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I finally stopped trusting the surface-supplied backup gauge after a close call at 90 feet in Pascagoula
Last month on a pipeline job off Pascagoula I watched a diver's backup gauge read 200 psi higher than his primary, and he almost pushed past his planned turn pressure because of it. People keep saying you should trust the backup if the primary fails, but that gauge was 3 years past its calibration date and nobody on the crew had checked it. How many of you actually verify your backup gauge reads match your primary before every dive, or do you just assume it's good because it's there?
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keithyoung24d ago
3 years past calibration is wild. The bigger issue is that a lot of crews treat the backup like a decoration, just something on the harness to point at during an audit. But those gauges drift slow over time, and a 200 psi gap at 90 feet is a real problem because that is the zone where you still have some time to fix it. Down deeper, that same gap could be the difference between a normal ascent and a chamber ride. What I would add is that the fix is not just checking the two gauges match on the surface. You got to do it at the start of the dive and again at your deepest point, because some gauges only drift under pressure. Takes 10 seconds and it tells you which one to trust.
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