Close calls?

What kind of close calls have you encountered while diving?

  • Out of air emergencies

    Votes: 2 6.7%
  • Entanglements

    Votes: 9 30.0%
  • Equipment failure

    Votes: 12 40.0%
  • "Dangerous" marine life encounters

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Entrapement

    Votes: 1 3.3%
  • Medical problems

    Votes: 1 3.3%
  • loss of orientation/lost

    Votes: 5 16.7%
  • unknown cause/not sure what happend

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    30
  • Poll closed .

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I was on a check out dive, my instructor was leading. (Club Med) We went into a narrow channel between two rock walls. (Felt somewhat cave-like, but there was no overhead.) Very surgy, the instructor got caught up in the surge, and went tumbling past me. He grabbed out for something to arrest his trip, wouldn't you know he got my primary. Yanked it out of my mouth. As goofy as that was, the training was excellent, I calmly deployed my octo, and swam out. We discussed it on the boat, he apoligized profusely, and that was the end of it.

Was only scary when I thought about it later.:eek:
 
One of the joys of diving surface supplied is that it is *much* easier to get tangled or hung up on things. The flip side is that you have lots of time to sort it out and you can call for help on the comm link if you need it

BTW It is easy to find the diver in these situations, he (she) is on the end of the hose.:)
 
I recently experience Vertigo at about 30ft. I got myself under control and calmly surfaced. By the time I surfaced I was fine. Decieded to go back down again, and BAM vertigo hit again. I surface and called it a day.

It turns out that I just started using ear drops to help prevent any infections from brewing that day. After my 1st dive I used the drops and the problems began at 30 ft, just below the thermocline. My ears were inflamed by the drops which cause a significant temp difference in my ears causing the Vertigo.

I've since used the drops AFTER the last dive of the day and had no further problems.
 
In my AOW class we were doing the deep dive. The instructor was taking two people at a time to the 100 foot level. Once they did their thing he brought them back up to about 30 feet where they navigated a compass course back to the shore.

My buddy and self were to ascend to a staging area at 50 feet and meet the instructor there and then do the deep dive.

We were almost to 50 feet and my buddy was tugging on my arm, I could feel something was wrong. When I turned he was holding up his free flowing air 2, and he had the wide eyed look. I took the Air 2 and stuck my finger in the mouth piece I could read his non verbal, " I tried that", then I checked the purge button, again " look of I tried that", so I unplugged the low pressure inflator hose.

Then there was this look of " he just unplugged my hose now what?", I could tell he was confused as to what to do next. I had many thoughts run through my mind as to options.

1. Wait for instructor, we were very close to area but this would mean descending further.
2. Swin back to shore or dive flag under water.
3. Make an ascent from right there.

I could tell he was panicked and confused and decided on number 3. I gave him the thumbs up and grabbed his arm and we did a nice slow ascent to surface, got calmed down and swam on surface back to the shore and waited for the instructor.
 
Just this weekend, I was swimming through a passageway on a freighter that went down in Alpena. There was light on both ends that I could see even though the passage was a bit tight. Anyways, there are remanants of electrical wire hanging all over the place in this wreck. I got hung up on one of them when it hooked my dive knife on my BC. I thought that the passage was too tight, but sat there wondering WTF for a minute or so until my dive buddy quickly untangled me (I wasn't thrashing about, so I didn't make it worse) and showed me the wire.

I also had a dive run OOA on my Advanced Open Water class, but that wasn't a true emergency. We were in thirty feet of water. He knew that he was running low (I didn't think to check as I had 1100 psi left when he ran out) and calmly did a swimming ascent when he ran out. His OOA signal looked more like he needed a shave than a true OOA signal. That is the rotten part, we were swimming side by side about five to ten feet apart. You can bet when I am assisting with classes that we make everybody aware that you need to exagerate hand signals underwater from this experience.
 
Shark encounters have become routine. We "encounter" bullsharks on about every third dive, but have only had one get so aggressive that we gave up the fish.

My closest close call with marine life was with a much smaller fish. While trying to frame a shot of a couple of lionfish in a stiff current, I was swinging my free arm back and forth to hold my orientation. A third lionfish swam from behind me underneath my swinging arm. If my arm would have been two inches lower, I would have impaled it on the lionfish spines. The bad news was that we were on a livaboard in the Coral Sea about 130 miles from land.
 
I was on my OW cert dive and we were exploring. My divemaster on one side, my buddy on the other. We came upon some rocks and kelp, the divemaster and my buddy split on both sides of some kelp leaving me to go through it. It was pretty dense. I felt something at my back so I looked and it was my buddy trying to detangle me. As I looked forward and began moving forward at the same time, some kelp hooked on my second-stage and yanked it out of my mouth. In my mind, I heard my instructor say "blow bubbles". So there I was, unable to see my regulator that was now buried in the kelp as I was dutifully blowing out my last breath of air. The rest of me was buried in kelp up to the elbows. I started digging for my regulator and finally saw a glimpse of chrome (I really love chrome now). I was able to untangle the reg and get it into my mouth barely in time. It was a really big breath of relief! Neither my buddy nor my divemaster saw any of this. I realized that day that I could stay fairly calm in an emergency, and that's a good thing!:wacko:
 
I have several... none of which there's an appropriate category for in the poll, so I didn't respond to the poll.

The one that was potentially most catastrophic (SeaJay's opinion of the incident not withstanding) was when a group of twelve of us were abandoned by a native boat captain roughly two miles offshore. To this day I really have no advice as to how one could prevent such an incident.

The second incident involved my instructor trainer, an untrained native diver, me and a second instructor candidate. We were doing a deep dive in which we intended to exceed the 130 fsw recreational limit on a 5000 fsw wall when the IT became seriously narced and decided to see if he could reach the bottom. At around 120 fsw or so the IT took off for the bottom in a vertical swimming decent without warning. The alarming thing to me has always been how long it took the other candidate and I to arrive at the conclusion there was a problem (even though we both agreed afterwards that we hadn't thought we were narced at the time). Swimming hard we didn't catch up to the IT until 200 fsw feet and he actually tried to fight us off as we attempted to "change his mind" about his intentions. This created two additional problems... (1) we were exerting ourselves hard for an extended period in 200' of water -- CO2 buildup was an issue and I was in serious breathing trouble by the time we got things settled down which was, in turn, sucking serious air supply from my tank not to mention making nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity growing issues, and, (2) his aggression was real -- we both lost our regulators at least once struggling with him and I had my mask flooded without warning -- which when already in breathing trouble was a dead serious issue. By the time we "solved" the problem with the IT we were at 218 fsw (my deepest dive ever) and I was technically a rescue candidate myself though I rescued myself thanks to good training. By all rights, this dive should have been a disaster and we were pure and simple lucky. One more link in the accident chain almost certainly would have resulted in at least one fatality.

Lesson learned -- don't push your luck. If we wanted to do a deep dive like that, we should have chosen a location with a hard bottom. Having never been so deep before it was the height of stupidity to have tried in a location where the bottom was known to be fatal knowing full well we had no idea how we would react to the depth. Second lesson learned... in choosing to make the rescue, I made several bad choices of my own which by all rights should have killed me, too. I do not regret that we made the rescue effort and am, obviously, pleased at the outcome -- but the realization of what the outcome should have been is not something to be taken lightly. When teaching first aid and rescue, we always teach that you should not endanger your own life to rescue another... we both violated that rule and very nearly turned one accident into three. I sincerely believe that the only reason either of us survived the rescue itself was because the attempt required the very narrow mental focus that is about the only thing that is possible to do when you're narced -- mind you that not once during the rescue did I ever actually think to see if I had air left in my tank (though I was worried about depth -- why?)

The third incident was in 1991 and one that was the direct result of sheer stupidity on my part and but for the grace of God, should have been fatal. I was working as the DM on a 60 foot live-aboard from which we were diving an area in the Caribbean where there never had been moorings. At that time, the policy was to use a "wreck hook" on the base of a coral head where it would do the absolute least damage to the reef. For those who do not know what a wreck hook is, it looks like a giant treble hook a fisherman would use... three pointed hooks about two feet long and eight inches with each set one third of the way around a circle. The boat would pull up to the dive site and, as the DM, I would enter the water with the wreck hook and swim down to the reef to select a place to set the hook and then physically position the hook to hold the boat at the site. Once set, I would pull on the line to signal the tender the hook was set and the captain would allow the slack to be taken up. While this is happening, I'm supposed to sit back away from the hook and observe to be sure it's going to hold. There's the rub... I had been working the boat all winter and had never lost a set, so I got cocky and would often begin my ascent early to reduce the bottom time I was getting on the set and to get the divers into the water sooner.

In this particular case, the seas were a little rough -- about 4 feet or so -- and the boat was bouncing pretty well no the surface. As a result, I was in more of a hurry than usual so I could get the divers into the water before they got too hammered on the dive deck. I set the hook, gave the tender a few pulls and waited to see the slack pull up. As soon as the anchor line went taught, I started up the line on my ascent. As I went up over the position I had set the hook in I was looking down at the hook to make sure it was secure and as I progressed by angle of view moved closer and closer to my chest. At almost the exact instant my chin hit my chest the boat heaved on a large swell and the force broke the coral head. The wreck hook shot out of the coral like it had been fired out of a cannon. The first impact hit me top dead center in the breast bone -- actually about one inch south of it. What saved my life was that I had a fairly large console mounted dive computer and I kept it clipped off on the front right clip of my BCD. As luck would have it, the hook hit the face of my computer instead of the soft flesh under my rib cage. As it were, the hook penetrated the face of the computer and ripped the LCD out of it.

Keep in mind that I was looking directly at the hook when it broke out of the coral head while traveling directly up the anchor line. This means that the line of travel for the hook was more or less parallel to my own line of travel while I was bent at the neck and waist at an oblique angle... Once the hook had ricocheted off the front of my computer, the second point of impact was more or less straight on to and dead center in my mask as I looked back at the hook. The impact was strong enough to snap my head back but for whatever reason the glass in the mask held and did not shatter. Maybe I was already subconsciously reacting to it and was already moving my head back, I don't know because it all happened way to quickly for me to do anything other than note the key events -- I seriously had no time to even think about any of it until it was all over. Had the mask not held, I'm sure I would have been dangling with the hook in my head like a marlin when they pulled me back onto the boat.

Lesson(s) learned -- no matter how good you think you are, you aren't. Safety is safety and the instant you begin to take shortcuts, you are at risk of an accident. Also, big boats exert a degree of force you can not imagine... anchor lines are subjected to incredible tensions in rough waters. As a rule there's going to be enough slack in the line to handle it... but sometimes things go wrong. The anchor is not a place to play around, especially on a larger boat.
 
never had a "close call" under the water. This comes from quite a bit of luck when I was a beginner and lots of planning now.

I was frightened once while accompanying a spear fisher... that was a huge bull in my eyes and he should have let him have the stinking fish.

I pulled a buddy out of a narced trance well below 130'.

I have given air to a few who did not manage theirs very well.

I have arrested the rapid ascent of two divers... one bit by a moray and the other who lost her mask.

Above the water is another story... I have a Franken-toe from the tank I dropped on it, and there are other instances. I just hope my luck and planning hold out! :tease:
 
I haven't ever really had a close call. I have assisted a bunch of divers with theirs though. Everything from arresting out of control descents to divers who puched out because of a free flow or flooded mask and divers who had their tanks fall out of their bands under water. I did get the line wrapped around my feet once on a cave dive because some one was jerking the line around and I couldn't get out of the way. I've posted that story before but while it only took a few moments to untangle myself, my team swam off and left me. The vis was bad and the guy in front of me (the one who was jerking the line around) never noticed that I was flashing him and then I wasn't there. I cought up to them after they turned so we met face to face. He never did notice or take action on the fact that I wasn't there even when he turned and I should have been in front of him.

The most frightening incedent was once we were on our way out of a cave. I was leading with my wife behind me and a third person behind her. She flashed me and I turned. She told me that the other person wasn't there. We checked our gas and headed back in. She had just lost sight of his light behind here so he shouldn't have been far. We cought him in a couple minutes and headed back out. i was more than a little worried though when we didn't find him right away and was not looking foreward to getting out of the cave and telling his wife that we had misplaced him. He didn't tell me the whole story until several days later and when he did he was pretty choked up, As it turns outm he had dropped a line marker on an earlier dive and spotted it on the floor as we were headed out. The line is several feet off the floor and the vis wasn't real good. Anyway he decided to drop to the flooe and pick it up. He must have turned or something when he dropped because when he came back up he couldn't see the line. When he finally spotted it he went the wron way heading in instead of out which is why we didn't find him right away. He didn't get very far when he came to an intersection that's clearly marked and he realized his mistake just as we cought up to him.

Of course what he should have done was to signal us to hold before he dropped down to pick up the line marker and he never would hane lost the line or became disoriented.
 

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