It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.
By Rusty Miller
As of the writing of this article, we only have 21 days before Christmas so in the “Olden days” back when manual transmissions where a standard and automatic transmissions where special order on new automobiles. When the only big mail order was JC Penny and Sears Roebuck and you had to have your order in before Thanksgiving to get it just before Christmas Day.
You ask, what’s this have to do with scuba diving? Well just like diving you could only get any equipment like regulators, tank harness (pre-BCD) weights and weight belts from a box store called a scuba dive shop. But you could not just walk in and buy your equipment unless you had what was called a “C-card” – your certification card. You couldn’t even get your tanks filled without it. There were few charter boats along the coast that would even take divers out because they didn’t understand what the sport was all about. So we had to make do with what was available and from there it became a very big industry.
The equipment that we used was very primitive by today’s standards and not as reliable as today’s equipment and because of the vast improvements in the equipment we have lost touch with several of the lifesaving skills that we would learn then versus now.
Over the next couple of articles I will go through what skills that aren’t taught to new students unless it’s an old timer like me that at least want to demonstrate them in the pool. A couple of the old skills require practice and repetition for them to be of any life saving use. If these skills are done wrong you will find yourself in a very dangerous situation very quickly.
I want to talk about the first skill that a lot of newer instructors almost never if ever teach to students mainly because they have never been taught themselves. It used to be the main out-of-air skill because this was taught when I got my first C-card as a 10 year old through the YMCA back in the ‘60s, it’s called buddy breathing. When we where taught to buddy breathe we where using state of the art downstream double-hose regulators. They were the type that the Navy divers would use so the dive industry adopted the same regulators.
I’m not going to go into details about how they worked but let’s say if you were looking up or on your back they didn’t work very well. Now for the buddy breathing skill on those types of regulators it was sketchy at best and you had to be able to perform it without panicking otherwise one or both of you would die.
You would need to use this skill when you ran out of air in your cylinder. Did I mention that we didn’t have SPG’s like now, we had a “J valve.” It was part of the tank valve and had a heavy type of wire that ran down the left side of the tank and when you took your last breath you would reach down and pull it down and suddenly you would have 500 psi of air to make your way to the surface. If you were lucky and the tank was filled with the valve in the correct position.
I’ll finish up the buddy breathing skill in next week’s article. Until then keep making bubbles.
-Russell Miller #59999
Editor’s Note: This is a repeat of a column from December of last year.
