he would not have had a leg to stand on in the resulting lawsuit.

 

[Max Speed]

Three times. Regulator of a design which could freeze to closed...and did. 70' CESA.

Freeflow at depth due to freeze. Finally emptied the tank at the surface. Oral inflation practice is good.

Buddy on HP80 and unfamiliar with teenie tank factor. Ran out at safety stop.o Oral inflation practice is good. Psi alone is not a good gauge of gas remaining across different tank sizes.

Redundant and independent gas is good.

 

[LeFlaneur]

Never out, just suddenly low. Something like dive #6 or 7 between OW and AOW and my deepest dive to date. I had an instabuddy with much more experience who just swam off on his own. I got nervous, overbreathed my reg and burnt through my air. I ended up buddy breathing with the divemaster until I got back to the anchor line. Not a big event in the long run but I'm kind of glad I had the experience.

---------- Post added June 15th, 2015 at 11:22 PM ----------

---------- Post added June 15th, 2015 at 04:16 PM ----------
This is why I still teach buddy breathing to OW students.

Buddy breathing isn't regularly taught to OW students anymore? That seems like a pretty major oversight.

 

[archer1960]

Never out, just suddenly low. Something like dive #6 or 7 between OW and AOW and my deepest dive to date. I had an instabuddy with much more experience who just swam off on his own. I got nervous, overbreathed my reg and burnt through my air. I ended up buddy breathing with the divemaster until I got back to the anchor line. Not a big event in the long run but I'm kind of glad I had the experience.

---------- Post added June 15th, 2015 at 11:22 PM ----------



Buddy breathing isn't regularly taught to OW students anymore? That seems like a pretty major oversight.

I agree. I was newly certified PADI last year, and my instructor mentioned buddy breathing in passing, but we only practiced using the octo. My suggestion would be to teach using an octo in basic OW, then teach buddy breathing in AOW.

 

[Lefty Writer]

In this century I have had only one instance of ooa. diving single tank and the valve got rolled off in a cavern. No biggy however I dive with h valves. switched to the necklace and exited. It was my fault. I cracked the valve to check for leaks and did not turn it all the way on. I got distracted. I love H valves.

Well, Chief, that's what you get for having someone else besides me as your dive buddy that day.

:d

I remember watching you exit the cavern, wondering where you were going (and where Rafa was).

 

[Bob DBF]

Does staying down until it gets hard to inhale and then having to gently sip the air on ascent count as "out of air"?

Na, otherwise my first attempts with K-valves would have to count, I sure liked it when I could afford an SPG. Also I don't see going OOA intentionally as an issue, rather it is an extensive use of resources.

It is interesting to me to see that over the decades, the OOA go from a usual and expected nonevent to a traumatic emergency. I have been in the position of sharing air a number of times and found it less frantic back when I had only one second stage.




Bob
--------------------------------------------

That's my point, people, by and large, are not taught that diving can be deadly, they are taught how safe it is, and they are not equipped with the skills, taught and trained to the level required to be useful in an emergency.

 

[Phil_C]

I can only remember one occasion when a diver nearly went OOA, one where a group of military divers apparently went OOA on their deco stop, and one where we had to make an AS ascent.

The first was when I was doing a lot of dives shadowing groups whilst I was doing my CMAS 3*. I was just patiently hanging at the rear of a group doing a dive to about 65' and watching what everyone was doing. I saw a diver ask his body how much air he had left, and the diver signalled 120 bar. I thought nothing of it, then about ten minutes later watched as the same happened again, with the diver again saying he had 120 bar. My interest was by then piqued and a few minutes later he again signalled he still had 120 bar!

I swam over and asked him to show me his gauge, which he did and I saw he actually only had 40 bar left. I am still not sure he realised, and I indicated to the DM that he was low on air and that we were going to make an ascent, and that I would go with him. The plan had been to return to the anchor line to ascend, but he was far too low to do that, so we started a gradual ascent whilst swimming back towards the boat. We intersected with the anchor line at about 20' which was right where a drop tank was, I showed him the drop tank but we finished a safety stop and ascent on what remained of his tank. I still had plenty of air, we had the drop tank, but he didn't have much else left.

When we talked about it afterwards he seemed completely oblivious to the fact he had almost gone OOA and should have started his ascent much earlier. So no drama or fuss, but I remember it because the DM had failed to understand my communications and hadn't understood why I had suddenly headed up with one of his divers, so that for me was the real learning point, rather than the possible OOA.

The second time was with a group of Turkish military divers. I was visiting a training facility and my host invited me along as a guest on a relatively deep (140/150') training dive they were doing. They had a deco trapeze deployed below the boat, but as we descended my escort aborted because he could not equalise his ears. We agreed I would continue with the group, which I did. We finished the dive and ascended at the end and had a small amount of deco to complete. I hovered near the deco bar, but most of the military lads were hanging on it.

After a few minutes I noticed that at least two buddy pairs were air sharing, or using the drop tanks. I thought they were just practising, but after we surfaced I asked and was told they had gone OOA on the deco stop and that the air sharing was for real.

I had finished my dive with plenty of air left, and was feeling quite smug about it, right up until the point I tried, and failed, to climb back into the boat

Being unceremoniously hauled back aboard by a couple of young fit soldiers removed the smug grin from my face.

The air shared ascent was with my instructor, we were doing a dive to 90', and as we reached the bottom of the anchor line her yoke 'o'-ring blew leaving her with a free flow from the first stage. Again no real drama or panic, she just came onto my octopus, we turned the tank off, and aborted the dive making an AS ascent back up the anchor line. - Phil.

 

[nimoh]

Buddy breathing isn't regularly taught to OW students anymore? That seems like a pretty major oversight.

I think you are probably confusing buddy breathing with air sharing. Buddy breathing involves sharing one second stage and taking turns breathing. Air sharing involves sharing a air source (tank) but using two distinct second stages and both divers are able to breathe freely without taking turns.

To the best of my knowledge, buddy breathing is not commonly taught in basic OW classes, air sharing is taught in all basic OW classes

 

[boulderjohn]

Buddy breathing isn't regularly taught to OW students anymore? That seems like a pretty major oversight.

I agree. I was newly certified PADI last year, and my instructor mentioned buddy breathing in passing, but we only practiced using the octo. My suggestion would be to teach using an octo in basic OW, then teach buddy breathing in AOW.

The decision to remove buddy breathing was a long time coming. It was an optional skill for a long time, and then it was removed as an option a few years ago. Here are the primary reasons as I understand them.

1. Although many ScubaBoard participants argue that it is easy to teach, research decades ago by Dr. Glenn Egstrom of UCLA indicated that it took many successful buddy breathing practices to make a buddy team competent enough to use the skill in an emergency, and the skill had to be practiced regularly or that competence would be lost.

2. The history of the use of buddy breathing in actual emergencies is not good. In too many cases, the result of the incident was two victims rather than one. This was determined to be true because an OOA diver is often in a state of panic and will behave very differently than when in the comfort of a practice exercise in a swimming pool. In the only case I know of in recent years, a woman in Florida was given a rental regulator set that did not include an alternate air, and she ended up in a buddy breathing situation with an OOA diver. Both divers perished.

3. It is extremely rare these days to find a regulator setup that does not include an alternate air source. In the Florida case mentioned above, a lawsuit was filed against the company that rented her the gear without the alternate regulator, but I have not heard of the resolution of that suit. The point of the lawsuit is that in modern practice, an alternate air source is so standard that failing to use or provide one in rented gear makes one liable for damages in the case of an incident.

4. In the case of an OOA emergency with no alternate air source available, the CESA is considered a safer alternative to buddy breathing, making the skill unnecessary. Agencies would prefer that students not be taught an alternative that is less safe because they would prefer that divers not be tempted to use that less safe alternative. The Florida case mentioned was a bizarre one in which the OOA diver was unable to stay on the surface because he was intentionally severely overweighted so he could more easily hunt lobsters, was wearing a brand new weight integrated BCD, and he did not know how to dump the weights. What happened during the air sharing that led to their deaths was not determined.

In summary, buddy breathing is considered to be an unnecessary skill because of the almost universal use of equipment that renders it obsolete, and even if that equipment is not available, a safer procedure is preferred.

 

[James R]

One diver taking AOW was out of air at 60' when I was a DM on the dive boat, and was with the class. I was diving doubles, so no big deal, handed him the long hose and ascended to 15' to do a safety stop. The problem was he didn't want to stop...just kept on ascending. We weren't even close to NDL or anything, so I went on with him. No panic, or drama.

Then we get on the boat and he is complaining about my molded mouthpiece hurting his teeth, going on and on about it. More than one person basically said shut up, it's better than being dead. At the end of the charter he tried to give me 1.00 as a tip...I told him to keep the dollar if that's what his life is worth.

Not a great story, but that's the only OOA situation I have ever been in.