Oral inflation

Dive gear maintenance: BCDs

Dive gear is expensive but looked after correctly it will give you many years of service. You are reliant on this equipment at depth and ensuring it is always in excellent condition means you never need to fear an equipment failure will spoil your dive.

BCD

When you buy a BCD make sure it is the right size. Too often a salesperson will tell you if it is a bit loose over your T-shirt it’s okay as a wetsuit is thicker… Don’t fall for that, your 7 millimetre wetsuit is not much thicker than 2 millimetres at 40 metres and an ill-fitting BCD at depth is not pleasant. The other important factor is that you may end up diving in the tropics, half naked, and a snug BCD is important.

Make sure you have tried a rental rear inflation as well as a side inflation before you buy. If you don’t know the difference, try it before you buy it. Side inflation BCDs with pockets are popular with training schools (instructors can pop weights in students’ pockets if they are too buoyant). It is a rugged style of BCD and it’s cheaper than most integrated weight BCDs.

Another important factor is the weight. If you will travel often with your gear consider a lightweight travel BCD as some BCD’s can weigh as much as 3-4 kilograms.

Cleaning

Rinse your BCD in the bath in warm water. Very often you will find there is water inside the bladder of your BCD. This happens when you hold the deflate button long after it is empty on your descent. Fill the bladder with a few liters of warm water by holding the BCD down in the bath and holding the deflate button. Then give it a good shake to swirl the water around and dissolve salt crystals (warm water dissolves salt quicker than cold water).

Invert the BCD and allow at least half of the water to run out by depressing the inflate button. This ensures the small valve and tiny opening on the inflation side is flushed. (Do this often and you will never have a sticky inflator.)

Drain the last water by depressing the deflate button, then orally inflate the BCD, drain it again, inflate it again and hang it up to dry, in the shade. Clip all the clips – a closed clip is less likely to break. Extend the straps so they are not folded over in the same spot constantly.

Bookshelf: Into The Abyss

Into The Abyss: Diving To Adventure In The Liquid World – Rod Macdonald

I think Rod Macdonald might be quite famous in his part of the world – he’s the author of several diving guidebooks on Scapa Flow and on wreck diving in England and Scotland. I hadn’t heard of him before I read this book, but I think he’s well-known in British diving circles.

This book is more or less his life story as a diver, starting with his introduction to scuba diving in the early 1980s. The water off the United Kingdom is cold – in parts, even colder than the Atlantic Ocean off South Africa’s west coast. He mentions a dive that they’d do every year in a Scottish quarry on 31 December, Hogmanay, and says that the water was so cold (2 degrees celcius or less) that his regulator would spit pellets of ice into his mouth as he inhaled. When Macdonald started diving, the low pressure inflator hose on BCDs hadn’t been invented yet, so the practice was to descend and then orally inflate your BCD at the bottom. Fun times!

Macdonald soon became interested in wreck diving, and given that the North Sea and surrounds saw so much naval action during both wars, there are many, many wrecks to explore. Navigation during the early parts of the 20th century wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now, so skippers relied on dead reckoning and the locations of many of the ships on the hydrographic charts of the region are incorrect. Macdonald and his friends would search for wrecks using the charts as a guide, and then mark them precisely. Many of the wrecks they dived on were “virgin wrecks” – they were the first divers to make contact with the wreck since its sinking.

Deep diving on air took its toll, and after several scary nitrogen narcosis incidents, Macdonald switched to trimix for his deep diving (shortly after it was introduced – he was among the first divers qualified by BSAC in this new skill). This enabled him to dive deeper, and more safely.

Quite early in his career Macdonald acquired a dive boat, and used this for exploring. His anecdotes about boating and skippering a dive boat are entertaining and fascinating – the insight he has into the ocean from being a skipper as well as a diver is profound.

There are chapters on diving in Truuk Lagoon (MUST GO THERE) and Palau, and the book starts and ends with an account of his incredibly dangerous dive in the Corryvreckan Whirlpool off the coast of Scotland. This is a terrifying natural feature in a deep (70 to 200 metres) narrow channel through which there’s an intense tidal current, directed into standing waves and whirlpools by the narrow pinnacle in the middle of the gulf which rises to within 30 metres of the surface. Macdonald recounts how the downward current at the change of the tide was so strong that he watched the bubbles from his regulator become stationary above him, and then start descending. Scary!

This book was completely different to Deep Descent – I didn’t get the same sense of competitive machismo from Macdonald and his fellow divers as I did from reading about the divers who visit the Andrea Doria. They seem to enjoy the thrill of discovery and investigation, searching for uncharted and lost wrecks. But their diving practices are at the same time very conservative, and on several occasions dives were called off because of the sea conditions (which, off Mud Island, can be dire) or because a diver felt unwell or narced early on in the dive. I approve.

Get the book here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise click here.

Dive sites: SAS Transvaal

Some of Tony’s students needed to do a deep dive, so we paid a visit to the SAS Transvaal in Smitswinkel Bay, on a gorgeous Sunday morning.

I was trying out a new seasickness remedy – ginger pills – although the sea turned out to be so benign I scarcely needed them. This particular experiment is going to require repeated observations before we can even draw tentative conclusions, unless I go out in a storm, pepped up on ginger capsules, and suffer no ill effects. But I’m reluctant to try that.

The SAS Transvaal was a naval frigate that was scuttled in 1978 using explosive charges. She is identical to the SAS Good Hope, which lies in the same bay. The wreck is long – nearly 94 metres – and quite broken up but still readily identifiable as a large ship. She makes an eerie creaking sound, which is at once creepy and wonderful. Auditory stimulation is rare on a dive (part of the reason I like diving…) but can be very special.

I’ve dived this wreck twice before, the most recent being in September last year with Kate and a big group of Tony’s current and former students. (This also happened to be the very first dive I did with my Sony Cybershot DSC-TX5 camera.) There was far more light and visibility that time – the photos in the first half of this post are from that dive – hopefully you can see the difference in the water colour and amount of light.

This time, we descended slowly, on the shot line. I was extremely wary of nitrogen narcosis, having had a bad experience on the wreck of the SAS Good Hope late last year. After orienting ourselves on the wreck, we dropped onto the sand so that the guys could do skills.

This time, it was dark, but the visibility was pretty good once we’d passed through a steep thermocline, above which the water was green and soupy. Once again I wished for a giant spotlight to illuminate the whole wreck at once – the dimensions of the vessel are astounding and the colours down there are spectacular, but all the reds, oranges and purples are totally washed out and only show up in a camera flash or torch beam.

There’s a lot of soft coral adorning the wreck, including my favourite – the wonderfully named sunburst soft corals. They look completely grey until you shine a torch on them.

Sunburst soft coral with polyps extended

The ubiquitous mauve sea cucumbers were a prolific presence, as usual. They form a large component of the biomass at that depth, and are clustered in huge groups all over the wreck.

Orange gas flame nudibranch and purple soft coral on the SAS Transvaal

I found an orange gas-flame nudibranch, which made me very proud (it was the start of a nudibranch bonanza at Partridge Point later in the day…) and a pair of redfingers, who seemed to be having a fight (or courting) until I disturbed them. This isn’t a great picture, but I can’t usually photograph moving targets at all on deep dives, so for me it’s a bit of an achievement!

Dodgy photo of redfingers on the SAS Transvaal

These dives go so quickly – our air and bottom time were up pretty much at the same time – and we made a leisurely ascent, with Tony deploying a jumbo-sized SMB at the safety stop. While he was doing so, he dropped his knife, and I made a spectacular catch – I managed to perform an acrobatic swoop towards it as it tumbled downwards, all the while aware of my own depth and comfortable that if it went too deep I’d let it go. I felt rather smug after that and made sure that everyone had seen my moves once we were back on the boat.

Strawberry sea anemones on the SAS Good Hope

Dive date: 6 February 2011

Air temperature: 26 degrees

Water temperature: 8 degrees

Maximum depth: 32.4 metres

Visibility: 8 metres

Dive duration: 32 minutes

A near miss at 26 metres

Diving accidents are rare, yet in almost every case stupidity features highly and Saturday’s dive was no exception. We were a group of seven. Three were former students with various qualifications (minimum Advanced), all having done between 20 and 100 dives. All regular divers with me, they were just tagging along for a fun dive. I had three students doing a deep dive for their Advanced diver qualification. All three had completed most of the dives for this course and deep was one of the last dives. I had assessed all three during previous dives and did not anticipate any problems. Cecil, very capable, excellent dive skills and safety concious; Mark, very capable, good dive skills and Diver X, also capable and on two previous deep dives had displayed good watermanship.

So what went wrong?

We descended in a strong current, staying reasonably close together and doing a nice safe slow descent. (I am not a fan of dropping like a brick.) I paused at 20 metres to make sure there were no signs of stress from anyone. Tami was a little slow in getting down but her buddy was watching and of all the group Tami rates high up on the best of the rest list so I was not concerned. The visibility was good, 10 – 12 metres and I could see from everyone’s bubbles that they were all breathing in a relaxed manner.

We dropped to the bottom, and I handed slates to the three Advanced students, slates with a few questions, a bit of maths, and a simple puzzle. This task is a good indication of nitrogen narcosis and a diver’s state. Some of the questions on these slates are ‘”How much air do you have?” and “What is your depth and who is your buddy?”

I time this exercise, so I check my dive computer during the process. This tells me if the depth answer is right, and at the end of the exercise I ask each diver to signal their air supply. Diver X got most of the answers wrong, and more to the point his air pressure answer was 10 bar. I asked him to look at his gauge as everyone else had close to 200 bar. He indicated he did not understand his gauge so I looked at his gauge and it was ZERO.

He then turned and swam away from me towards Cecil, pointing at Cecil’s body. Having someone point at your torso tends to make a person look down to see what he is pointing at. At this point I had caught him up and started to turn him around. He then spat out his regulator and at this Cecil realised there was some problem and perfectly executed the raised arms so his octo was in clear view.

I shoved my regulator in Diver X’s mouth and looked at his eyes – he had no idea of what was going on. I then gathered the group and we started to ascend with Diver X on my octo. At one point I had to bang him on the chest to get him to understand he should hold onto my BCD as he refused to do so and twice drifted off and lost the regulator. We did a short safety stop and ascended. He did not orally inflate his BCD on the surface so I did it for him.

I am extremely grateful to Grant for racing the boat over and getting us out of the water quickly, as we surfaced far from the buoy line (owing to the howling current) and the unexpectedly rapid ascent (and the fact that my hands were occupied holding onto Diver X) meant that we hadn’t deployed our SMBs. The dive site we were at, the wreck of the SS Cape Matapan, is very close to the shipping lane into Table Bay harbour and very exposed. The southeaster was strong and the sea was choppy with fairly large waves making divers on the surface without SMBs very hard to spot.

What do we learn from an incident like this?

Check, check, check your gear. I doubt Diver X checked his equipment before the dive. Second, he did not do a proper buddy check.
Keep your skills sharp. Diver X has forgotten many of the skills he was taught when he did his Open Water course. Refreshers exist for a reason.
Be fit to dive. Get enough sleep and don’t party the night before a dive – SPECIALLY a deep one, where there is no room for error. DON’T come diving if you’re hung over or stoned.
Be alert before and during the dive. Check your pressure gauge before you stow your gear on the boat, when you kit up before rolling into the water, again when you get to the bottom, and frequently during the dive.

And, if you require a dive buddy with exceptional skills, then Cecil is your man.

I know you will all blame nitrogen narcosis for this incident, but on the way up I stopped at 15 metres, again at 10 metres, and again at 5 metres, and there was no change in Diver X’s behaviour. I had to descend from 2 metres back down to the group doing their safety stop and get them all together so we could surface as a group as we were diving on the edge of a shipping lane (I was concerned that we had possibly drifted into the shipping lane in the current) and I had not surfaced with a SMB as I could not release my grip on this diver to deploy the SMB.

What most people don’t realise is that when you don’t take dive safety seriously you almost always put others at risk. I had five other people with me, their safety being my responsibility. We risked surfacing in a shipping lane, without an SMB in less than perfect surface conditions (to put it mildly). All in all other people were put at risk due to the casual disregard for safety by one diver. Don’t dive stoned, hung over or when not serious: not with me and not with anyone else.

I’m left with one cylinder half filled with sea water, one salt-filled pillar valve, and one first stage and two second stages requiring complete rebuilds or servicing. And hopefully some thoughtful divers who all learned something today.

Zero to… HERO!

Congratulations to Kate, who arrived in Cape Town on 8 October 2010 having never dived before, and is leaving on 10 December qualified as a Divemaster, with more than 60 dives and over 45 hours underwater under her belt!

Kate demonstrates incorrect snorkel technique (in the car, on the wrong side)

While she was here we dived almost every day, in all sorts of conditions. She dived in visibility ranging from pea soup (with croutons) to over 10 metres, water temperatures from 11 degrees up to 18 degrees, and experienced a wide range of what Cape Town diving has to offer. She even did a dive in just a shorty wetsuit – the water LOOKED warm but wasn’t – and I am pretty sure she’s the first diver EVER to do something like that in this city!

She experienced everything from orally inflating another diver’s BCD at 15 metres, to securing Clare’s cylinder when it came loose (oops!), tying knots underwater, a meeting with a very frisky sevengill cowshark on her first ever dive with sharks at Shark Alley, and using a lift bag to ferry our artificial reef out to the correct depth.

Kate transporting part of the artificial reef

She spent a lot of time towing the buoy line, inflated SMBs and balloons underwater (the latter was highly amusing to watch), mapped wrecks and the pipeline at Long Beach, exchanged information on the layout of the SAS Pietermaritzburg with wikivoyage guru Peter Southwood, enjoyed high-speed boat rides to various local dive sites, filled cylinders at a local dive centre, and navigated at night in order to find the yellow buoy at Long Beach. She’s breathed from a hang tank at a safety stop after a deep dive, and from another diver’s octo while swimming to shore. She’s a pro with a compass. She’s also done some underwater photography – thanks to her, the gobies at Long Beach have a serious complex about the paparazzi!

Kate and Clare getting their bearings on the beach. To infinity and beyond!

Kate dived with and without a computer, in various types of gear and several different wetsuits. She knows the difference between an A-clamp and a DIN fitting. She removes and replaces inserts on cylinders with her eyes closed, changes O-rings, and puts on her own kit. She has filled over twenty cylinders as part of her compressor operator course.

Kate was also a fantastic ambassador for diving for the various students of mine that she interacted with. As part of her Divemaster training, she led dives, demonstrated skills, helped students with their kit, and took on various tasks in order to prepare her for the responsibilities that go with this qualification. She did all of this with good humour, good sense and great precision.

During her stay, Kate buddied with all kinds of divers. She met Russians, Swedes, Canadians, French and fellow British divers, and some regte egte South Africans. She assisted foreign-language students with understanding the questions on the quizzes and exams when their English wasn’t up to the task. She got on famously with everyone she encountered, and was never grumpy or a prima donna.

In the ocean she encountered seals (she’s not a fan), giant short-tailed sting rays, hundreds of octopus, sevengill cowsharks, and her favourite friends – barehead gobies! They’re going to miss you, Kate… And especially your underwater singing!

Barehead goby — Look at that sad little goby face!

The courses Kate completed during her stay in Cape Town are:

Open Water: 21 October 2010
Advanced: 27 October 2010
Emergency First Responder (EFR): 3 November 2010
Nitrox/Enriched Air Specialty: 8 November 2010
Rescue Diver: 17 November 2010
CMAS Compressor Operator: 24 November 2010
Wreck Specialty: 7 December 2010
Night Specialty: 7 December 2010
Divemaster: 8 December 2010

I am confident that she is a safe, capable diver with excellent experience under her belt so far, and I look forward to hearing about her future exploits in the underwater world.

Oral inflation

As I have mentioned before, problems arise when we don’t follow our training. I was working at a busy resort as skipper, Divemaster and Instructor. On a busy day I would kit up at 6.00am, launch the boat, dive, hit the beach to collect the next group, quickly change cylinders and head straight back out again to dive, sometimes doing four or five dives a day. We would only be done by early evening so there was no time for kit maintenance.

I had a problem with my inflator during the last dive of the day and quickly replaced it with a spare from my dusty tool kit late in the evening. Being too tired to fetch a cylinder I did not test it (mistake number one). The following morning I was distracted whilst kitting up and did not test it (mistake number two). The first dive of the day was to 40 metres. Being skipper and Divemaster meant I did not have too much time on the boat for a buddy check (mistake number three).

Half way down to the reef I intended slowing my descent and found my inflator was not working. Ah, no problem, I teach people how to orally inflate their BCD every time I have a student so I was not concerned. What I had forgotten was the pressure exerted at 40 metres on the bladder of your BCD is way more than you can imagine and oral inflation at that depth is a lot more difficult than it is at 18 metres. Instead of a few small breaths to reduce my descent it took a good eight or ten and by this time I was ready to bounce off the bottom.

The moral of my story: remember to always do a buddy check even if you have to do it on yourself. Don’t skip this step! And don’t change anything on your kit without testing it prior to dropping off a boat.