Anchoring To Dive

[Winnipesaukee Divers]

Originally Posted by Kamper

I'm willing to take your word for it that a 'deck watch' is not a legal mandate but I stand by it being a demonstration of sound judgement when there are people in the water.

You make a good point... for someone swimming or just floating around. However, as a diver I'm acutely aware of what's going on around me. Sounds carry a long distance underwater and I can hear you coming a half mile away. When I do surface I always stop at the 10' depth and wait, I tell everyone it's a safety stop to decompress, but here in the lake its more to make sure the coast is clear sort-a-speak. I also try to surface near my boat, it’s part of the underwater orienteering I spoke about earlier.

The first thing I do when I enter the water is: besides making the diver yell... you know; let out a holler and tell everyone how cold it is (even when it not), I descend to the bottom and set the anchor, then take my bearings and plan my course, then wait for my dive buddies. Once we're ready we start the dive, I tell them to keep an eye on me, I swim in one general direction while watching my air consumption at a certain interval I make a turn (either left or right), proceed on to the next air mark interval and turn again and so on, taking me right back where I started from. Once under the boat I check my air and ask my buddies to do the same, it they are low we end the dive, if we have plenty then we continue on doing the same maneuver in another direction. BTW: I'm always watching my compass, depth and amount of air time to my NDL (dive lingo for "No Decompression Limit) or safe diving limit (500 PSI). My dive buddies always seem to be surprised when I make the sign for our boat which is directly above us.

If we're searching for something large we use the circle method: where one diver acts as the pivot point while the diver swims at end of a 50' or sometimes a 100' line, if it snags on something he follows it back and either frees it or singles the other diver to come to it. We've found lots of great things this way, sometimes we just swim together with the line between us which works well too.