Posted by Karl S. on January 17, 2003 at 13:51:31:
In Reply to: What would you have done? posted by Ken Kurtis on January 16, 2003 at 19:04:12:
Its a fairly common rule in Calif that if you return to a boat with less than 500 psi you are done diving for the day. Since OOA is less than 500 psi, its an easy call. This policy is normally posted in a flier or on the website of the boat.
Needless to say, if a boat's D/M enforces this rule, the boat has probably just lost a customer in the future. These are the kind of customers you want to lose. Nobody wants someone to die on their boat or on their store sponsored activity.
I myself always dive with 2 tanks. Sometimes the 2nd tank is a 13 cu ft pony. Sometimes it is a 40 cu ft stage bottle. On a boat dive, I bring my 63 cu ft stage bottle filled with EAN36 and use that for the egression phase of every "deep" boat dive. It gives me redundancy and additional range, and the benefits of nitrox even after an air dive.
I stop breathing off the main tank on my back when I reach 750 psi, and my turn around point is at about 1/2 of my gas presssure. Therefore I can egress either off the back tank or with the stage tank. This "technical" form of NDL recreational diving is an outgrowth of my tech diving. I just dont feel secure anymore with only one tank on. In a perfect world, everyone would have a pony bottle of some kind. Scuba has not yet evolved to that point yet, however. We are still in the prevailing "octo" or "Air-2" stage, a sad state, in my opinion.
A diver who sets his/her own standards more conservatively than the boat is a good diver. When I show up on the boat with my 63 cu ft stage bottle filled with EAN36, I get a lot of invitations to go diving with the boat on their "advanced days" like Sundays once a month.
A diver who runs out of air should be accompanied by a D/M, or else should not be diving.
Some boats will make the D/M available to go diving with novice divers, while the boat captain or the pilot sub for the D/M on deck. Not all boats do this, however.
How you run your boat is the captain's responsibility. How you run your scuba store is the owner's responsibility. Their respective judgments should be supported, not argued with, in my opinion, since it represents their livelihoods, and they will tacitly get the blame if someone dies, heaven forbid.