I have several - but I guess the point is that I didn't panic on any of them and figured out how to deal with them u/w and learned from each incident.One was in doing a dive on Jupiter's famed "Hole in the Wall." This is typically a 140' drift dive with a northbound current, but on this dive, when we dropped in, the current was running slightly southward and off the reef. I was vacationing there and didn't really know the area, so I was following the DM and the group. My buddy was a local. I had trouble keeping up with the group and started overbreathing my reg - a VERY scary feeling. I started feeling that panic that comes from "OMG - I can't get enough air!!!!!" I started thinking through my options, which including just grabbing the reef (which is primarily rock, not coral) and pulling myself along, but there are scorpionfish there, so that didn't seem my best option. My buddy was ahead of me and didn't see me falling farther and farther behind and I was losing the group. So I just stopped and then suddenly realized that my Venturi was turned all the way down to minimum. I turned it up and suddenly had all the air I needed. I caught my breath in a few seconds and was able to catch up to the group. I'd burned through a fair amount of air and the dive didn't last much longer and to be brutally honest, it wasn't my favorite dive of the trip, but I was back in for a second (shallower and less stressful
) dive an hour later with no issues whatsoever (with the Venturi about halfway between min and max).Another tough one was when I was DMing a class on a VERY rough day. We do shore dives for our classes and the vis was REALLY bad at about 2 feet or less. I took 1 student out for a tour at the end of the 3rd dive and was bringing him back in (with him hanging onto my arm). I was dead on in my navigation, but the current had pushed us slightly off course and I suddenly navigated us into the rocks at the end of the jetty to the left of the cove I wanted - we started getting pounded by 3 foot waves. We surfaced and I removed my reg long enough to yell to him "Keep your reg in your mouth!" and we pulled each other off the rocks and into the cove. A VERY scary and adrenaline-pumping moment, especially since I had the student's safety in my hands and it was *my* fault for putting us both in the situation in the first place. Luckily the student was extremely calm and capable and very strong (whew!!!) and we helped *each other* out of the problem and there were no consequences (the student was extremely cool about it, thank God!). (It still bugs me, as I *know* I was dead on in my navigation - ARRGGHHH!!!! The moral of the story in that case was, under those conditions, if you *have* to tour a student, you might want to pop up - we were very shallow- and visually check bearings.)
The trick is NOT to panic, to "stop, think and act" then to LEARN from the problem for the next time something like that might happen. And by all of us sharing our problems in a public forum, we multiply that effect by being able to benefit from others' problems.
