- Messages
- 93,449
- Reaction score
- 91,776
- Location
- On the Fun Side of Trump's Wall
- # of dives
- 2500 - 4999
... and then there's the act of forgetting the simplest things at the worst possible time ...
Last August I travelled to Florida to begin my cave training. On the next to last day of an eight-day class I made the only mistake I've ever made underwater that had me momentarily thinking I might die there.
My buddy and I were being worked pretty hard by our instructor at Ginnie Springs ... in a place where the flow through the cave creates a lot of physical exertion. We'd reached the point in our training where he was throwing multiple failures at us ... to test not just our skills, but our ability to react calmly to the task-loading. And he was picking the worst places to do it. After handling a few of those, breathing pretty hard from exertion, he signaled my buddy to go OOA. I was in the lead, and had to turn around in a tight place, fighting the flow that wanted to push me out of the cave, put my buddy on my long hose and figure out how to maneuver him to get in front of me. Problem is that my mind was a couple steps ahead of my body, and when I put my necklaced reg in my mouth I neglected to purge it before inhaling rather forcefully ... because I was already breathing so hard. The result was that the small amount of water in the reg went down my windpipe and caused it to spasm shut ...
Here I am, a few hundred feet back in a cave, needing to breathe in the worst way ... and I can't. All I could do was toss my fist in the air, signaling my buddy to "hold", get negative enough to lay on the bottom, and try to relax until the spasm passed. My buddy later told me it took about a minute ... it felt a lot longer before the spasm allowed just a tiny trickle of air into my lungs. Oh that felt sweet ... but still not enough. It took a lot of conscious effort to stay relaxed and let the spasm pass. Finally I looked up ... into the concerned faces of my buddy and instructor, and signaled OK. I laid there another few breaths until I felt it was OK to get up and put in the effort needed to get out of the cave.
All the way out I chided myself for doing something I've spent the past few years teaching OW students not to do ... goes to show that even the most experienced divers can, under the "right" circumstances, make the simplest of errors. And sometimes those are the ones that will bite you the hardest ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
Last August I travelled to Florida to begin my cave training. On the next to last day of an eight-day class I made the only mistake I've ever made underwater that had me momentarily thinking I might die there.
My buddy and I were being worked pretty hard by our instructor at Ginnie Springs ... in a place where the flow through the cave creates a lot of physical exertion. We'd reached the point in our training where he was throwing multiple failures at us ... to test not just our skills, but our ability to react calmly to the task-loading. And he was picking the worst places to do it. After handling a few of those, breathing pretty hard from exertion, he signaled my buddy to go OOA. I was in the lead, and had to turn around in a tight place, fighting the flow that wanted to push me out of the cave, put my buddy on my long hose and figure out how to maneuver him to get in front of me. Problem is that my mind was a couple steps ahead of my body, and when I put my necklaced reg in my mouth I neglected to purge it before inhaling rather forcefully ... because I was already breathing so hard. The result was that the small amount of water in the reg went down my windpipe and caused it to spasm shut ...
Here I am, a few hundred feet back in a cave, needing to breathe in the worst way ... and I can't. All I could do was toss my fist in the air, signaling my buddy to "hold", get negative enough to lay on the bottom, and try to relax until the spasm passed. My buddy later told me it took about a minute ... it felt a lot longer before the spasm allowed just a tiny trickle of air into my lungs. Oh that felt sweet ... but still not enough. It took a lot of conscious effort to stay relaxed and let the spasm pass. Finally I looked up ... into the concerned faces of my buddy and instructor, and signaled OK. I laid there another few breaths until I felt it was OK to get up and put in the effort needed to get out of the cave.
All the way out I chided myself for doing something I've spent the past few years teaching OW students not to do ... goes to show that even the most experienced divers can, under the "right" circumstances, make the simplest of errors. And sometimes those are the ones that will bite you the hardest ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)