"Edgar" wrote in message
...

"Sir Thomas of Cannondale" wrote in message
news:nrBwj.21347$6t3.15750@trndny07...

"Dave" wrote in message
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On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:15:26 -0800 (PST), Bob said:

For the same reason that once enjoyed sport scuba alone,,,

I wouldn't dive alone on a bet. Navy training I guess. (Of course at
this
point I prolly wouldn't dive at all. It's been about 35 years since I
did.)

I sold a sailboat to a young guy, back around early 90's. He gave me a
deposit,
was supposed to pick up the equipment and give me the balance the
following
week.. That weekend he died in a diving accident. Why? Because he
stayed
down by himself when his partner gave him the signal that she was low on
air.

He got caught on some wire on the bottom of Gloucester harbor or
thereabouts.

Dead..

There is a reason not to dive alone.
I found that out the hard way a long time ago. It was in the Mediterranean
and I joined a diving school. We had done the pool based course and were
off an island doing our first real dives.We were all low on air so we came
up and the others got out.. I was still breathing Ok and had not activated
the reserve supply so the instructor let me go down again. I was a novice
and did not realise he should not have done so. I went down about 20' and
when it became hard to draw breath I reached to pull down the lever to
activate the reserve, only to find it was already down, having presumably
caught something while I was in the boat so all the air was gone,
including the reserve.
. I kicked off the bottom and just made it up-probably got a little bit
more air from the bottle as the pressure fell but the fresh air felt
really good.
Another hard learned lesson-and it was a well regarded diving school too,
not a cowboy outfit..



I had a similar experience with my old double steel 52s with an old wire
reserve line on them. Ran out of air (got really hard to breathe) with my
double hose at about 60 feet deep off Catalina. I had one real 1/2 breath
left, but it was pretty easy to get to the top... just followed the
medium-size bubbles and exhaled slowly the whole way. I didn't think it was
a big deal at the time, but I did remove the wire from the valve. :-)


--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com