Nautilus life line

No affiliation as usual, just saw this for boaters and divers as a companion with a PLB.

http://www.nautiluslifeline.com/

Great idea - And cheap insurance.

That's awesome!

Frankly, I'm skeptical...On any decently run dive boat, this will be unnecessary. Of course not all dive boats are not properly run..

Leaving your life in the hands of anyone else is a big no no. Constantly a good amount of survival stories Are from people trusting the wrong Experts or guides and such and being left behind or walked out into the middle of nowhere straight into a survival situation and then told to do everything wrong by the person they trusted with their lives. There is even that movie made about the divers left behind by the crew.

Am I understanding it correctly? This is a GPS that somehow (???) broadcasts your location to marine radios within an 8 mile range.

I'm assuming it displays the coordinates on marine radios ... somehow? Is that a standard thing for marine radios?

Is 8 miles enough when out on open waters?

It would seem that a PLB would be a much better safer choice to protect if things go terribly wrong.

Do they make PLBs specifically for diving? I could see putting a regular PLB into an Otterbox or similar, but I'd wonder if the flotation factor would be too great. I'd hate to dive with a little box constantly pulling up on me.

Digital Selective Calling radios are the new standard for VHF marine radios. It is complicated, but, yes, essentially they serve as an area 911 and will display or announce the GPS location transmitted and will have an alarm that sounds when an emergency alert is issued over the channel. GMDSS/DHC radios are required on commercial vessels.



The limit is a function of line of sight. At water level to a typical recreational boat it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 miles, roughly. It will be somewhat further in a call to a commercial vessel with an antenna a significant height above the water.

This unit is deigned to deal with the situation that arises all too often where a diver is separated from their boat. Getting found can be a challenge, even with various non-radio signaling devices. Numerous instances where divers have been left, for a variety of reasons. It does happen. A PLB will get you rescued, but that isn't a local solution. Ideally, you would carry both.

Dive canisters are available for some PLBs. McMurdo makes one and ACR is planning to offer one with their latest PLB. Technically, an Otter Box is rated for 100 ft, as I recall, That may suffice for typical recreational diving, but I am not sure I'd bet my life on that. Typical dive canisters are rated for much deeper. The McMurdo is rated to 450 ft. giving plenty of safety margin.

In an attempt to answer my own question, I did a quick google for scuba accident statistics. "Left behind by dive boat" didn't even show up as a category. I am not sure that any of the sources I found were all that impartial, but I do suspect that LBBDB is pretty rare; when it does happen, it makes headlines.

So, got any statistics on LBBDB? In over 500 dives, it only happened (momentarily) to me just once and that was for good cause. All the scuba accidents with which I was involved related to embolisms, out of air, cardiac and such, not improper behavior by the vessel.

I suspect that the Nautilus Lifeline is an answer in search of a problem, at least in the world of scuba. There is a limit to the number of gadgets and trinkets you can haul underwater with you, so the statistical probabilities are relevant. I think a good bailout bottle (supplemental air) would be more likely to be useful to most divers.

Since I began diving over 27 years ago with advanced, cave, etc. certifications, I have been lost at sea once and I have found a guy floating out at sea that was lost once as well. Dive boats out of West Palm Beach, fl. Were bad for awhile losing divers but I think it has improved somewhat over time. I will not go diving on a boat anymore without a PLB since I almost bit it when I was lost at sea from a dive boat. I was fortunate to be seen with a dive alert and a big dive sausage and a lot of prayers while floating out in the big ocean. You cannot depend on nobody but yourself if things go astray. And this goes especially true when you’re in a cave and you are on a short time clock. I like the VHF idea to yell at the boat as well as well as the PLB. The PLB when in the ocean may be awhile till you get rescued while you are keeping the sharks company, but the VHF will help as well if there are nearby boats that may aid you in getting out of the water faster. Both would be nice, and there are a lot of underwater containers to put them in which doesn’t consume much space. OMS, watershed, McMurdo, DUI to name a few.

IMO a great idea now if they made one with just the alert and frs/gmrs for us land lubbers.

Fastfind, Fastfind Plus and FastFind Max G PLBs

The McMurdo PLB Dive Canister Page says their aluminum canister is designed (and tested) to protect the McMurdo Fastfind PLB down to 150 meter (500 ft / 15 atmospheres) depth , so it certainly does seem like a good choice for a diver with the larger versions of the McMurdo Fastfind PLB, but if you have the smaller 200/210 model, see the PVC model below. It took me a while to find the McMurdo Fast Find PLB Dive Canister manual. This page says it will also hold the GME MT410/MT410G but not the KANNAD and ACR PLBs.

The Landfall Page says it is designed for the Fastfind, Fastfind Plus and FastFind Max G PLBs, and is slightly cheaper than the PLB itself. This page has what seems to be the same unit (same 150m depth cite), though they call it a "Revere(R) Dive Canister, with some larger images of the unit, a slightly lower price, and says the unit is 6.5"x3.75"diameter, adds 1 lb positive buoyancy. This vendor cautions that the Fastfind PLB must have the -20deg C battery, and this page is more specific about the " -20 deg C Non Hazardous Lithium Battery". This site has a nice photo I didn't see at the other sites, and also mentions the battery compatibility issue.

Fast Find 200/210

McMurdo recommends a cheaper canister for the smaller Fast Find 200/210 ( the 210 is the new lightweight unit Doug Ritter reviewed here ) which is "depth rated to 180 metres", is PVC rather than aluminum, and positive buoyancy with the PLB in it, which seems like a nice feature. I'd prefer a more visible color than black - preferably retroreflective so I can locate it with a flashlight at night or signal mirror by day, but some SOLAS retroreflective tape around the unit might address that. This McMurdo page says that unit is only available from Custom Divers. It is also a lot cheaper - the equivalent of $113 vs the $286 street price for the McMurdo canister. They also sell replacement O-rings and suggest you change them each season.

The McMurdo Fast Find 210 web page has a link to download the manual, and shows both the aluminum and PVC canisters on its accessories page.

Actualy this looks like a great backup plan, but I would still have another backup plan past that like a PLB that can go diving with me just in case this doesn't work

I'm no diver, but I did some poking around.

There is a nice, quite detailed article on the Nautilus Lifeline here: Alert Diver Online.



There's a good summary of the popular diving "backup plan" hardware at the Scuba STAR (Safety Tracking and Reporting) website.

On that site, they present the results of a number of their (quite interesting) diver safety surveys, but the most pertinent one to the Nautilus is here: Search this page for the "DEC/JAN '09 SAFETY SURVEY: Surface Signaling Equipment"

95% of the respondents indicated that they have needed urgent/abnormal pickup at least once (which I infer means they needed to use some of the hardware below). { I think this is an "opt-in" survey, so there is probably some selection bias - those who have had problems might be more likely to respond to the survey).

In summary, the signaling devices the responding divers carried most often (from most to least common) were:
Safety Sausage (nearly universal), whistle, flashlight, signal mirror, air horn and strobe.

What they most commonly actually used (from most to least common) were:
Safety Sausage, (whistle or flashlight) (2-way tie), (signal mirror | air horn | strobe) (3-way tie).

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To indulge in my particular focus: it looks like about 1 in 3.5 signal mirror carriers received specialized training in their use, and no-one reported a signal mirror malfunction or failure.

(There's lots more info in the survey results - I encourage those interested to read the full article to get it w/o my filtering.)