archer1960
Contributor
This isn't much of an incident as such things go, but it had the potential to cause trouble with lung over-expansion if things weren't handled, so I thought it deserved posting.
I'm a pretty new diver, with ~30 dives under my belt. Yesterday was my first dive of the season, and my first one in about 4 months. At one point my buddy and I had come to the surface to do a long-ish swim to join another buddy pair a ways away. When we started to descend, I was having a little trouble equalizing, as is fairly common for me on the later descents of multiple-descent dives. Not a lot and not painful, but I could feel the pressure in my ears when I got to the bottom at ~19 ft. So I tapped my inflator to put a puff of air in my BC to get neutral after the descent. But with the pressure in my ears, I couldn't hear the inflator go. Since I was wearing bulky gloves, I just assumed I had missed the button, so I hit it again a couple more times, including one long one. However, I had actually hit the button all 3 times, so I started going up in a hurry. I turned head down and started finning hard while reaching for my butt dump, which took a while to find since I was a bit out of practice. I bounced up to probably 7 ft in a few seconds before I started back down again. This time I was more careful, and made sure my ears were fully cleared before tapping the inflator again, and I reminded myself to wait to see the effect before doing another puff. I still overshot by a small amount a couple of times before getting it zeroed in, but nothing that threatened to shoot me to the surface again.
Just a reminder to be sure to take it easy and slow down after a long layoff!
I'm a pretty new diver, with ~30 dives under my belt. Yesterday was my first dive of the season, and my first one in about 4 months. At one point my buddy and I had come to the surface to do a long-ish swim to join another buddy pair a ways away. When we started to descend, I was having a little trouble equalizing, as is fairly common for me on the later descents of multiple-descent dives. Not a lot and not painful, but I could feel the pressure in my ears when I got to the bottom at ~19 ft. So I tapped my inflator to put a puff of air in my BC to get neutral after the descent. But with the pressure in my ears, I couldn't hear the inflator go. Since I was wearing bulky gloves, I just assumed I had missed the button, so I hit it again a couple more times, including one long one. However, I had actually hit the button all 3 times, so I started going up in a hurry. I turned head down and started finning hard while reaching for my butt dump, which took a while to find since I was a bit out of practice. I bounced up to probably 7 ft in a few seconds before I started back down again. This time I was more careful, and made sure my ears were fully cleared before tapping the inflator again, and I reminded myself to wait to see the effect before doing another puff. I still overshot by a small amount a couple of times before getting it zeroed in, but nothing that threatened to shoot me to the surface again.
Just a reminder to be sure to take it easy and slow down after a long layoff!