We had a similar issue when our family of 4 were going for a dive at Canyon Lake. We each assembled our equipment, checked and then bagged the items we had. (For myself and my husband we had all of our gear. As for our 2 children, Laurna 17 and Jay Jay 14 they were lacking some gear.) Knowing what we were in need of, we set out to the nearest Dive Shop. Laurna was the one who needed the most gear so we rented hers. Jay Jay had everything except some weight for his weight belt, so we bought him the 6 lbs that he needed. Having 4 full tanks and all the appropriate gear, we drove up to Skyline for our first dive of the vacation. Well the first problem we encountered was that the lake level was down so the ramp down to the boat dock was at about a 45 degree slope, in other words... I slid down the last 1/4 of the ramp. The next issue related to the floating dock was currently being used by a group that rented jet skis and such to the public. Due to the heat of the day and the number of people on the dock we each took and prepped our gear on the nearby shoreline. This was much easier and everything seemed to be going good until:
- Jay Jay’s weight belt was too big for him. So I gave him my smaller one and took his: this worked well except I was already fully geared up at the time.
- My gauge hose somehow developed a crack in it. So my husband went to the truck and brought his tool box and extra parts to replace the hose.
- He didn’t have a hose that would fit. He then left us in the lake with the gear and he went back to the Dive Shop to get a new hose.
- It took him almost 1 hour to return, Laurna was freezing from being in the water so I told her to go up on the rocks in the sun
- The Dive Shop didn’t have a 2000 psi hose but only a 3000 psi (well now I have a great hose to my gauges)
- My husband and the rest of us started to gear up again. I was done first so I started to help Laurna. At some point when she was putting her flippers on, she handed me her mask and snorkel (this I don’t remember) which when she asked for them back I didn’t know where they were. Well the only option was down.
- I started looking for the mask and snorkel while my husband finished helping Jay gear up and then himself. I did find the mask and snorkel! Yea!
- We were all geared up and ready so we get ready to descend, I then noted a large amount of bubbles coming from Jay Jay.... I gave the signal for us all to ascend due to Jay Jay’s BCD hose (the one that is fixed in position on the BCD) detached.
- With this my husband threw his hands in the air and said that’s it!
- The kids still wanted to dive so I offered to let Jay Jay take my gear and the 3 of them could dive. My husband stated no that wasn’t going to work and let Jay Jay use his gear instead so that the 3 of us could dive
Overall it took 4 hrs for us to get everything in a state so that we could dive for 45 mins that day!