What Really Happens
When You Lose a Reg?
To better understand that last statement, it helps to think about what actually goes if and when a diver loses a regulator under water. Such a loss could occur for a variety of reasons:
- Another diver could accidentally knock a regulator out of a diver’s mouth with an errant fin stroke.
- The diver himself could turn his head suddenly and hit his regulator against a stationary object, dislodging it.
- Yet another cause of regulator loss seldom addressed during entry-level training is when that five-cent plastic cable tie holding the mouthpiece on the second stage breaks, leaving the affected diver with just a mouthpiece in his mouth — and a second-stage body that is nowhere in sight.
The good news is that, when these things happen, the affected diver is usually in a normal swimming position, in which case the “lost” second stage just hangs down in plain sight. This may be why lost second stages are less of a problem than they could be. What’s most important to understand about the difference between practice and reality is this:
- Divers in training have the opportunity to take a nice, deep, long breath from their primary second stage before cavalierishly tossing it over their shoulders and attempting to find it.
- In the real world, a diver who unexpectedly loses a second stage may be at the beginning of an exhalation, at the end — or anywhere in between.
In other words, in real life, divers don’t always have the luxury, as they do in training, of having several seconds in which to fumble for, find and resume breathing from a missing second stage.
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