What's the dumbest thing you did to a housing.

I'll start : It's snowing and I'm doing a wet suit dive in december, so I'm in a hurry to get from soggy, to butt naked to dry and cozy. start the car do my stuff and leave, hit the 60mph mark and hear a CLUMP in the back, a look in the rearview and I can see my old Aquatica A3 bounce back and roll off from the pavement. Well the housing survived and so did the Canon F1 and 100mm, the macro port somewhat bore the brunt of the attack but after testing proved it maintained its dry manner . Let just say that I'm not as anal now about the storage and packaging as I used to be

Cheers

WEll, i gave my Ike housing with F90 in it to a fellow divemaster while we were in the bottomless blue off of Rangiroa. I had to swim to the boat to get the drivers attention as he was watching a stationary sausage (another story that) After i got to the boat we came to pick up the divers and i was told i was lucky to have a housing. "What do you mean?" I said. Turns out she let go of the housing for some #$#$&%^$ reason and it started to drop into the abyss...

Luckily, one of the guests was looking into the water hoping to see a shark at the time and he was able to swim down and catch it at about 40 feet.

Needless to say i gave him a few beers in return. I won't mention what i said to the other dive guide....

Quite a few years ago, our area had an artificial lake build for competitive water skiing. Being the half-crazy guy ( <deep sigh> Yes, it's true, the Loon was modeled after me.) on the staff, the paper sent me down to get some images of the lake in action.

After a day of shooting plain-vanilla stuff from the boat and shore, I am struck by a thunderbolt: how about a wide-angle shot of the skiier turning around a buoy from water level? I zip home, grab my Ikelite MD housing for a FM2, and next thing you know, I'm hanging out in the water next to the #2 ball.

Although the skiier was a National champion, he's dubious. To assuage his doubts, I put on a motorcycle helmet. Coolness. The boat lines up, the skiier enters the course, and...

Later he told me as he rounded the #1 ball, he had a moment of confusion: he saw TWO buoys! (the real buoy and my helmet) In the confusion, he split the difference. Alas, this is where the housing resided....

The writeup to NPS was catastrophic flood from waterskiier; camera was back in a week. Housing was back in a week, too, kudos to Ikelite. And the yellow stain in the water was never noticed.

All the best, James

Greaty storys guys. Fortunately for me (unfortnuately for you) I have no storys nearly that good.

Thanks William, but i think ol Fdog wins it in my book!

Thanks William, but i think ol Fdog wins it in my book!

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Hang on a minute Mike! I have a dumb story about housings.

I bought a Sea & Sea DX-D70 housing. It broke after the 3rd dive. How dumb is that?!

James I hope that motorcycle helmet was full face, Man, I got ran over by a miscalculated wind surfer during a similar shoot, that cost me a few stiches... and a Stromm (anybody remember thoses) housing and blah blah blah. I can only imagine a water skier, that's a piece of wood, It's gotta hurt .

I was doing a pool shoot about a month ago. The shoot was with my medium format hasselblad, but I took my D2x along too, as I wanted to demonstrate that it produced better quality images underwater! Pride comes before a fall and all that.

So I took both housings down to the bottom of the diving pool - empty. Both fine. The returned to the surface and loaded the cameras. Lots going on and got distracted when loading my D2x. Then suddenly the models were in the water and it was go go go. Got the hasselblad in and returned for the D2x. The back wasn't closed properly and luckily I was looking at it as I decended. No bubbles, but the leak deterctor started flashing. You know when white sharks breach - well I leaped from the pool with equal athleticism!

There was about a teaspoon of water in the housing - and no water on the camera. I was certainly saved by the leak detector. And like 99% of floods it was completely my fault. Normally I am quite introverted when diving, concentrating on setting up my housing and thinking about my photography. But on this occasion I was too busy chatting - showing off trying to impress the models, most probably!

Suffice to say that the D2x didn't dive again that day! And the Hasselblad produced much better photos than the non-existent D2x pix! Although it has since done 24 dives in the Red Sea without incident!

Alex

Alex, a report like this can't be completed without some shots of the models.

Nicely put Arnon, i concur!

Oh Yes PLEASE

Alex, I would love to see how many beats per second that British heart of yours did, that would be interesting stat's So much for the stiff upper lip!

Happy Trafalgar! when you guys beat the french and spaniard you forgot to kidnap the cooking staff, bad strategy, 200 years and still on roast beef and crumpet

regards

After a dive in Norway, I attached my Sealux F801 housing to a rope that I hung from the back of my 13ft boat to secure the camera while I climb up the ladder...

Got distracted operating the anchor and engine while chatting with my dive-buddy.

Next thing I saw was a housing with Subtronic strobe surfing behind the boat at 25knots...

Housing, camera and strobe survived without damage...

I don't plan to do that again...

Cheers

Torben

Palau...Jellyfish Lake...hiked in with my Minolta 7xi in Ikelite housing...had nice snorkel with famous friendly jellies...hiked back out and as I stepped down from the bank to get in the tender to return to the boat, slipped just a teensy bit on the mud. Since my housed camera was hanging from the nearest hand, I gently used it like a cane/walking stick, pushing the opposite handle into the mud for balance. Didn't notice that the port had also touched mud...just enough to dislodge it from its clip on the underside. Wouldn't have been a problem, except that before mounting the tender, I gave the whole rig a little swish to rinse the mud off the bottom handle, which sloshed about a cup of nice salt water into the housing and all over the camera.

When I got back to the boat, I carefully wiped off the camera, but when I turned it on to see if it still worked, was greeted by that lovely smell of burning electrical parts and white smoke curling from its innards. The ONLY redeeming thing about the experience was that I salvaged this one photo from that camera's final roll of film...

Moral: if you slip and the only thing handy to keep you from falling is your camera housing, just roll over and do a back flop into the water -- never EVER use a housing to break your fall...

I have one too...

I switched from my old Bonica camera and strobe to a nice new Canon S45 (at that time) and a Canon housing. I intended to use the Bonica strobe for the Canon rig since it had the sensor on it so it should have been no problem.

I tested the setup and everything worked fine.

I took probably about 20 pictures on land with the S45 before I got on the boat.

Of course I had the case greased and everything, I did the bucket test, no bubbles and THEN ... I attached the strobe tray.

... The Bonica strobe tray has two small prongs to keep the camera from twisting. Those prongs fit perfectly on the lip of the Bonica camera case. ... Not on the Canon camera case.

I tighten the screw to get the Canon case and the strobe tray nice and snug and since I already did the water test, I dumped the system in the rinse bucket.

About 2 hours later right before getting in the water ... my camera case was flooded half way with water.

I saved the CF card but the rest was toast.

Got a new camera, S50 at this time removed the Bonica prongs and everything worked fine after that.

Vlad

A very, very long time ago I had a Ewa bag for my (then current) Nikon F801. I tried using this at over 10m - no problem using it at first as I descended and no water got in, but the 'glove' through which my hand operated the camera became squeezed onto my hand andfinally I found that I couldn't remove it. Felt rather stupid swimming along with a camera stuck on my hand. Never again!

Actually, I just remembered (must have blocked the painful memory...) another brilliant move I made with a housing (is there a prize for having done the MOST dumb things?)

In Socorro, I was shooting video of the wonderful mantas. On one dive, I jumped in and a crew member handed my camcorder down to me as usual. I floated a few feet away from the boat while my buddy jumped in, and was just getting ready to put the camera's lanyard around my wrist to descend when my tank O-ring blew and air started blasting out behind my head. I quickly contorted around and turned off the air, but when I turned back around, I realized I was no longer holding my camera!

Two crew members threw on tanks and jumped in, but we were in a channel with a strong current and a depth of 150-200ft, so they weren't able to locate it (at least that's what they told me...we joked that they just made a mental note of its location to return to on the next charter!).

Nowadays, the instant a camera is handed down to me in the water, the lanyard goes on my wrist IMMEDIATELY! Alas...another lesson learned the hard way...

Ouch ! , that's gotta pinch, loosing the housing is one thing, not having the air to do anything about it, well... priceless that what is called dead in the water , I can picture your face under the mask. bet you purchased the mountain super locking carabiner and safety harness when you came home

...losing the housing is one thing, not having the air to do anything about it, well... priceless...

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Yeah, and my buddy had just gone uw and was facing the opposite direction, so didn't see the camera floating off into the deep! He came back up to see why I was still on the surface, but by then the damage was done.

Funny how lanyards took on a WHOLE new meaning for me from that day forward! When I'm in shallow water with flat bottoms, I sometimes still take the lanyard off, but I'm ALWAYS aware of what's beneath me, and what "might" happen if -- for any unforeseen reason -- I had to let go of the camera...

Amen!