First open water dive of 2010 (in MN)

[DetectorGuy]

I agree that there is no deep dark hidden threat of diving dry. A member of the site PMed me asking about it so that maybe they can learn from what I experienced and I started to explain it an a personal reply to them but then I thought I should Cut/Paste my response here so that maybe someone can learn from my mistakes.
In construction we fill out "near miss reports" when something that could have hurt someone but didn't. In construction we share these "near misses" that happen weekly with our staff so that we can prevent injuries.
It helps to show trends and because the near miss reporting is done by the people doing the work, we get a good view of what is really happening where the rubber meets the road.

Here is my near miss and maybe it will help someone:

That dive I dragged the dive flag out to the stern buoy. there are two buoys on the wreck that the GLSPS places every year as part of what they do. One is at the bow section (closer to shore and in shallower water). The other is at the stern section about 150 yards further out into the lake and in deeper water. My dive plan was to surface swim out to the stern buoy, take a compass heading to the bow buoy, drop down to the stern, take a few pics and then head underwater to the bow section, take a few pics of that, surface, swim to shore.

I dropped down to the stern at 50' took several photos, swam around it a few times, dropped down the starboard side to 57' and took a few photos. At this point I was going to swim toward the bow section and I noticed that my dive flag was tangled up on the mooring line (near the surface). This prevented me from following through with my plan. I spent the balance of the dive looking at this stern section until my air got down to 1000 PSI. I made my slow ascent as I was winding up the dive flag line on my winder deally.

Now when I took the dry suit certification through Naui, I was taught to use the suit only and not the BCD for buoyancy control. with this fresh in my head, I had my BCD completely empty so dumping air there was not an option.

As I got up to about 20' I was holding down the exhaust valve on my left arm of the dry suit to vent out and slow my ascent for my 3 minute safety stop. This is when I noticed that the air was not venting as fast as I would have liked and stopping was not going to happen.

This is where the luck came into play. Because my dive flag was tangled on the buoy line, I was ascending next to it. I just reached out and grabbed it at 15' and stayed there for 3 minutes. I ended the dive with 500 PSI and did the long surface swim back to shore.

The culprit to my problems were many but not letting them cascade into panic were key. I found out later that many people just tie their dive flag to to the buoy to prevent it from tangling up. I also found out that the Weezle Wear undergarments are loftier than the fleece that I used in class, and that the nylon outer shell of the undergarments do not transfer air as rapidly as fleece. (I remedied this by melting several holes in the undergarment in the exhaust vent location). I also believe that we need to plan your dive and dive your plan but when you run into a "situation" you need to adapt and overcome.

Would I have got bent by missing my safety stop? Probably not, but this safety stop was in my plan. Was I too light in weight? Right after the dive I thought I was about 5 pounds too light, but now I know that I was probably over weighted.