Presumption is the Mother of Disasters: Undercurrent 09/2024

Presumption is the Mother of Disasters

some diving mistakes are worse than others

from the September, 2024 issue of Undercurrent

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Back in the early days of scuba, there were those who thought "Diving was dangerous and sex was safe." While I won't speak about sex, I will say that diving had some risks that don't exist today. R.P., a San Antonio (TX) diver, reminded us, "I started diving before dive vests and even before pressure gauges were standard. The tanks we were given in Cozumel were J-valve tanks, but no one was trained in J-valves. You can imagine what I did and saw."

"In my rush to get in the water, I had not checked my tank."

For those who started diving in the late seventies, you might find it difficult to believe that a standard tank - a J-valve tank - had a lever that you had to pull to access the last remaining 500-700 psi in the tank (unless you dived with the lever down). Pressure gauges were uncommon. When it became hard to breathe from your regulator, you pulled the lever - hoping that it had not already been pulled inadvertently - and headed for the surface with the remaining air.

While it was easy to make a mistake with the J-valve, thankfully, they are history. But there are still plenty of mistakes left, so we asked our readers to tell us about mistakes they had made. We believe that if you share mistakes, you educate others, helping them avoid errors. It seems that many of the errors described are about running out of air, often because divers went in with tanks they had presumed to have been refilled but were not.

Running on Empty

David Ross, from Québec (Canada), told us that in 2008, when he had already made about 400 dives, he joined a liveaboard on the Great Barrier Reef. Upon arrival, he said, "I was tired already, tremendously excited, and preoccupied with preparing my complicated camera rig for the dive. On the first dive of day three, we went deep, roughly 100 feet. I saw a shark and tried to get my camera set for the shot when I felt that odd respiratory resistance sensation you get just before the tank runs out of air. I looked at my SPG, and I was O-U-T. I looked at my depth: 100 feet. OK ... In my rush to get in the water, I had not checked my tank. It hadn't been refilled - entirely my responsibility....

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