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Reush - 8/30/2014 1:11 PM 
If half of what happened to you occurred to me I would’ve just gone snorkeling. I have a great confidence in my safety, and my abilities but I am not into tempting fate.
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That really depends on the dive and what’s going wrong. The last time I called a dive my power inflator wasn’t working. No big deal, I was diving before power inflators but on the way out it became a distraction I didn’t need and I turned around and returned to the beach.
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May I go off the topic of this post a bit and ask you what gear you use that you self service? I know HOG actively supports self-service, and even trains for it and allows over the counter service parts purchases, but am aware of little else as far as self-service options?
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Just one, no matter how small. In my experience two things going wrong at the same time, even if those things are small and unrelated, can cause big problems. Everyone understands and trains for the big problems but the small things are often never considered in your training. The unrelated problems can lead to confusion and that can lead to panic. Panic is the number one killer of divers in my opinion.
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Once I back rolled off the boat, only to discover I had forgotten to put on my fins and my weight belt. I had been distracted meeting new people on the ride out to the dive site. It took only a couple of seconds for me to decide to climb back in the boat and skip that dive. Of course, those weren’t little things.
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Greg - 9/01/2014 7:46 AM
From RichKeller: Panic is the number one killer of divers in my opinion. There was never any panic, just Murphy kicking my ass all day. Luckily we had extra gear and calm heads the whole time. It turned out to be a great dive.
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Btrax - 9/01/2014 9:54 AM
I probably would have been done with a leaky bc and just called it a day. the dive lights def would have done it for me. I never dive without a working dive light , just in case - but then i am extremely conservative. Must be a pilot carry over lol
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JenK - 9/18/2014 7:13 AM
We had a similar issue when our family of 4 were going for a dive at Canyon Lake. We each assembled our equipment, checked and then bagged the items we had. (For myself and my husband we had all of our gear. As for our 2 children, Laurna 17 and Jay Jay 14 they were lacking some gear.) Knowing what we were in need of, we set out to the nearest Dive Shop. Laurna was the one who needed the most gear so we rented hers. Jay Jay had everything except some weight for his weight belt, so we bought him the 6 lbs that he needed. Having 4 full tanks and all the appropriate gear, we drove up to Skyline for our first dive of the vacation. Well the first problem we encountered was that the lake level was down so the ramp down to the boat dock was at about a 45 degree slope, in other words... I slid down the last 1/4 of the ramp. The next issue related to the floating dock was currently being used by a group that rented jet skis and such to the public. Due to the heat of the day and the number of people on the dock we each took and prepped our gear on the nearby shoreline. This was much easier and everything seemed to be going good until:
- Jay Jay’s weight belt was too big for him. So I gave him my smaller one and took his: this worked well except I was already fully geared up at the time.
- My gauge hose somehow developed a crack in it. So my husband went to the truck and brought his tool box and extra parts to replace the hose.
- He didn’t have a hose that would fit. He then left us in the lake with the gear and he went back to the Dive Shop to get a new hose.
- It took him almost 1 hour to return, Laurna was freezing from being in the water so I told her to go up on the rocks in the sun
- The Dive Shop didn’t have a 2000 psi hose but only a 3000 psi (well now I have a great hose to my gauges)
- My husband and the rest of us started to gear up again. I was done first so I started to help Laurna. At some point when she was putting her flippers on, she handed me her mask and snorkel (this I don’t remember) which when she asked for them back I didn’t know where they were. Well the only option was down.
- I started looking for the mask and snorkel while my husband finished helping Jay gear up and then himself. I did find the mask and snorkel! Yea!
- We were all geared up and ready so we get ready to descend, I then noted a large amount of bubbles coming from Jay Jay.... I gave the signal for us all to ascend due to Jay Jay’s BCD hose (the one that is fixed in position on the BCD) detached.
- With this my husband threw his hands in the air and said that’s it!
- The kids still wanted to dive so I offered to let Jay Jay take my gear and the 3 of them could dive. My husband stated no that wasn’t going to work and let Jay Jay use his gear instead so that the 3 of us could dive
Overall it took 4 hrs for us to get everything in a state so that we could dive for 45 mins that day!
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An interesting thread. I had a similar experience last weekend at night off Shaw’s Cove in Laguna Beach. From the outset, I was out of my routine because I was staying at a nearby hotel for a conference and therefore did not pack my car as I normally would for my weekly dive. Due to the two-day delay I forgot to bring my dive water and some other comfort items. From there:
—showed up at the agreed on time and found my two buddies (both highly experienced) already suited up. I already felt behind the eight-ball.
—My knife strap broke. I reached for my save-a-dive kit and realized I had left it at home: a casualty of combining a dive excursion with a business trip. No spare strap meant no dive knife, which also put me on edge because that is a security blanket for me (fishing line, nets, or freeing the occasional marine life a six-pack ring). The forgotten bin with the save-a-dive kit also had my spare knife and dive shears.
—New gloves did not behave like my old gloves did and that created more stress on the sand before we entered the water (the Velcro straps didn’t work or fit like the previous ones did).
—On top of all this, my compass got stuck, leaving me to rely on an electronic compass or one of my two spares. I could navigate, but it was outside my normal parameters.
We made the dive and it was awesome...but due to my gear issues we kept to the outside of the reef where we could use natural navigation. My buddies were terrific and it helped that all of us were experienced. I felt comfortable diving the profile we did but would have been just as comfortable scrubbing the dive had my buddies wanted to penetrate the reef and to a profile that required actual compass navigation. We got in 45 minutes and were treated to sharks, rays, and a wide variety of fish. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday night!
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It depends. The last time I called a dive, it was because the buddies / group brought beer on board, insisted on a 5 star restaurant so the group could drink hard alcohol, offered a nice wine before dinner, so they obviously have a drinking problem. My mask constantly leaked (I did not have a suitable redundant mask, either) and the buddy I was diving with was so engrossed that another member of the group saw me ascend and came up with me. It was mostly the drinking...I don’t care if divers want to drink, but they should have the courtesy and professionalism to wait until all the dives are over.
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MDW - 1/25/2015 1:19 PM
I came close to calling off a dive once. Similar situation to Greg’s. My buddy and I were about to do a pretty aggressive dive (190’ for 25 min on 18/45). First, he had some ear problems so we went to 10’ and back about 3 times, then, on the fourth try my power inflater popped off the corrogated hose, so I had to find some tie wraps to fasten it back on. Luckily in the meantime he got his ears to start clearing, so we decided to give it one more try. We decided if one more thing, however minor and easily fixable, went wrong, that it was a sign we should thumb it, but luckily it was all aces after that.
That said, if we had been doing a "normal" dive I would never have even considered the next minor issue to be "it" and would have continued to fix any minor glitch that stood in the way of getting under way. There have been numerous times when someone had a minor issue as we were gearing up or getting in and you just wait or help fix it. Now, major problem in the middle of the dive, yeah, the dive is over, return to base. Often, though, there can still be another dive after that - fix the problem or replace the gear and get right back on that seahorse.
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