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During my OW certification dive in Florida recently, I had a very bad experience and wondered if this has ever happened to anyone else.
The boat had an exhaust problems and, before it was over, 11 of the 18 people on board were sick. Our intructor said this was the first time he had hired this boat, but would never use them again.
But my problems didn't really start until I got into the water. As soon as I hit, my weight belt let go and one of the clasps came loose on my mask. I managed to snag the weight belt with my left hand but had only slightly inflated my BC and had slightly negative buoyancy. I signaled my instructor that I had a problem and he was immediately by my side, That's when I made a HUGE rookie mistake: I spat out my reg to tell him what was happening and, in the process, had a couple of gulps of cool, but very salty sea water. Once we got everything back in place and I was about to give the OK signal, I felt my stomach churn. I terminated the dive, managed to get out of my mask, fins and BC, was smacked in the face with diesel fumes and crawled onto the bow where I spent the next little while hanging over the side "feeding the fish.":wacko:
Looking back on it, I realized that most of my problems came from that fact that both my dive buddy and myself were students. Even though we went through the motions of checking each other's gear, neither of us noticed that my mask clasp wasn't secured. Add that to the fact that we were both extremely nervous and you have a recipe for potential disaster.
Oh, I went in the water the next week and am now OW certified. I'm about to enroll in the AOW class.
I know the textbook said to expect a bad experience every now and then. I just didn't expect mine to come so soon! But, I feel like I got my bad experience out of the way early and now expect a string of enjoyable dives!
Just curious: Are experiences like mine rare?
See you at the bottom!
Ken
The boat had an exhaust problems and, before it was over, 11 of the 18 people on board were sick. Our intructor said this was the first time he had hired this boat, but would never use them again.
But my problems didn't really start until I got into the water. As soon as I hit, my weight belt let go and one of the clasps came loose on my mask. I managed to snag the weight belt with my left hand but had only slightly inflated my BC and had slightly negative buoyancy. I signaled my instructor that I had a problem and he was immediately by my side, That's when I made a HUGE rookie mistake: I spat out my reg to tell him what was happening and, in the process, had a couple of gulps of cool, but very salty sea water. Once we got everything back in place and I was about to give the OK signal, I felt my stomach churn. I terminated the dive, managed to get out of my mask, fins and BC, was smacked in the face with diesel fumes and crawled onto the bow where I spent the next little while hanging over the side "feeding the fish.":wacko:
Looking back on it, I realized that most of my problems came from that fact that both my dive buddy and myself were students. Even though we went through the motions of checking each other's gear, neither of us noticed that my mask clasp wasn't secured. Add that to the fact that we were both extremely nervous and you have a recipe for potential disaster.
Oh, I went in the water the next week and am now OW certified. I'm about to enroll in the AOW class.
I know the textbook said to expect a bad experience every now and then. I just didn't expect mine to come so soon! But, I feel like I got my bad experience out of the way early and now expect a string of enjoyable dives!
Just curious: Are experiences like mine rare?
See you at the bottom!
Ken
