What's the most intimidating dive you've done or thing that happened to you?

[TulsaTime]

Great thread with lots of interesting stories and certainly food for thought.

Being a fairly new diver, I haven't had much of an opportunity to find myself in many intimidating situations but thus far my most intimidating would be my first dive after getting my Scuba Diver cert in Jamaica (third dive overall).

This was at a Sandals, so most everyone else on the boat was either a DSD or occasional vacation diver. There was a French fellow that I had kind of buddied up to on the boat previously and this was the last dive before heading home for both of us.

The DM had us all meet at the bottom in a circle before heading out to the reef (yes, on our knees in the sand, which I no longer do). I was at the direct opposite point in the circle from the DM and so the farthest away and my French pal was to my right.

The DM gave the signal to head out and everyone started to do so. Being the farthest away, I was the last to start. As my instafriend started to kick off, he also made a big sweeping stroke with his arms. You can probably guess what happened - his left hand hooked my hose and swept my regulator out of my mouth. Wouldn't have been so bad, but it happened right as I was inhaling and I got a good breath of seawater.

So, here I am 40' down and choking with my reg floating somewhere behind me. Since I was the last of the group, everyone else (my friend included) had no idea and was merrily swimming off toward the reef. Visibility was 80-100' so I could see the bottom of the boat just above me. Mild panic set in. I wanted to shoot for the surface but fortunately my training kicked in and I remembered what the instructor had repeated many times - "Don't remove your regulator! If you need to cough, even if you need to vomit, do it through the regulator!"

So, I did the backsweep and caught my reg, put it back in my mouth and coughed up the water. Thought about ditching the dive then but I took a couple of minutes to calm myself and said, "Screw it, I'm fine now and I'm not going to waste this dive!" Went on to have an otherwise nice relaxing dive and never said a word about it to any of the group (although I told my instructor the next day as I was preparing to leave and thanking him for his training!).

In the end, I was actually kinda "glad" that it happened. All throughout training I had thought to myself, "This is all well and good, but will I remember it when the time comes?" So in that respect, it was actually reassuring and a bit calming (afterwards of course, not so much during the event).

 

[gchilcott]

There’s an “island” called Roca Partida in the Revillagigedos (S. of Baja), that’s a pinnacle in open ocean with steep walls. Due to the swell, the Avon tender couldn’t get close to the wall, which meant swimming in open water between the boat and the rock. We’d seen an oceanic white tip, a tiger, and lots of Gallapagos and Silky sharks during this particular dive.

When my teammate and I started swimming off the wall back to the boat at the end of the dive, four or five Silky sharks appeared and were checking us out. Their motion and body posture wasn’t threatening, but they were interested. We’d been diving in the area for more than a week by that time, and were around sharks a lot of the time, so this didn’t feel particularly unusual. Once at the boat we got back-to-back so we could hand up weight belts and scuba rigs while also keeping an eye on the sharks, who were coming in close at this point.

My buddy was first up, and I was poking at the sharks with a ~2 ft. piece of PVC pipe to keep them back while he heaved himself into the inflatable. When he kicked up over the side of the boat the sharks got excited and the dynamic changed, which is when it got intimidating for me. I was then trying to pick my time to take a shot at getting in the boat while none of them were swimming right toward me. If I got a good poke at a shark and actually connected, it would take a bigger lap before turning back, so the idea was to wait for all of them to be far enough away to have time to get up into the boat. I fended them off with the PVC pipe for a while (which probably seemed a lot longer than it actually was), and even hit one on the nose with my hand, but I finally got my moment and made it into the boat without mishap.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Has anybody here been intimidated by any barracudas?
I did a google search recently and from what I read they can get quite nasty in the right circumstances. I saw a few pics of some nasty injuries.

 

[Steve_C]

Not personally but had a report from another NC Diver that when they went to shoot their bags at the end of a wreck dive big cudas tore up their bags as the bags went up.

Was snorkeling off Bermuda and saw a couple of big barracudas. When I tried to inch a bit closer they altered their position in what looked to me like an attack posture. I inched the other way. May have been harmless but i felt intimidated. As I inched off they resumed their previous position.

 

[muzikbiz22]

Has anybody here been intimidated by any barracudas?
I did a google search recently and from what I read they can get quite nasty in the right circumstances. I saw a few pics of some nasty injuries.

Was followed/stalked by one. Was fairly unnerving. Probably more so than my Great White encounter and/or my "I thought I was a goner in ripping current" incident.

 

[Steve_C]

A cuda provided one of my more amusing dives. Was diving with a buddy on an inshore wreck. Noted a very big cuda as we started down. We were slowly cruising just off the bottom tilted head down looking for stuff when I looked over and laughed. The cuda was hanging about two inches above his tank with its mouth even with buddy's ear. Tail went way past the waist. Buddy saw me laughing and glanced over his shoulder and saw the cuda. They swam like that for several minutes. He looking at stuff on the bottom, the cuda waiting for him to scare up some lunch.

 

[WarrenZ]

Ive got a couple of barracuda stories my barracuda encounters were better than my shark stories.

When we were in the Caymans we had a huge barracuda (5+ feet) follow us for about 15 minutes waiting to see what we would scare up out of the reef. We finally lost it when we swam up to another one of the divers from our group and I signaled for Pam to get her camera ready we then split apart so Pam and her niece could swim between us right into the path of the barracuda. After that dive she had a couple of great shots of a barracuda and a wetsuit that need a rinse.

When I was in Catalina I watched a school of baby barracudas come into the bay swim around and then come right back past me again on their way out both times it took about 10 minutes for the school to pass. Of course I was the only one on the boat that saw the school since the rest of the group was back on board the boat shivering and I was down toasty in my drysuit.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Great thread with lots of interesting stories and certainly food for thought.

Being a fairly new diver, I haven't had much of an opportunity to find myself in many intimidating situations but thus far my most intimidating would be my first dive after getting my Scuba Diver cert in Jamaica (third dive overall).

This was at a Sandals, so most everyone else on the boat was either a DSD or occasional vacation diver. There was a French fellow that I had kind of buddied up to on the boat previously and this was the last dive before heading home for both of us.

The DM had us all meet at the bottom in a circle before heading out to the reef (yes, on our knees in the sand, which I no longer do). I was at the direct opposite point in the circle from the DM and so the farthest away and my French pal was to my right.

The DM gave the signal to head out and everyone started to do so. Being the farthest away, I was the last to start. As my instafriend started to kick off, he also made a big sweeping stroke with his arms. You can probably guess what happened - his left hand hooked my hose and swept my regulator out of my mouth. Wouldn't have been so bad, but it happened right as I was inhaling and I got a good breath of seawater.

So, here I am 40' down and choking with my reg floating somewhere behind me. Since I was the last of the group, everyone else (my friend included) had no idea and was merrily swimming off toward the reef. Visibility was 80-100' so I could see the bottom of the boat just above me. Mild panic set in. I wanted to shoot for the surface but fortunately my training kicked in and I remembered what the instructor had repeated many times - "Don't remove your regulator! If you need to cough, even if you need to vomit, do it through the regulator!"

So, I did the backsweep and caught my reg, put it back in my mouth and coughed up the water. Thought about ditching the dive then but I took a couple of minutes to calm myself and said, "Screw it, I'm fine now and I'm not going to waste this dive!" Went on to have an otherwise nice relaxing dive and never said a word about it to any of the group (although I told my instructor the next day as I was preparing to leave and thanking him for his training!).

In the end, I was actually kinda "glad" that it happened. All throughout training I had thought to myself, "This is all well and good, but will I remember it when the time comes?" So in that respect, it was actually reassuring and a bit calming (afterwards of course, not so much during the event).

It sounds like you recovered very well. This scenario is why harassment was originally used in training years ago. Well, let me clarify, there was productive harassment and then there was sadistic harassment. Productive harassment trained divers to expect the unexpected, kind of like what you went through. It was actually a very valuable tool to teach divers to handle what happened to you like an old pro.
It wasn't extreme by any means, it was fairly mild to start, just a dislodged mask and maybe a yanked out reg from behind by a DM in training or AI. This was all done in the shallow end of the pool to start so if things went awry the student could stand up and be out of it. Then when the students became more used to it more was added later in the deep end of the pool and the student wasn't allowed to go up, they had to resolve the situation at depth. By the end of the course everyone was pretty used to having unexpected stuff happen, actually it was expected by the end.
The end result was that new divers weren't affected by minor inconveniences like getting regs knocked out or masks dislodged and flooded because they had already endured days of this stuff. The idea was to get them so used to it that they would almost be yawning with boredom when it actually happens for real, kind of like "Oh, this again".

They don't teach that way anymore, so now divers have to discover this Sudden High Intensity Training on their own on how to deal with those types of situations and the subsequent emotions behind it.
You did very well and I'm sure you would have been a model student back in the big bad old days of totally non PC draconian training.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

What you call "productive harassment" is still part of tech training ... or at least mine was when I took my trimix and cave training classes. They don't call it that ... my instructors just told us we'd be experiencing some "failures" during the dives. Some of them were pretty creative, especially if you got a little sloppy with your technique at some point during the dive ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[boulderjohn]

It sounds like you recovered very well. This scenario is why harassment was originally used in training years ago. Well, let me clarify, there was productive harassment and then there was sadistic harassment. Productive harassment trained divers to expect the unexpected, kind of like what you went through. It was actually a very valuable tool to teach divers to handle what happened to you like an old pro.
...
They don't teach that way anymore, so now divers have to discover this Sudden High Intensity Training on their own on how to deal with those types of situations and the subsequent emotions behind it.

That experience was never universally part of instruction. In his description of the very first meeting of instructors from across America in Houston in 1960, the meeting that led to the creation of NAUI, Al Tillman (NAUI instructor #1) said that his group (the original Orange County instructors) were surprised to see some of the instructors doing this sort of thing. It was never a required part of scuba training. Yes, some instructors did it, but they were on their own. It is now rarely done much in basic OW training because of the real fear that a panicked student could bolt while holding the breath and die. Some instructors do it without agency approval anyway, but if they were to lose a student, they would not do well in the lawsuit that followed.

What you call "productive harassment" is still part of tech training ... or at least mine was when I took my trimix and cave training classes. They don't call it that ... my instructors just told us we'd be experiencing some "failures" during the dives. Some of them were pretty creative, especially if you got a little sloppy with your technique at some point during the dive ...

This is required by both agencies for which I am certified for technical instruction. With TDI, you get a stack of cards you can use to tell students what failure they are experiencing. With PADI, they are called "emergencies" and "surprises," and the instructor is supposed to use good discretion about what ones to choose during a dive.

Most tech agencies do not actually impose the emergency on you--they tell you what to experience, etc. Some agencies allow the instructor, for example, to pull your mask off, but most will only allow the instructor to tell the diver to hand it over. When I did my first tech training, when the instructor wanted someone to be out of gas, he would literally shut the gas off. I won't do that--I will point to the student and signal that he or she is out of gas. I witnessed with my own eyes a situation in which an instructor put a student out of gas and had to deal with the panicked sprint to the surface that could have killed the student.