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Lift Bags, do you have one? Do you need one?
Lift bags are only for heavy duty commercial divers who are laying pipes and cable right?
Wrong!
There’s a common misconception among sport divers that lift bags are only something that the hard-core technical divers have any kind of use for.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The average sport diver could come across a variety of incidences where a lift bag could come in handy.
Do you ever do any underwater treasure hunting?
How about wreck diving?
Have you ever gone out with some buddies to find reefs, wrecks, or ledges that might not be in any of the GPS books you’ve seen?
If you do any of these things then lift bags can make your life a heck of a lot easier.
How can lift bags help you?
There is the obvious of course. Lift bags can help you get something off the bottom when you couldn’t do it yourself.
They can also help you get items up more safely.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a diver find a weight belt on the ocean floor and decide to take it with them. After all, soft weights can get expensive! The diver usually goes over, picks the weight belt up and inflates their buoyancy compensator to keep from sinking to the bottom.
True that’ll work, but what happens if the diver drops the weight belt? They’ll shoot to the surface like a Polaris missile!
If the diver had a lift bag, they could have just tied a rope to the belt and sent the bag to the surface where their buddies on the boat could find it and pull it up safely.
That brings me to the sport diver’s most valuable use for lift bags: marking stuff.
If you’re a fisherman, spear fisherman, or lobster hunter you know that the best spots to hunt are the ones that no one knows anything about.
I have friends that literally have their GPS books willed to people! These guys aren’t going to let this information go until they die!
How did they get this information?
First they started with an everyday GPS book filled with known reefs, ledges, and wrecks. Then they’d do a little exploring. They’d go off the reef until their sonar showed a sandy bottom. Then they’d run a search pattern until it looked like they were on another reef or ledge.
Now it’s time to dive.
They’d go down on the reef with nothing but a couple of lift bags and some line and look around. If they found a ledge with lobster lined up on it, they sent up a bag.
If they came across a cavern full of grouper, another bag went up.
If they found a ledge they didn’t know was there, up went another bag. During this whole time, someone is on the boat moving over to the bags, picking them up and marking the GPS location.
Now you have a bunch of super secret areas to hunt!
Now comes the tough part.
Where do you carry lift bags?
There are a few BCs that’ll have clips on the tank where you can strap a lift bag. That’s probably the best way to go about it since these things don’t exactly fit in your pocket.
I’d also carry a reel so you have something to attach the bag to. If you’re planning on carrying multiple bags (make sure your equipment can handle this) you can take a spool of biodegradable rope to use.
Many local dive shops also have classes on how to use lift bags. Especially the ones who are selling them and there’s no substitute for professional instruction by someone experienced in lift bag use.
True the hard-core techies use lift bags too, but that shouldn’t prevent you from benefiting from them too.
With a little training, they can become a highly useful accessory in your dive bag.
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