Bad experience....have you got over it?

[ItsBruce]

My own story goes like this: In 1996, after being away from diving for a bit, I did a boat dive off Destin, Florida while on vacation. We were to see a wreck at about 80 feet. I was told the water was cold, so I decided to wear my hood. I had never dived with a hood before. There was a current so the plan was to enter the water, follow the anchor line down to about 10 feet and wait.

To this day I do not know quite what went wrong. However, at 10 feet, I still felt a lot of force on myself, so I kept going down the anchor line, dumping air from my BCD, kicking my feet, and pulling hand-over-hand. I bottomed out at the bottom. By then, I was using a lot of air and felt I could not get enough air. I thumbed the dive.

What I know for sure was that someone recovered my weight belt from the bottom. I don't know if I lost it when I entered the water or whether my buddy dumped it when I surfaced. (Losing it on entry could account for the pull I felt and for my difficulty in descending.) In hind sight, I believe that the hood was too tight across my neck.

I was not inclined to do the second dive. However, the dive master (actually misteress) pretty much threw me back in. The second dive was trouble free and great.

Had she not thrown me back in for the second dive, I doubt I would have ever gone diving again.

(Further note: After the dive, I had a meal at a local hangout and ended up with some sort of food poisoning.)

 

[drbill]

I had an OOA experience at 70 ft. when my tank valve's debris tube clogged and shut off all air to my first stage. It was one of the few times I have not dived with my pony so it involved a CESA from that depth with almost no air in my lungs (I had just exhaled when the tube clogged).

For at least a year after that I had a strange "choking" reaction upon descending on nearly every dive. I kept thinking about not having any air to breathe. I had to psyche myself up to descend. Once at depth everything was fine for the rest of the dive. Now, 2+ years later, I've overcome that reaction and am comfortable again.

 

[StSomewhere]

good to hear people acknowleding ****ups. I was reading some of the DIR posts (in a different thread) and get one of them to admit any racing heart beat at 60m will be like trying to get a hotel room with water in New Orleans.

Mistakes make the diver. Redundancy gets you home.

DIR trains you to handle failures, you actually practice handling failures so you can deal with them calmly. The farther you go in their training, the more failures you have thrown at you. Losing a mask, puncturing at wing or having a reg freeflow at 45' is inconvenient at best, imagine if it happened to you inside a cave or when you had a deco obligation. Panic is your enemy, learning to keep control of the situation is the way to combat panic.

 

[Swan1172]

Mine happened on my first dive after being certified. Beyond that, it was also my first boat dive and my first salt water dive. It took me a lot of weight (28 lbs) to get under in my OW class, but it was in a freshwater quarry and I was wearing a 7mm farmer john.

For this dive, I was in Cozumel and in a 5mm jumpsuit. I figured my weighting would be about the same given the additional bouyancy of the saltwater. However, the DM on the boat argued with me and would only let me take 20 lbs.

For the dive, we were going down to about 60 feet. I jumped in, let the air out of my BC and nothing happened. I just was bobbing on the surface. The DM watched me and swam back over to the boat, grabbed another 4 lbs in weights and jammed them into the pockets on my BC. Still nothing. Instead of adding more weight, he tells me to swim down and that my suit would lose some of its bouyancy and I would be OK.

I start swimming down, but have to kick like hell to get anywhere. I finally get to the bottom, but start floating up because I am underweighted. By the time I get to the bottom again, I am breathing very heavy from all of the effort. My vision started to narrow and I knew I needed to get to the surface quick. I tried to signal the DM, but he was 25 feet in front of me with the rest of the group. I made the decision to head for the surface.

Of course, being underweighted, I did not need to add very much air to my BC to start me rocketing toward the surface. I immediately dumped all of the air out of the BC and was still ascending too fast. I remembered to exhale my entire way up.

At about 25 feet, I felt something pulling on my leg. It was the DM. He saw my ascent and grabbed me in an attempt to slow me down. My ascent finally stopped at around 15 feet and we hung there for a few minutes. Back on the surface, he asked what happened and I explained it to him. I headed back to the boat and he went back down with the rest of the group.

Needless to say, I was pissed. I increased my weight to 30 lbs for the second dive of the day and did not have any more problems.

 

[Fish_Whisperer]

Did you burp the wetsuit? And wow, why were you using a 5mm in Cozumel? Holy cow, you must have been burning up!

 

[Swan1172]

Did you burp the wetsuit? And wow, why were you using a 5mm in Cozumel? Holy cow, you must have been burning up!

The wetsuit did not have any air in it, and was tight as it was a size smaller that what I usually wear. As for the 5mm, that is what they gave me on the charter. Everyone else was wearing the same, so I thought that was the norm for Cozumel in January. The only time I was really hot was on the boat between dives.

 

[Goober2]

About 18 months ago, my fiance and I were headed to an all inclusive resort. He has been diving for about 5 years and I wanted to try to experience this as well. They offered a Resort course, free of charge and I thought it would be a good way to see if scuba was for me prior to spending the cake to get certified.

The Resort instructor tells me to walk fully geared to the edge of the boat for my first giant stride ever (that was not previously demonstrated) I get my mask on and put my reg in my mouth, go to step off the boat when a giant wave came and i fell face first into the water. Reg went one way, mask the other and I had a panic attack. Once everyone got in teh water, Instructor lets the other students down on teh line, says to me that I should come along. Now he has 3 students on the bottom and me trying to force myself underwater despite not being able to breathe on the rented reg. It had a hard breathe anyway and I was still having a panic attack. I was full on gasping for air. *I* called the dive and let him go down to the 3 students who have never dove before and sitting on the bottom.

I thought my scuba experience was over forever. I never thought I would do it again but forced myself the next day to gear up and walk to the edge to try again with a different instructor. He actually held my hand for the descent and about a week after my trip, I signed up for formal PADI training and got my OW.

Now unfortunately, EVERY time I gear up and think about giant stride, I panic. Even at teh pool during my cert class.... Luckily, on our recent trip to Roatan (which was my first "real" dive trip) boat was small and we had to roll off the boat.

 

[Cacia]

well, I was with a group of ten and we were doing Chandelier cave. We descended and everyone went in ahead of me. When I got to the small opening of the cave, it looked like chocolate milk. I could not go in so I surfaced and then tried again. Could not make myself go in. The thought of all those people in there terrified me.

I was the only one.


Jellyfish lake got me too. I swam halfway out and started thinking about the crocodiles. The jellyfish were touching me all over and I went back to the dock. It really sucks, stinks, no viz, not sure why everyone loves it but they do. If you look below you it is all green and dark and the Hydrogen Sulfide is just waiting to reach up and kill you. I cannot think of a worse death than having a crocodile drag you down into that bowel of hell called jellyfish lake.

(Micronesia)

 

[TSandM]

I suspect, if one dives long enough, one will experience an "oh, *****" moment.

I've had one I recognized, and one I didn't.

The one I recognized was my freeflow, which I posted as "My first underwater emergency", at which point Diver0001 pointed out to me that it wasn't an emergency, which it really wasn't. A reg freeflowed and couldn't be stopped. We were at 35 fsw, from which I could easily have done a CESA were it required, and I had not one, but two divers with me who were immediately aware of the problem and prepared to do what was necessary. I had so much support, I should have felt like somebody swinging in a hammock. But I was scared. It was a new experience. It went well, and ended well. A big lesson in the value of trained buddies WHO YOU TRUST.

The other was a narcosis experience which was extremely unpleasant. I was at 100 fsw, in a site with which I am very familiar, but in an area I had not previously visited. Viz was poor, and I was diving with new partners. I became convinced I had lost buoyancy and was headed for the surface. Short of laying on the inflator bigtime, can anybody think of a way you lose control of your buoyancy at 100 fsw enough to be at risk of an uncontrolled ascent? But as my husband has pointed out to me, that is my bete noir, so if I developed paranoia from a dark narc, that was going to be my delusion, and it was. I conquered that challenge, but I have not gone back to that depth in our waters, largely for fear of a repeat. I'd need to do it with a teammate I completely trusted. That one spooked me. The other did not.

Edited to improve wording

 

[Storm]

I suspect, if one dives long enough, one will experience an "oh, *****" moment.

You don't have to be diving long to have one of those moments. Mine cane with just 7 OW dives under my belt. Last October, my wife and I decided to fastrack straight from the OW to AOW (I got beat up enough over this decision back in October). OUr main dive of concern was the night dive, but other than a blown fin strap, it proved not to be the problem dive.

Now the deep dive, well we didn't have a good....to say the least. My tank was light (2700 vs 3000) and despite this I allowed myself to be convinced by the DI that we would be okay. Long story short... I had an OOA at 95 feet. My wife, (my regular buddy) was there with her octo, but I can tell you that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach didn't go away for a few months.


We survived it, and the lessons learned were many, but every once and a while I think back on it, just so I rememeber the lessons learned.