At 12:15 AM 1/10/98 -0500, Bob Sherwood wrote:
>  I am concerned about this Ice diving thing with out surface support and
>being done with only a reel. What happens if the line breaks ? 

That would concern me too!  I somehow had pictured them each with a reel,
but that's probably not what they are doing.  You'd have to treat your
expired air as silt, using it as a way to determine where you'd been, when
you were doing a search for the exit with your safety reel.  It'd be pretty
hard to find the hole....

>  Nanci seems to have somewhat a handle on what their doing although I
>question why they put the harness over the bc? 

That's not what I meant, not how people do it.  The harness goes over the
exposure suit, under the BCD.  Divers using a harness/backplate system to
begin with can just clip the line off to that.

And I'm not to crazy about
>all the lines that may be in the water at one time if an emergency takes
>place.  It may not seem like much, but three lines floating around can
>create a huge mess. I much prefer the use of one main line for the dive team
>and one for the support diver. This reduces the amount of tenders needed and
>simplifies the whole operation.  I'm also curious as to how much line people
>are willing to play out to the the diving team?

You're right, even with just two lines, the tenders must be attentive to
keep them untangled if the divers cross eachother's paths.  As for how much
line,  it's pretty common to keep divers on a 100 foot line, with a 150
foot safety line.  The safety line (for those who don't ice dive) is longer
because if the safety diver had to do a search for a missing diver, he
would just swim a circle out at the end of his longer line, and his
floating line would catch on the diver, who has gone to the "surface",
right under the ice, to wait.  As David Middleton says, this is _very_
strenuous, if you were already cold/tired from diving, it would be hard to
quickly search for your buddy.

Different groups will use longer lines, though; they are just limited, I
guess, by how long of a safety line they have.  The group I dive with
usually puts the divers who like better visibility in first, and the ones
who dig the most in last, but sometimes we'll get a longer line out for the
last diver, so he won't be going over the same picked-over area.  

Nanci
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