The infamous three way air share
Ok, forgive me, this is quite a few years old now, but I have always found the story funny and completely unique, so I will pass it on in case someone can learn something from it.
JB, MT, and I were setting up for our dive at Crystal Beach, Fl. At the time, (97, 98) the entrance was still small enough that one could only with difficulty sidemount through the entrance with one bottle off, so the standard (established by BH) was to bring your backmount tanks loose, wrap them all up in the harness and shuttle gear through the entrance via a diver on the inside. This necessitated that each of the divers bring an "entry bottle" typically a 40 with a single regulator. The thinking being that at any time, each diver was surrounded by tons of other working regulators, so you were never really far from more than once source of gear.
True to the plan, we each had a set of doubles, two stage bottles, scooters and our entry bottles. JB, being the skinniest of the crew, opted to go inside the entrance to receive the equipment and shuttle it the ten feet to a wider spot in the passage where one could pass by a set of doubles. Each of us was wearing a weight belt and a stage slung 30 for breathing. As is the standard for Crystal Beach, when the cave is flowing out, and the visibility is the best, the visibility in the basin is horrific- on the order of 6 inches to two feet, due to the mixing fresh and salt water. (It's a bright horrific, because the sun shines down the 20 feet to the bottom.) JB had slithered into the entrance, and we had two of the sets of doubles and most of the stages into the cave, along with the scooters.
JB was known at the time (and may still we be) for his horrific gear maintenance. It was a rare day when something of his didn't just fall off his gear. True to form, the pressure gauge popped off of his high pressure hose on his entry bottle, enveloping him in a cloud of bubbles. Apparently, he had positioned all of the spare tanks forward in the cave, so the only thing within immediate reach was his entry bottle. I was immediately outside the entrance, about 3 feet from him, preparing to pass another bottle through, when a huge cascade of bubbles comes coursing out of the cave entrance. I stare in frustration as I am sure he has knocked one of the other regulators open while passing the gear forward. Suddenly a hand shoves out of the bubble cloud, fingers extended. Without thinking, I pull the single regulator from my mouth and place it in his hand, which immediately pulls it back into the bubble cloud. Now, I'm looking around, trying to decide where I am going to get more air, as my now donated regulator doesn't seem to be coming back to me.
MT swims up just in time, and hands me the regulator out of his mouth, which I breath from greedily, not looking forward to having to give it up. Luckily, MT has brought the last stage with him, and is deploying the regulator and turning it on for himself.
As soon as MT gets the stage working, I pass his reg back to him, and breath from the stage. I then set the stage at the entrance and shove the regulator through the hole to JB, lightly tugging on my regulator hose. JB gets the picture, and my reg is spit out the entrance, and the last stage is pulled into the cave.
I shove my arm into the cave with the OK signal, and get a reciprocal OK from him with an arm shoved outside the cave. MT and I exchange OKs and we both continue one by one into the cave.
We continued the dive, albeit slightly shortened, as JB hogged up all my stage bottle gas, but without further incident.
What went wrong? Aside from an unpreventable mechanical failure, really nothing. Each team member knew exactly what was going on, and reacted correctly. Had we only two team members, the other bottles would have been at my knees, and I would have reacted as MT did, bringing the last stage into play. JB was in a position in the cave where it is not possible to have multiple tanks right at the entrance and still shuttle gear past them, so there was nothing much he could do to better his position, aside from have a buddy within arms reach.
Take aways: Maintenance! It's easy to bypass critical maintenance when you are diving every day for months on end, and your gear really needs more than annual maintenance. Things like cheap plastic HP gauges take a beating in caves, and in the end are not really appropriate for cave diving. JBs failed at the plastic junction of the hose and the gauge body, allowing the metal tube within to become bent and eventually fail. This wouldn't have happened on an all metal HP Gauge. This might also might not have happened had JB noticed that his SPG was a cracked piece of crap.
Jason
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Originally Posted by adam0321
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