Why are divers always being asked to practise with their equipment in the pool before taking it into the sea? Because of scenarios like the one Maggie Cainen recounts here
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MICHELIN MAN
AND ANCHOR WOMAN
SOME PEOPLE SAID THERE'D BE NO DIVE THAT EVENING. They didn't know our club. Despite heavy, continuous rain and intermittent patches of fog, it would take an earthquake to stop us!
The local saying goes: "If you can see the fort it will rain; if you can't see it, it's raining already." Well, you couldn't see the fort all day, but it appeared at about 6pm.
There were eight divers on my boat, and three non-divers as dogsbodies. The grey sea, with its rolling, white-capped swell, looked far from promising, and we had Jack and Sue, two visiting students from a local university, diving with us.
Our destination, Sea Serpent, sank in WW2 and was later blown up as a danger to shipping. Today's dive was on the outer of its three parts,where all the best bits of wreckage were, including boilers teeming with marine life - ferocious congers, lobsters, shoals of pouting and bib, small flatfish and, occasionally, spectacular cuttlefish.
Dave dropped a 7kg weight on a line with two buoys attached to the heart of the wreck. Kitting up in the small well of a crowded hardboat, in a strong swell with a south-westerly blowing, was difficult.
Jack was diving with Stuart, one of our most experienced divers. Sue buddied with Jim. We zipped Jack into his drysuit, found his weightbelt, helped him into his borrowed BC and watched him do his buddy-check. "How many open-water dives have you done, Jack?"
"Not many. Actually, only one. It was in Stoney Cove. There's not much open water in Sheffield."
"Are you sure you've got enough weight on?" He wore the lightest weightbelt we had seen in years.
"I don't weigh much," he replied.
The four divers lined up ready to jump. Sue also had borrowed gear, a massive wing supporting a 15 litre bottle. We had a struggle to heave her upright, as its combined weight kept tipping her back. "Isn't a 15 a bit big for a shallow dive?"
"It was the only one I could borrow for today," she said.
"When I say jump, you all go in together," Dave interrupted us. "I'll drop you right by the buoys." In went Jim, Sue and Stuart but, as Jack steadied himself, one of the quick-release buckles on his borrowed BC popped undone and his rig swung round in front. The other three struck out for the drifting buoy, and Sue and Jim disappeared down the line.
We fastened Jack back into his BC. He was very thin and it was too big for him, but we pulled the releases as tight as we could. "Can you reach everything?" I asked anxiously, like a mother duck.
"Sure," he said and straddle-jumped bravely in. My baby duckling looked so tiny in that big swell. We watched him join his buddy on the line, and they vanished.
Thirty seconds later, back he popped, having swollen from a very thin young man with an overlarge flat jacket to a thin young man with a huge round jacket!
Much fiddling and adjusting on the surface, and he and Stuart went down the line again. Another 30 seconds and back up came Michelin Man. We pulled him into the boat and put Stuart in a threesome with the next pair.
"What happened?" I asked, in my best dive marshal voice.
"I think I sat on my inflator button," he replied. I looked disbelieving. "Well, that's what it felt like. I went down OK, but as soon as I hit the bottom I started to swell up and it wouldn't dump."
"What about the second time?"
"My suit suddenly filled up with air, so I had to come back. Nothing would dump."
I had to stop his debrief as I heard a shout: "Divers up!" An ungainly object was thrashing around on its back on the surface, appearing and disappearing in the swell with a trailing DSMB just about floating alongside.
Dave hastily manoeuvred his boat beside the odd creature, which turned out to be Sue with her voluminous kit, supported by Jim.
It took three of us to haul her aboard, as the DSMB was full of water and acting like a drogue anchor. The huge wing and bottle had become detached and almost succeeded in pulling us all into the sea.
"What happened?" The essence of her colourful reply was that the wing kept filling with air, she kept dumping and eventually it parted company from her bottle. She had lain like a beached turtle on the bottom until her buddy hauled her to the surface. Her borrowed DSMB had leaked and it too was solid with water.
The moral is obvious. Try not to borrow gear and, if you do, practise with it first in a pool. Using it first time in a crowded boat in a rough sea is a recipe for disaster.
We think the inflator on Jack's BC got tangled with the line, causing the BC to expand and project him skyward. We had probably tightened the buckles so well on the overlarge stab that it had put pressure on the drysuit valve, which is what made it inflate on his second rapid ascent.
As for Sue, her wing and tank were far too big for her size 10 frame, and no amount of tightening could make them safe. I'm only glad that neither of them ended up in the nearby DDRC with a bend or a burst lung.
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