Avoid Running Out of Air SCUBA Diving
One thing we can count on when we're on land is that we don't run out of air. When we're diving though, this becomes a possibility with serious consequences.
The good news is that an out of air emergency is very preventable before the dive and air issues in the water can be successfully managed by following basic recreational dive principles.
Let's dive into avoiding out-of-air emergencies when we're SCUBA diving!
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The surface interval's over... get out there and dive!
The Under Pressure Divecast is the SCUBA diving podcast dedicated to making SCUBA fun, entertaining and accessible! Join me SKuba Steve as I go over topics related to recreational SCUBA diving, discuss gear and provide easy tips that make your diving more enjoyable, comfortable, safer or more memorable.
SKuba Steve
Under Pressure dive buddies, one thing we can guarantee on land or almost guarantee is that we aren't going to run out of air. But when we're scuba diving, obviously that situation may change. And the the consequences to that can be pretty serious. So the good news is that out of air emergency is almost completely preventable. And so what I want to talk today talk about today is how we can prevent running out of air while we're scuba diving. Get into your gear, because it's time for another episode of the underpressure dive cast. I'm your host, scuba Steve. Scuba diving is a fun and exciting adventure sport, and you can be a diver. And to help you get there. The underpressure dive cast is here to talk about recreational scuba diving. And let's get into it. I will eventually get the new intro right. It's all good. So what we're going to cover today is we've got a little bit of news. We will talk about the main topic of course route what why do people run out of air? And what can we do about it? It's one of the most serious things that can go wrong underwater. And, and like I said, it's pretty much completely preventable. So we also have a gear junkies garage and a tip of the week. So let's get into it. Let's talk about the news.
Alright, so the only news I have this week, um, I must confess, I didn't look up any specific industry news, but I did get my C bands, and my ginger gum from C band company. And so I ordered those after the episode about motion sickness. So we're just going to put those on and make sure that uh, make sure I don't get motion sickness during the during the episode here. So we'll we'll, we'll see how they work in a completely benign environment. So one thing I will say is that, that they got pretty beat up in shipping that happens on occasion. But nothing was broken. So all right, so there you go. See bands in place hidden that pressure point. We'll see if it keeps me from being nauseous from stage fright. Maybe that's silliness aside, let's move on to the main topic.
Okay, so let's talk about how how this whole idea of running out of air, and what we can do about it, why it happens. Before we get started on my notes, when I was I was getting ready for the show, I realized that I have a lot of emotion invested in this topic. And you know, you can on the surface, you can say, okay, it's a big deal because running out of air a could be frightening to you as a diver be it could. It's a serious topic to begin with. But I also think maybe I carry baggage from my training, you know, and so I want to be sensitive to that. So if I sound a little over the top at some point, I don't. And I don't want to suggest right now that this isn't a serious topic that that people need to pay attention to. But at the same time, the whole point here is to be positive and motivating. And if I drift away from that, that's I just wanted to say that that's I noticed that about myself when I was writing my notes that I do have a lot of emotion invested in this. So we'll see how it goes. The usual data caveat that I that I've talked about this before. And as I've tried to bring more data driven information to you through through the last few episodes. There isn't a lot of science, when it comes or scientific studies with meaningful data that apply to scuba diving, at least not directly. Now in the case of running out of air as a diver. We do have some statistics. But you have to be careful even with those because there's statistics about fatalities. And not everyone that runs out of air dies from it. And so the data is skewed by the fact that if nobody dies, nobody reports it. So if you run out of air and you have to go air share with your buddy and you make a safe ascent to the surface and you guys all you know you get over it and you have a great dive day. Nobody's going to call Dan and say this happened. Okay. So it's really important to understand what the data that actually As always, with scuba diving that we only have what we have. And so what I could find is a couple of things. First of all diving is very, very safe. There's one fatality for every 200,000 dives, roughly, I mean, and again, the data is hard to come by. But diving in generals very safe accident data. When we talk about the accident data in scuba diving, we're talking about single and double double digit numbers. So it's very hard to make any kind of statistical interpretation. With that low frequency of incident now we we should all be really happy that the frequency incident is so low, or the frequency of incident is so low, but it does make any kind of real scientific analysis of the data difficult. There's my caveat 30 to 40% of dive accidents that result in fatalities involve running out of air in some way. That's that's the best that we know now what happens in a divers mind underwater is difficult to interpret. And, and a further 20% of embolism accidents are attributed to panic because of an out of air situation. So if you kind of put all that data together, you're kind of in the realm of 50 to 60% of all scuba diving accidents involve running out of air and again that those numbers you can find reports that are going to give you different numbers, the point is not the exact statistical figure. The point is that there's a real good percentage of dive accidents that have something to do with being out of air. And being out of air is preventable, as we're going to discuss here in a few minutes. So the good news is diving safe to begin with the second new, the good piece of good news is that one of the biggest problems that we have as scuba divers we can prevent. Okay, so that's awesome. All right. So why do we run out of air? And if you google this, you're going to find lists of reasons that we run out of air. Don't overcomplicate it, we only run out of air because of two things. We're not watching our gauge
or equipment malfunctions, or there's an equipment issue. Okay. Everything else is just a subcategory of not watching your gauges, or an equipment issue that arises. It's that simple. So you know, you can say, oh, but what about you know, what if I dove deeper than I usually go? And then I ran out of it? Well, why did that happen? You ran out of air because you weren't watching your gauge. Not because you dove deeper. You didn't run out of air because of a current that required you to use more air to swim against it. You used you ran out of air because you weren't watching your gauges. So I want to be really clear and i i i don't mean to be hard on people about this. I said in the beginning, I have a lot of emotion attached to this because I do believe so strongly that it's preventable in most cases. And and I say that because you can never say all, but I have never seen a case where a diver ran out of air that they legitimately couldn't have prevented it either beforehand or handled the accident differently in the situation. So you know, and I'm I'm happy to look at any issues. If you guys know of a case where it was completely unavoidable, you know, throw it in the comments to the video, or email me and I've got the contact information at the end of the episode, email me and let me know because I would be interested. First of all, to fact check my myself but also to have that in my body of knowledge. In case it comes up in the future. So there's two reasons we run out of air not 27 not seven, not five to we're not watching our gauges, or there's an equipment issue. So let's talk about how can we, there's and there's kind of two places where we have to handle out of air situations. One is prior to the dive. What can we do before we even get in the water to prevent an out of air situation? And then we're going to have in the water situations, which is really the scary stuff, right? And that's, you know, how do we handle that in a way that's going to prevent an accident. You know, a broken piece of equipment is not a die of accident. A hurt diver is a dive accident. Okay, so so let's Let's talk about preventing an out of air situation entirely. The first thing is pre dive checks. It doesn't matter if you own your gear, if you're renting gear, it doesn't matter if you're diving 10 miles away from your house at a reservoir. Or if you're lucky, a beach, or if you're diving 5000 miles away on an exotic vacation, you need to check your gear. That means pre dive checks, put your gear together, pressurize the system, look at your gauges, how much well, even before you pressurize the system, check your when it's depressurized, check your gauge and make sure it's zero. Right, we want to make sure that when our our pressure gauge reads zero, that's because it's depressurize, there is no pressure on it, then pressurize the system, make sure you have that 3000 pounds of air in your in your tank that you were expecting or if it's 2800 that you know that. But if it's 1000 unless you're diving very shallow, you know, you've only got 500 pounds of air to work with before you have to be back on the surface so that it's really important to check your gear up front. And that's you know, a couple of notes I did I actually read an article in prep for this that isn't really specifically relate well, actually it is I was gonna say it's not related, but it is and this is this whole concept of where do you put that tank valve when you open it. And the rule of thumb when I was learning to dive was that you would fully open the valve and then back it off a quarter turn. And so you may have heard that. Don't do that. Okay. There's there's two problems that well, really, there's only Yeah, there's two problems with that one. If you have a valve that is in any midway position, you don't know what position is actually in, because you can go either way, and it's going to move.
If you have a fully backstopped, if you go to open, it's going to crack or if you go to shut, it's going to crack shut a little bit. But if you go to open it, it's not going to go anywhere. So you know exactly what position that valves in and that's really good for, for peace of mind, and for being able to do a quick check. So that's one thing. And then the other piece of that is if it's really not fully open and a quarter turn back, because functionally, fully open and a quarter turn backs probably not going to hurt anything. But if it's not actually fully open and a quarter turn back, let's say it's only half a turn open, maybe you were in a rush, you go whoosh, whoosh. And then and then back it off a little bit. Now it's only a half a turn open. It'll breathe fine at 15 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet. But as you go deeper and deeper, and you need more and more air, because of the pressure and depth, the regulator is going to have a harder and harder time pulling that much air out of out of that smaller hole. And so you're going to have a harder time breathing. And that has actually caused dive accidents where people did get hurt, because they panicked when they got deep, because they thought they couldn't breathe because their tank wasn't delivering enough air. So fully backstop your vows. And there's you know, there's the complaints about this are a that you might damage the valve seat in the fully open position. And be that if it's in a fully open position and it's under pressure, you might not be able to shut it, it might the valve might stick open. Okay, be 100% honest, a if you have dive of you, if you dive a tank so much that you ruin a tank valve by backstopping it, you know, kudos to you, you know, there's the odds of that or that the number of cycles it's going to take to actually damage that valve is more dies than the tank is going to be worth. Okay. So the other piece of that this whole idea that you're going to, it's going to stick open is, you know, first of all, I've never even heard of it actually happening. People talk about maybe it's going to happen, but I've never heard of it actually happening. And think about this. I'm on the boat. It sticks open. I don't care. Right sticking open doesn't matter until you go to change out your tank. You get underwater. If the valve is stuck open, what difference does it make? None. You're gonna breathe off of it anyway you don't want to shut the valve. And, you know in we're not talking about a situation where we're diving doubles, and you have a manifold on the back that you may manipulate if you have a failure of one of your tanks, we don't do that when we're when we're recreational diving. We have one tank, it's usually a 64 or an 80 or 63 and an 80 or an 80. And you only have one valve it's a single point of failure. So if that fails, you're off to your buddy anyway. Right so all right, that was way longer about the open tank valve than I had planned to go but suffice it to say open it fully. breathe through the regulator's don't just look at the tank gauge and go Okay, it's all you know, I've got 3000 pounds, breathe through both regulators and you should have to write primary and an alternate. The second thing, and then the rest of the buddy checks. Make sure you understand how your bc works, pressurize it, inflate it fully until the relief valves pop. Make sure it inflates and deflates properly. Make sure that the inflator hose when it's when it's depressed is inflating and we need to do when you stopped depressing it it stops inflating, right because there's a way for you to lose air that way as well. Okay, so the next thing you need to do is understand your gear know your gear. Okay. And where this comes into play, what we're talking about now is a few the air delivery system itself and your gauges, right? You want to understand how your air delivery system works, how your second stage regulators work, and you know where the purge valve is. Because if the diaphragm inside of one of those regulators gets flipped on itself or or folds or get some sand in it or something, you need to be able to purge it or maybe blow through it really hard in order to clear it. So that that can reseed because that can cause a free flowing regulator which can cause you to to lose air as well.
But understand how your gear works learn it before you dive if you're renting gear, get it as soon as you can before you dive if you're at a destination and you can go to the dive shop and get it a day before you dive That's awesome. If you have to get it the morning that you're going to dive get there early, have somebody walk through it with you so that you understand where's the purge valve Where are the vents on your BCD all of those things that are going to matter to you as a diver Oh, and your computer, know how to read it. Okay, I and I'm not being dismissive here. All the computers have, you know, different display types. And we need to understand what the computer we're using how it displays if it's air integrated, how does it display pressure you know, where is it on the screen so that you know at a glance how much air you have. Alright, and certainly if it's your own computer, you need to be aware of how it works. Alright, so that is part of the prevention. The next thing about prevention is maintenance, if you own your own gear, and this is one of the reasons that we do on our own gear is diverse is that we're in control of the maintenance of that gear. So make sure it's maintained on on at the periodicity that the manufacturer plans or more frequently, if you're diving a lot or you've you've been diving in an environment that might have a lot of that might get it dirty. If you're in a really turbid environment you get a lot of grime or whatever in your regulator, you might want to get it cleaned out and serviced in between dives a little more frequently than you would if you're just diving in clear freshwater or or nice Caribbean ocean water so maintenance is an important thing that's for every piece of gear you own. Make sure that it's being maintained properly. If you're renting gear you know then you need to decide you know do I know these people well enough that I don't need to see the maintenance logs or do I need to ask about this when was the last time this regulator was was maintenance was maintenance was maintained. When was last time this tank was maintained and this is a big one because a lot of dive locations can go through tanks very fast. And you know when was it last hydrated. When was it When was the last inspection and make sure you have that information or at least That you can find it so that you have confidence that that the equipment that you're using for life support is going to work for you. And this is not something it's not, you're not being mean or rude to ask to see the maintenance logs for a piece of equipment that you're going to go to 60 feet underwater, and expect to breathe off of it. Alright, that's, that's reasonable and fair. So, the next thing is planning your dives. So with computers, there's this, there's this don't want to say tendency, but there's a possibility of letting go of just assuming the computer is going to take care of things. And I think it's really important to take a step back from that and say, you know, if I were diving the tables, how would I plan? How would I plan this dive? And what that means is, where's the current going? Where's it coming from? How deep Are we going to go? what's the what's the visibility, like? How far offshore Are we going to be? Where's our start point in their endpoint, understanding all of those things. And then integrating those into your gas use, you know, if you're going to be diving in current, and you're not going to be doing a drift dive, if you're going to dive into the current at the beginning of your dive, and with the current at the end of your dive, but you need to understand that what that's going to mean to you if you're fit and healthy and and you know, diving into the current isn't a big deal. Maybe that's, you know that it's still going to impact your gas consumption. And if you don't die very often, or you're not as mo as active as somebody else, you might use much more gas going into the current than you would than then you would if there was no current. So it's important to understand not only the diving environment, but your own
health and ability for that particular dive situation. So plan your dies and understand the dive situ the the the dive parameters, I talked about gas and current, the tank size that you're using, a lot of times we're going to end up using the the 80 cubic foot tanks, sometimes we use the 63 or four, I have to get that number. But anyway, those smaller tanks. You know, what gas mix Are you using, that's not so important in terms of gas consumption. But if you have to share air with somebody who's using a different gas than you are, then you need to factor that in to your dive plan going forward for the rest of the day. And you know, what happens if you that that's kind of what happens if you have to air share, go to the surface, what happens to the rest of your dive day is is not within the scope of this discussion, but but it may come up. What's your turn time? What's your turn pressure? And what are the surface conditions. So if you are going to be diving in off a boat, and the surface is rough, or even if you're going to be shore diving, and the surface is rough for your swim back, you may want your regulator in your mouth, are you gonna have gas to do that? That's important to understand. So one of the things that I when I did my research there, there was some an incident where somebody forgot to check their gauges, and it was attributed to nitrogen narcosis. Now this is a reason that we have deep diving training to begin with, right? The recreational limit for a basic scuba diving certification is 60 feet. And the reason for that is that going deeper than 60 feet 60 to 100 100 to 130 almost guarantees you that you're going to be narked and how you respond to being narked. Or your ability to understand what it looks like or what it feels like is going to make could make a difference in how well you handle it. And whether or not you miss something like, Oh, I'm not checking my computer, I'm not checking my analog gauges. So if you plan to do a lot of deep diving or really any deep diving, it's important to make sure that you're prepared to do that. And one of the ways that we can prepare is by taking a specialty course. All right. And I already talked a little bit about renting your gear, but the bottom line is, it's still your life support. And so you still need to know how it works and understand its maintenance schedule. So that's that's what I'm going to say about that. So those are the things that we can do, generally speaking predive to avoid an out of air situation to begin with. We do our pre dive checks, we understand our gear, we understand the conditions we're going to dive in, we pay attention to the briefing, and we plan our own dives. So what can happen underwater? You know, so you can have, you can do all of those things, and have something go wrong underwater, and nobody's going to be able to prevent that for you 100%. But, by using good diving practices, we can avoid negative consequences of issues that happen. So pay attention to where your buddy is. Right? Make sure you're staying close to your buddy, I talked about in the last episode in Episode 11, I talked about what does it mean to be a good dive buddy, and you need to stay close. But you also need to be aware, and you need to be looking at a few things for both yourself and your dive buddy. One is stress. So are you getting stressed? Is your dive buddy getting stressed? If you're stressed, you're going to use more air? Or are you knocked? You know he's your buddy in art? What does that look like? And how is it impacting their diving? Then what about your air supply? Obviously, we need to be checking that on a regular basis. But we also need to be checking in with our buddy on their air supply. Because whoever has the you know, that becomes one of the limiting factors for the dive. If our term pressure is 1000 pounds, you need to know which one of you is closer, because it's not the one who you know it's not okay, we'll go when the when the second one of us hits 1000 pounds, it's when the first one of you hits 1000 pounds. So understanding those factors and how how your buddy is doing is the first thing.
And those are still preventive, right. You know, if our dive buddies stressed, or they're using air faster than we were expecting, we can manage that if we're staying on top of it. So when stuff really happens, though, when you're underwater, you've done all your pre dive checks, and something happens. All right. Let's say you weren't watching your gauge. You didn't check in with yourself or your dive buddy, your dive buddy didn't watch their gauge, and we're getting low on air or they run out of air underwater, we need to go back to one of the first things you would have been taught in your scuba class is stop, breathe, think act. And while it may be counterintuitive, when something is going wrong, that the first thing you need to do is stop. That is still the first thing you need to do. Even if the step two is breathe and you're out of air, you still need to stop and gather your thoughts. You need to get in a calm place so that you can take the right action. Remember when we talked about the statistics era symbolisms were commonly attributed to people who panicked because they were out of air. So that's, you know, we don't want to do that. We need to stay in control, stay calm, or at least stay calm enough to make a good decision. And that means finding our buddy who should be very close by telling them hey, out of air, need to share and then making a safe ascent to the surface. Let's get to the thing that people kind of say okay, but I can't control this. And that is the whole equipment failure thing. equipment failure of well maintained quality scuba gear is very, very rare. It happens, okay. But it is not common. And so when you think about that standard set of equipment that every diver has, right, we all have two regulators. And we dive with a buddy So between the two of us we have for regulators to find a situation where all four of those regulators fail you or even three of them is I just can't even imagine it. So what when it comes to equipment failure, what can we talk about? Well, we've got gauge failure. If I've got if I'm diving a single gauge, which I don't and I don't recommend, but if you are if you're diving, you have just an analog submersible pressure gauge, and it fails. Let's say it floods in is no longer reading the tank pressure. Your dive is over. That's you have to call the dive because you don't have an accurate way. To monitor pressure in your tank, so that's okay. I mean, it's not the greatest because bomber, but it's better than getting hurt. So your dive is over. And so you get your buddy, you say, well, you don't really tell him you're out of air, but you say, my gauge is broken. I've got to go up. And you're going to have a great dive buddy, because you both listened to my last episode, and you're going to make an A safe ascent to the surface, you're going to get on the boat, either swap out the gear or go to the pier, whatever, swap out the gear so that you have something that works and get back in the water, or enjoy the rest of the afternoon, whatever, you know, sitting on the beach or snorkeling, I need to do an episode about snorkeling. It is an underappreciated sport. So what if I'm diving to gauges, which is what I do, I dive in analog submersible pressure gauges attached to my first stage regulator, and I also dive a computer with an air integrated system. If one of those fails, now it Well, okay, if your analog gauge fails, you still have a way to monitor your air and you can continue diving, with the understanding that if anything else goes wrong, you need to be done. Now you can make a different choice than that. If you say if you're diving, two pieces of, you know, submersible pressure gauge and a computer or two computers or whatever, and one of them fails and you're not comfortable continuing that dive, that's fine. Just tell your dive buddy, I'm done. Gotta go up. It's also fine, people have been diving with a single air tank gauge, for a long time, a lot of people still dive that way. And there's nothing wrong with that you just have a single point of failure. So you say okay, I've I did have to now I have one. If that fails, I'm done. And that's okay.
You can get a regulator free flow, like I talked about before, kind of in the intro there, where maybe the diaphragm of the regulator gets folded on itself or something. And that can cause a free flow condition. Sometimes if they're really, they're adjusted a little too close, or I won't say too close. But if they're adjusted, really, really Finally, if you turn them upside down, they'll free flow. And so you might, the first thing you can try to do is, you know, turn it upside down and with a mouthpiece facing down, and that pressure change will stop them from free flowing. And this can happen with your alternate, so you put your alternate and it's in its coastkeeper. And that can you know, if you're if you invert or something else, you can get it in a position where it might free flow a little bit, a lot of times those are adjusted a little less sensitive. So they're harder to breathe when you're using them. But they don't free flow as easily. So but it can happen and it, turn it upside down. If that doesn't fix it, you can put your thumb in it while you sort things out. They could break and you know it is possible for equipment to break, it's just very rare. And so if that happens, you don't have to run out of air for over it, you can stick your thumb in the mouthpiece, it will still probably leak around your thumb. And you're going to need to call the dive because you just lost your alternate air source and it's something you're having to mess with the entire time. That's not really a safe way to dive. That's okay. Just stick your thumb in there, tell your buddy go up to the surface, replace the just get a new rag or whatever, you know, whatever facilities you have. And like I said it's it's very rare for a piece of equipment like that to fail. So catastrophic Lee that you can't fix it on the dive. And again, I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying it's rare. The more catastrophic failures that people worry about is O ring failures. You know at the first stage where you know if it if it the O ring fails on your high pressure hose, which would go to your submersible pressure gauge or to your area integrated dive computer that actually has a tiny pinhole. So if you have an O ring failure or a hose break on that side of your first stage regulator, it's actually you're going to lose air, but it's in a very controlled rate. However, on the low pressure side, the hole is huge, relatively speaking, and so you can lose air a lot faster through a ruptured low pressure hose than you will through a ruptured high pressure hose. Again, these things are very rare, but they can happen. The first thing you do when you get under water or in the water is do a check write a bubble check So you make sure at least on the surface, that your O rings aren't leaking. If they're leaking, having that air passing across that boundary layer at the surface is something you need to stop, you need to stop it and get out and, and replace that O ring in a controlled situation, you don't want to be at at 60 feet with an O ring that's leaking, okay, so but again, even if something like that happens, if you get down to depth, and let's say, you're low pressure hose for your alternate regulator, that O ring rub blows out, and now you're losing air and there is no control of that, right because if you shut the valve on your tank, which would stop the airflow, you can't breathe. So there is no alternative there except to find your buddy share, making safe ascent to the surface and move on you know, get out of the water, fix the gear. And then you know, do another dive or if you're done for the day, if that was enough stress for you, then that's okay. You know, like I talked about in the last episode that I had that a mask come off when I was in Australia. And I was too anxious and I said I'm done. And so you have to be willing to do that. So the point here is that if there's a mechanical problem that causes a catastrophic loss of air from your system, your dive buddies right there where they should be and you need to that's one of the reasons we need to make sure that our die buddy is right there so that they are there for us if we have a problem that's serious, or we can be there for them if they have a problem that's serious. That's why we dive as buddy pairs. So
I guess my point is that that equipment failure is very very infrequent. And it I won't say it doesn't matter because you're probably going to call it dive over it but the impact should not be a dive accident because you have a buddy there to share entanglement is something else that came up when I was looking at the as I was doing my research on this and entanglement underwater is it can be scary but at the end of the day if your dive buddy is right there and you have a diverse tool the worst case scenario you cut your bc off get with your dive buddy share air and make a safe ascent to the surface total bummer you had to cut the straps on your bc hopefully you can go back down and get it some other time. But there's no you know again we go back to stay with your buddy and have the equipment for the dive if you're getting caught on something. You know, there's another thing to consider is if you're diving near something that might be an entrapment hazard, be situationally aware, and one of the things about diving is that you need 360 degree situational awareness right because our environment is all around we need to be aware of that don't go anywhere you're not comfortable getting out of right and if if your dive buddy wants to do a swim through and you don't want to just tell him I don't want to do it and and so that that isn't going to prevent you from ever getting caught on anything. But But even if you do get caught on something you know if you stop breathe think act you should be able to sort that without resorting to cutting your bc off and at the worst case scenario if you have to that's what you have to do to safely get to the surface that's okay you know you can repair a BC and the consequences of of not taking the right action or not taking action. The appropriate action quickly enough can be much worse than fixing a BC alright. I think we beat that enough. Let's move on to the gear junkies garage.
So this week on the gear junkies garage I want to talk about a piece of gear that I don't own and talk a little bit about why I don't own it. And it's related to the idea of running out of air and never or never running out of air and that is the extra emergency air bottles and you may have seen spare air and I know there's two other manufacturers. And so I want to say up front that I'm not against somebody having these problems or products, I'm not saying don't buy this. But what what concerns me about them is that they're not a replacement for good dive practice. You know, if you, if you have spare air that doesn't give you license to be 25 feet from your dive buddy, or 50 feet from your dive buddy. And that's what worries me about you know, these products is that people will get the idea that it's like a longer leash. And that, you know, and when you look at the website, and you see the anecdotes about, you know, this product saved my life, every single one of those stories. Well, the ones that, that there's actually any information about the actual situation, they're all preventable, and they all could have been avoided by being close to the buddy by checking the equipment before they got in the water by checking the equipment in the water. And, and like I said, By staying close to their buddy, so there was no situation in there. Where, and I haven't seen any situations where good dive practice wouldn't have prevented the problem to begin with. So and like I said, To me, this is just an extra thing that you have to put somewhere and deal with. And if you've been diving for a while, you know, that it wasn't until relatively recently that we all had to have surface marker buoys Well, that's another thing we have to clip on. And, and it's a good thing, we should have surface marker buoys Don't get me wrong, but at least if you're boat diving, you really should have one. shore diving, that's, you know, anyway, I, it certainly doesn't hurt. But it's one more thing to add on, to what you're taking in the water with you. So it can be you know, you start to get to the point where there's these accessories become distractions, to the dive experience, and interference to mobility in the water. You know, at what point is something a benefit or a catch hazard. And that's what we have to fold into it. So, I think when you say okay, I'm going to check my air, I'm going to do my predive checks, I'm going to dive with a buddy, I'm going to stay close to them. And I'm going to follow my dive plan. When I get to a turnaround time or turnaround pressure, I'm just gonna follow the plan you know, the products like spare air Don't you know, they just don't fit into my, my personal dive routine, I don't see the benefit outweighing the the, the management of the item in terms of having it on my body having to travel with it, putting it in having to make sure it's filled every time I go diving. And these are these are not things I mean, this is a full blown regulator and, and high pressure cylinder. So these are things that have to be cared for, and maintained in the same way that a regular piece of scuba equipment needs to be inspected and maintained. So it's just one more thing to me, it's another point of failure, rather than an added bonus. Because my go to is the dive buddy that's, you know, arm's length away. So that's my thoughts if you have a different experience with with some of those emergency products, I'd love to see it but in the in the description below or in the comments below this video. If you if you own it, and you and you've used it new and you feel like you know that there was no way to avoid the situation. And I'm not I don't want to be shaming people who have used these products and save their lives. You know, kudos to you for surviving a situation.
But I still think it's important to take away what could have been done to prevent the situation in the first place.
Okay and the tip of the week this week. This is another low cost tip and that is to label everything you You might you might think, Well, why do I need to label my mask? Why do I need to label my my fins? Why do I need to label my, my weights? If you're diving locally and you may take weight to wherever you're going a lot of scuba gear looks very similar. Okay, so one one now so Okay, let me finish that thought they'll tell a story. I, the scuba gear looks very similar and so it's not even malicious intent that people pick something up and think it's theirs. Right. And so you can have there's, there's two things here one is you don't want someone else to pick up your mask or your fins or whatever, and put it in a pile somewhere and maybe they don't use it, maybe they they thought it was theirs, they put it by their stuff. And then when they go to die, they picked up their own but now you don't know where yours are. So now you're walking around the whole boat, getting anxious going in the opposite emotional direction that we want to go when we're diving. So the other side of it is keeping all of your stuff in it. Having it all labeled makes it easy for you to keep it all organized. And also getting it out of the dunk tank and stuff like that, you know if everybody's putting in their, their regulators or whatever, and leaving them in for some amount of time. I'll do a dunk tape tank episode eventually but pretend you did. Then you go into get it, it's really easy to say oh there's SK that's that's mine. Right? So when I was in Bonaire in 2005 I was diving with the shop staff and at the resort that we were at there were little cubbies where you can put your gear you know overnight or whatever, not not your expensive gear regulated and stuff like that, but wetsuits and things like that. And so I put my booties in one of these little cubbies and the next day I couldn't find them so I asked around nobody had seen them and ended up going to the to the pro shop there and or the dive shop and saying hey I need some size 10 and a half booties and of course they didn't have them so I ended up with 12 or something and two days later one of the other people in our group came up and said hey, I accidentally pulled these out. And so and I got them back but and they were labeled so the the the advantage there was that at some point that diver looked at the at the at the boots and said oh these are cross his boots and then came over and said hey here they are, so you can get your stuff back if somebody accidentally picks it up. Alright, so Tip of the Week label everything. If you if you don't want to leave it somewhere, donate it you know if you're not going to donate it to the Grand scuba diving cause cause then label it all right. On the screen you can find ways to contact the show or in the description below as well if you're listening on the audio version of the or the podcast version of the show, contact information will be in the show notes. It's scuba Steve it up dive blog or under pressure dive blog calm. You can visit the website at under pressure dive blog comm you can find the audio version. On your favorite pod catcher. There's like 15 of them or something that that the show is on and you can find me on social media at scuba Steve up dB, mostly Twitter and Instagram. But there's a Facebook page as well. Thank you for diving in with me today, here on YouTube or listening to the audio program. On the left you'll see a playlist of episodes of the underpressure dive cast. If you enjoyed this video or podcast please don't forget to subscribe in the with the button in the middle or on your pod catcher service intervals over get out there and dive
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