diving mishaps

[Omicron]

Here's a bit of a mishap...not underwater...but diving related.

I met up w/ a friend at Redgranite quarry last weekend to do some diving. He was having some problems w/ the plug on his battery for his canister light - the wire was becoming frayed and was only hanging on by a thread. I told him I'd bring my soldering iron and some solder along so he could fix it. I had his spare battery and canister at my house, so I brought that along too so that he'd have a plug he could cut off of one battery and put onto the other.

So we showed up, plugged the soldering iron into the inverter and let it warm up. He ended up cutting the plug off of the backup battery charger as that one was easier to replace. He soldered the plug onto the battery, red to red, black to black. Let the solder cool, taped it up and plugged it in.

He flipped on his HID light aaaaannd...nothing. Turned it off, flipped it on. Nothing. He figured maybe his light head was goofy, so he asked if he could hook mine up. I told him no problem and disconnected my light head and handed it over. He plugged it in and.....nothing again.

About that same time, I asked him about polarity. One thing about HID light heads, is that the ballast doesn't deal well with reverse polarity. One could say that it deals with reverse polarity about as well as an ice cube deals with a flame thrower. In other words, it'll take it for about 1 second before it fries.

He double checked the solder job and he did indeed have red to red, black to black...but...because he took the plug from the charger instead of another battery, the wires coming off of the replacement plug were actually reversed from the battery. So while everything looked good on the solder job, when you actually plugged it into the light head you had red to black and black to red.

So..not just one...but two HID light heads were toast! They are now en-route to Dive Rite for replacement.

The moral of the story? Hrm. Always check polarity!! And, if you are really intent on trashing some gear, try not to involve anyone elses in the deal - stick to your own ;D

The upside of the story is that Dive Rite said they would bring our light heads up to "production standards" when they rebuilt them, so new switches/boots/glands/o-rings and all that good stuff.

As far as things I've done? There was one of my first dives, using my friends BC. You had to get REALLY upright to dump air from the inflator hose. I wasn't getting upright enough to dump, and I was getting pretty buoyant, at about 55 feet. So there I am, arms wrapped around a tree, waving "bye-bye" to my dive partner (the same one, incidentally, that nuked the light heads)...just as I was going to let go of the branch he got me in the right position to get some air out so I could sink again!