Johnny met me on A1A behind Tower 17 at 7:00 am. It did not take long to gear up, but we had a 25-minute surface swim to get to the Eastern Ledge of the First Reef line. When we got to the Ledge, I went down to secure the flag line, which I did by wrapping the line across a flat bit of rock and catching it under a rock lip at the ends. Johnny came down slowly and kept his ears equalized.
On the bottom, I indicated that he should signal that he was out of air and needed to share air, that he should hold the strap on my BCD, and that he should use his breathing to control his buoyancy. He signaled as he should and took my alternate air source. He also grabbed onto my BCD strap. Unfortunately, we went nowhere for the first 2 minutes then we swam to the surface. He simply could not use his breathing to become positively buoyant. The total time for the ascent was almost three minutes.
At the surface, I let him know that we needed to increase our ascent speed for the CESA. I signaled that he should watch me as I took 2 deep breaths in and out then took a deep breath in and dropped my regulator's second stage. He did fine except that he thought we were going up and I needed to settle him back on the sand. When we did swim up, we did so in under 35 seconds from 32 feet, which was perfect. I went back down and freed the flag line and Johnny met me at about 20 feet and we swam back to the beach.
Bottom time was 44 minutes, including the ascents; maximum depth was 31.9 feet; my SAC was 19.02 psi/min and my RMV was 0.49 ft3/min somewhat distorted by Johnny's breathing with me on the alternate air source ascent.
A continuing log of dives and commentary on items of interest to students at Cordova Diving.
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