Skyline is a beautiful wall dive with boulders and rocks off the north-west tip of Fidalgo Island (
Fidalgo Island - Google Maps) that it is accessible from a public beach after a rather long surface swim. It is an invertebrateÃÔ paradise! (For the first time I saw entire rocks covered with black sea cucumbers
).
The site faces a channel that lies between Fidalgo and Burrows Islands. It is extremely current sensitive. This body of water gets very busy on warm sunny days with boaters and kayakers. On top of that a rather extensive kelp bed grows every year between the shoreline and the boat traffic lane. The max depth of the wall varies between 85 and 95 ft according to the tide height.
I dived this site before twice where there was hardly any current last November. This time the current scenario turned out to be quite different. My buddy and I spent some time consulting two different currents and tides predictions (we followed the one that I have attached here)
We hoped to catch an flood current that would had take us out to the wall (westward) and an ebb current (eastward) that would have take us back to the beach. We surface swam to what my buddy thought was the site of the wall but the current was still ripping (the chart showed a current of less than 1kt but I think it was faster than that).
I began to feel a bit uneasy and we decided to hang on onto some rocks on shore and wait for a little while to see if the current was going to slow down. It did not. I had mixed feeling about what to do so I asked my buddy if he was comfortable enough to descend. (Ūf he is OK I will be OK I thought).He felt good enough to go down and off we went while I was trying to keep at bay a slight sense of anxiety.
I dived in fairly strong currents before at Keystone and Admiralty Beach and I never felt intimidated by them. I think it is something to do with the fact that I have been diving those sites on a regular basis and I have got to know the behavior of the currents. The current at Skyline was still ÁÖnknown to me. At Skyline there is not a beach where you can let yourself go and drift and then walk back to your starting point. Instead there is a short rocky shore that turns eastward and a big channel in front of it. God knows where the current would have taken us past that point! We were not planning to do a drift dive (we did not have a boat that would have picked us up whenever the current would have tossed us).
Our planned max. depth was 80ft. My buddy and I calculated the Rock Bottom based on my RMV (Respiratory Minute Volume) of 1.5 and his of 0.9. I did the calculation by hand with a calculator, while my buddy used the computer. We ended up with two different figures. Mine was the most conservative. My buddy also figured out a dive plan with the computer (something that I am still struggling to fully understand how he did it). I then did what TSandM suggested in her post and figured out our turning pressure. My buddy came out with a lower number than mine. After discussing our results we settled down and decided to turn around when the first of us would have reached 2,000PSI (which at the end it coincided with the ÅÓule of thirds pressure).
We did reach our planned depth of 80ft while holding onto rocks. At that depth I was still OK even if I wished that the current would have stopped or slowed down to let us cruise the place without any worries to admire the amazing marine life. Instead it stubbornly kept pushing us westward and it never turned back.
I signaled my buddy to go up in shallower water cutting the current diagonally and scrambling on the rocks. I was getting tired to fight the current and stressed out. At a depth of about 40 ft I don't know what happened. I guess my anxiety and stress level went up dramatically and I found myself breathing heavily and shallower. I failed to signal my buddy that I was not feeling OK and my buddy did not realize that something was wrong. I then grabbed my buddy's arm. My mind began to "scream" that I wanted to get the hell out of there. The water that I loved so much turned into a devil that I did not want to deal with. Eventually I reached a state of almost panic. I lost control of my buoyancy and I began to ascend. My buddy grabbed my fins and legs while I was dumping air out from my wing. I came back down and finally (Hallelujah!) I realized that I had to STOP, HOLD ONTO A ROCK, THINK AND BRING MY BREATHING UNDER CONTROL! I checked my SPG and seeing that I had plenty of air reassured me and gradually I relaxed and gained my self-control again. M A N! WHAT A TRIP!
We gradually scrambled up-slope among the bed and bull kelp, stopped for our safety stop and kept going until we surfaced near the shore not too close to the kelp and away from the boat traffic lane. I had about 750PSI left (my buddy 900) so we decided to swim back to the beach underwater as long as our air supply would allow us.
The moral of this long story is:
1) Current and Tide predictions are just PREDICTIONS. We, as a buddy team, need to learn how to discuss the contingency plan more efficiently and clearly to avoid confusion and misunderstanding later. We have to keep trying to improve our way to communicate. (After the dive was over my buddy told me at some point that he did not want to fight the current , but drift and I remarked that we had never discussed to do a drift dive. I wanted to swim diagonally towards the beach, which I guess it did mean that we had to fight the current to a certain extent!)
2) We have to improve the way we communicate underwater. My buddy has a slate and he hardly uses it! I guess when there is current it is probably not so easy to write on a slate. You are more concerned to use your hands to hold onto something ! I have to learn to communicate to my buddy that something is wrong as soon as a sense of anxiety sets in. If I wait too long it may be too late. I got freaken lucky! On one hand I should not make the assumption that my buddy is my "Guardian Angel" and would always be there to rescue me (in other words I need to learn how to look after myself better). On the other hand where the buddy's responsibility to be aware of the conditions of the other diver begins?
3) On land before the dive it is extremely easy to remember those famous three words that I have learned in the OW class: STOP, THINK and BREATH. Well this time I discovered that underwater it is a different ball game altogether. Those words don't pop up so easily as they should even after having nearly 100 dives! It seems that the brain goes slower down there and it takes more effort to remember things. Maybe every time before descending I should chant those magic words to engrave them into my brain! (If I remember!
)
4) In the past whenever I felt uncomfortable and anxious I would convince my buddy to change the dive plan. Well this time I tried to shut off those feelings and stick to the plan no matter what. I don't know exactly why. It was a mistake but at the same time without that self-induced push I would have never experienced what I have read in blogs and magazines until that point= UNDERWATER PANIC . Did I turn myself into a guinea-pig? Maybe, I don't think it was a conscious decision, though. My buddy's cool and self-control during this dive somehow, despite his slow response to my stress, helped me to manage this semi-panic state that flooded my brain in a flash without tragic consequences. However my buddy and I have no desire to put ourselves in that situation again. So to be able to dive a sensitive site like Skyline we have to keep looking at predictions and modify our plan according to what we have learned during this dive. We also have to learn to let things go(=abort the dive) if the real conditions are dangerously off from those predictions.
