pins - a breathing tube??

[Eoghain]

one for all you clever design folk out there...

In the UK where the rivers are thinner access can usually quite quickly be made to a pin victim. Getting someone off a pin though can be tricky work, and if the victims head is under water, it's a tough job to get to the victim and set up and rope work etc if required within 2 minutes.

So enter the breathing tube, a long peice of tubing which you carry in your boat, which if you could get it to the victims mouth would at least give you a bit more time to deal with the situation.

1st off - is it a good idea?? Would be a light weight piece of kit you could just leave in the back of your boat, but could time spent faffing about putting the tube into the victim be better spent just getting them off??

2nd - Design, Apart from the actual desing of the tube - how do you kink it at the mouth, make it fleixble yet sturdy enough yet felixble enough etc etc the main challange seems to be what kind of valve do you put on the mouth end to stop water going in??

A snorkel style purge valve would require the victim to breath out to clear the mouth peice of air - I wouldn't be too keen on breathing out if I was the victim!

A "bite" valve like what you get in thouse "hydration' rucksacks wouldn't be big enough to easily breathe out of...

Anyhow throughts/critisisim/ideas etc all welcome...

Cheers,

Eoghain.

[Mad_Erik]

http://playak.com/article.php?sid=1181 The kayak reviewed here has a breathing tube!

The idea just never took off.

I might be that if you are pinned in a position where you need a breathing tube... the chances of you being able to deploy one are not good. I imagine that the weight/force of the water woudl restrict your movements.

Also, folks criticised the idea as it might encourage people to put themselvs in to situations which they woudl otherwise avaoid.

This seems a bit OTT. A Level 5 coach told me, some time ago, that most paddling fatalities in this country occour as the result of pins on G2 water. I don't know how accurate this is, but if that is the case may be some of these people could have been helped?

[thetangoman]

It sounds like you are thinking about a common-and-standard snorkel. That solves the issue of the mouth piece and the kink at the mouth.

Issues you would have to consider include the maximum length of the tube, to ensure that the pinned person is not re-breathing CO2.

Andy

[kevinf]

http://www.rapidproducts.com/quickair/index.php



The sad reality is that in most cases either the victim is out of reach or the force of water is too powerful for this solution to work. When you pin you are almost certainly already out of breadth, from kayaking/struggling to escape, so unless you have an air pocket you will have much less than 2mins.

The concept of breathing air from within your boat is good one, no idea how well it would work or how many breaths you would get.

[scottdog007]

To be honest I would think the pinned person would be too busy thinking about other things first rather than thinking of using a snorkle. So trying to free the boat or/and trying to get out of the boat.

[James Hartley]

I must admit, it has on occasion crossed my mind, and the answer I half came up with was cut the tub off an air bag and use that if was really thrutching

[banzer]

If the victim is at any depth more than a few inches, or if the water is fast moving, you will need a sturdier, wider bore tube than you imagine or you won't be able to get any effective air movement up or down it. An extra-long snorkel (??) would probably be ok, but not one of those skinny beach shop ones.

[Adrian Cooper]

Wasn't this done to death a few months back?

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=84715&hilit=breathing+tube

[afkt]

Issues you would have to consider include the maximum length of the tube, to ensure that the pinned person is not re-breathing CO2.

this is the flaw in the plan, know as dead space. If your tubes too long you are wasting your time, of which you have little, but what use is a short tube?

[Eoghain]

If you breathe in through the tube and out through your nose the "dead space" problem is eliminated...

Just to clarify it would be a tube you as the rescuer would give to the victim.

Cheers for the input guys!

[Randy Fandango]

Issues you would have to consider include the maximum length of the tube, to ensure that the pinned person is not re-breathing CO2.

this is the flaw in the plan, know as dead space. If your tubes too long you are wasting your time, of which you have little, but what use is a short tube?

You use some sort of one-way valve somewhere in your system and a purge valve by your mouthpiece I should imagine.
I'm still waiting for that keen fellow from a few months back to re-appear with his prototype.
Like most I was basically rather cynical of the idea (after all, of it could be made to properly work surely someone would have successfully marketed something by now?) but the boy-scout in me kind of hoped he'd appear with a fully working contraption and stick two fingers up at the nay-sayers..... :-)
Giles

[Green.media]

As a scuba diver I've often wondered about potentially carrying a very small say a 1.5L 232 bar bottle of O2 on a river or a high nitrox mix (75% o2) (giving me 300L of o2 that for someone breathing fairly quick would last about 5-8 minets id guess 10 at a push) this would be on a 2 meter hose with a Poseidon cyclone metal valve, just to give you a little time to work things out if someone was pinned, in the end how ever I decided that it was more of a hazard to my self if I got pinned as it would carry the force of a medium size bomb! also if they are pinned deep enough that they were unable to breath then im unlikely to be able to get this supply to them
I recall reading an article a few years ago about how a snorkel that is longer than a length (believe 1.2M )will not work due to the force of water and the change in pressure, (approximately one bar) so this is also worth thinking about! The last thing I would want is to blow my last air out to clear a snorkel and find I can't breath in at all!
Cheers
Rich

[Eoghain]

Damn you boyles law!! Yep your totally right, forgot about that - The pressure at only 4ft would make it pretty near impossible to breathe through a snorkel like thing.. Ah well worth a bash! Cheers for the input!! I guess the garden hose will live for another day...

[Green.media]

spotted something in a article on the recent congo expedition.
A pack that fitted in the front of a buoyancy aid (about the size of a pack of cereal) with a tube that had compressed air in it as a emergency supply to last a few minets in a panic of up to 15 minets if your calm. May be something you would like to look into?
Cheers
Rich

[jackbay131]

I have to admit I've thought about this problem a fair bit, when I paddle I often wear a 1.5 liter water bladder under my bouyancy aid, when the waters all gone I often blow it back up and tell myself if I needed to I could breath from it and that it increases bouyancy but I guess in actuality this probably wouldn't work?

[DaveBland]

It's simple. There are 15-30 breath spare air devices around that do the job. They are around $300 or quid [damn this US keyboard].
Quite a few paddlers here carry them. They fit on the BA front pocket or some folks get their grannies to make a nifty little baggie/harness.

Any home-made contraption is probably not going to cut it in an emergency. There are sound arguments for and against carrying one but I guess the most influential factors are whether you really think you may need one [ie what are you paddling] and have you got the money and time to get one and get used to using it so it's natural if you do need it.

[ruralweb]

Back in the 80s when I was big into G5 stuff we used to carry scuba pony cylinders behind the seat and a demand valve carried near our mouth. These were enough for about 15 minutes - we used them several times and will always remember crawling along the bottom of the wall at Backbarrow bridge when we really should not have tried.

[Goopsdad]

Most of us already carry them in our boats- airbags. Cut the end of your airbag off in an emergency, the bag plus the tube is about 3' long. Should do in a pinch.