Done with rescue

[KJHorton]

I'm doing rescue next weekend and I can't wait to hear about it.

 

[Kim22]

I just got Stress & Rescue certified, and had to rescue then tow a 300+ pound "victim" 200 yards to shore...NOT fun!!! But I am well prepared for emergency situations - this is a great course for all divers.

 

[paradicio]

The wife and I just finished our Rescue pool sessions this past weekend. We are hoping to be able to do the OW section this coming weekend. So far the class has been a challenge but a LOT of fun and very informative and rewarding.

To be honest I'm a bit nervous about the OW section. Wish us luck!

 

[Saltwater Junky]

I'm looking forward to my Rescue class in 4 wks. Thanks for the heads up re: the physical aspect of the class.

 

[emttim]

Ok, so I can't respond to everyone and still give the story because it'd be spammy as hell, but basically we did our dives at a dive site called Negro Bar in Folsom, California. Some of you NorCal guys may know the spot...I know Jim will know it if no one else does at any rate which is why I mentioned it. Anyhow, the dive site was basically a beach next to a river. I wouldn't say the current was strong, but on the other hand, I'd say the current wasn't pretty. Our instructor said he chose that dive site for Rescue because the visibility can go to **** in an eyeblink, since once you touch the bottom, everywhere near the area you touch explodes into a huge silt cloud and you can't see a damn thing.

We started the class Saturday morning with the usual stuff...I had to set my kit up on the beach, as opposed to the trunk of my car like I normally do, for purposes of the class which kinda sucked since I hate dirt, sand, etc. but whatever. Our instructor's AI set up two buoys about 50 yards from each other in the middle of the river while he gave us the briefing. Basically, the explanation was that when he said "go", which could happen whenever during the class, we were to suit up, get our fins, mask & snorkel, get into the water and get our gear on, and haul ass around the buoys and back onto the beach with the expectation that the lap around the buoys should take ideally around 4 minutes.

After the initial briefing, we suited up, got our kits and swam out to inbetween the buoys and we did several rescue exercises...according to my logbook, we did self-rescue, tired diver, panicked diver, distressed diver underwater, surfacing the unresponsive diver and unresponsive diver at the surface. The exercises went pretty well except for the distressed diver underwater. In fact, the panicked diver was a lot easier than I thought it would be as far as dropping down underwater and approaching the victim at knee-level below water, getting behind them and inflating their BCD while staying out of their grasp. The distressed diver underwater was a PITA to me because it was rather hard to keep the unresponsive diver in a vertical position in order to ascend; plus I don't have the longest arms so it was pretty hard for me to locate the BCD from behind. I think in the future, I'm going to deflate the unresponsive diver's BCD entirely and then use my BCD to control the ascent since it'll be a lot easier for me. Definitely going to practice that exercise on my own with my dive buddy. The unresponsive diver at the surface was particularly easy for me since I'm an EMT so I'm used to giving rescue breaths...giving rescue breaths while finning out of the water to get the proper angle wasn't hard at all. During the course of the day, our instructor was telling us a story about when he was a parajumper in the Air Force and then when he finished his story, just grinned at us and then said "go"...it was so sudden we kinda looked at each other like "are we supposed to do the drill now?" and started running when our instructor gave us a "*** are you ******** waiting for?" look. That drill pretty much sucked ass and I think my finishing time was 5.5 minutes. I kept myself amused the entire day by imitating the Terminator and saying **** like "gooo, get in the lake!" and "I will not have sissy girls in my lake", etc. with the Ahhhnold voice.

At the end of the day, our instructor did place a small buoy underwater and had it be a "missing diver" and had us go find it so we ended up doing that rescue twice...the six of us (well we had 7 in the class but one had to take off a little early for a different class) split up into three 2-person dive teams covering different areas...me and my dive buddy covered the outermost area and all of us basically agreed to come up at 5 minute intervals to see if anyone had found the "missing diver". Me and my buddy dropped down alittle past the right marker buoy at the surface and proceeded to do U-pattern searches. We found the buoy right when it was time for us to come up at 5 minutes and check with everyone so we collected the buoys per our instructor shouting us to do so from shore, swam in and called it a day.

The second day we set up and got our briefing in the same fashion. Our instructor doesn't really agree with the piecemeal way PADI has the rescue scenarios and other exercises setup such as missing diver, egress with an unresponsive diver, etc. so he just combined them all into an actual rescue scenario. We did have the Go drill again, goddamnit, although my finishing time was 4.5 minutes this time and I hated life even more than the first time. In fact after I got out of the water I was basically like "**** you guys im sitting down" and sat my happy ass down right on the sand while my instructor and everyone were standing around while he talked about another story. Our briefing was basically that we were supposed to plan out amongst ourselves the plan we would use for an actual rescue scenario with the people present and then execute that plan during the actual rescue scenario.

Our guidelines were basically to have 5 "ghost" helpers who took care of the snorkelers who would be first in the water and the spotters so everyone present was part of the missing diver search team. One person was to stay on the surface to coordinate the search, once we got the unresponsive diver to the surface we were supposed to simulate yelling to shore to call 911 by yelling "someone order a pizza" and whichever dive team found the buoy would have one person of that team switch over to victim at the surface.

So I can just use names instead of saying "this diver" or "that diver", the members of our team were myself, my dive buddy Jason, and the other members of my class Lica, Rich, Ashley, Halley and Kevin. It was pretty much a unanimous vote that Lica would stay at the surface as the coordinator since she didn't have a compass, lol. Me and Jason were to take the outermost quadrant again, Halley & Kevin did the innermost quadrant, and Ashley & Rich did the middle quadrant. When the "missing diver" was found and that team surfaced the diver and one member switched over to the victim, the other person in that dive team would immediately start rescue breaths, start towing the victim to shore, and as the other dive teams came up again at 5 minute intervals, they would converge on the victim and first responder, assist as needed and then as a unit we would egress the victim, get him/her on the beach and then initiate CPR & rescue breathing, oxygen, etc. The amusing part of the plan was that my instructor had told us during the briefing on how he'd recommend setting it up is to use every person to the best of their respective abilities, and as a result, everyone pretty much pointed at me as the person who should do the CPR and patient care on the beach. I kinda laughed and told them they're all certified in CPR now so it shouldn't make a difference, but despite me pointing that out, everyone decided that the priority once we all converged on the victim was for me to get on the beach ahead of the victim to start patient care....it's not like I've ever ran a code in real life despite being an EMT since I work for a transport company but hey whatever.

Once our instructor said "go", we initiated our response, got our kits on as fast as possible, and I made sure everyone did a quick pre-dive safety check and did /not/ run (since I don't wanna see the trauma that could be caused from someone falling while running with a full kit on) before entering the water and then we moved to our respective quadrants and made our descents.

We staggered the descents since as each team got in their quadrant they immediately dropped down, so by the time me and Jason dropped down at the outermost part, we only had 3 minutes to search before coming back up to check. Well, as I was dropping down (Jason had descended a second before I did so he was "ahead" of me so to speak), I saw Jason start rising back up with a buoy in his hand and signaling me to surface so I was like "pfft well, fine, I won't descend" and surfaced then Jason switched over to victim as I was inflating my buoyancy (he tucked the buoy into his BCD so we didn't have to deal with it). I immediately removed the victim's mask, looped it through my arm so it wouldn't get lost then started rescue breaths while towing the victim to shore. Pretty quickly, I'd say within 30 seconds Lica (who had remained on the surface) got to me, started being the equipment handler so I could get the gear off the victim, and we started towing the victim to shore while I did rescue breaths.

After about another 30 seconds, Ashley & Rich showed up and started helping tow the victim to shore. Nobody had said a damn thing about the 911 response so as I was counting the 5 seconds inbetween rescue breaths, 1 1000, 2 2000, I yell "someone order a pizza", 3 3000, 4 4000, 5 5000 *breath*. Within another minute we had Halley & Kevin around the victim too and I don't even remember who but I hear "I'll take over rescue breaths, get to the shore as fast as you can!" By that time, I had also gotten someone to be equipment handler for me so I had my kit, mask & snorkel off so once one of them got at the head of the victim to take over rescue breaths, I rolled backwards onto my back and hauled ass to the shore. I got into water shallow enough to stand up in, got my fins off and at about the same time I was ripping off my wrist computer and flinging my gloves into the sand so I could feel the chest enough to do good chest compressions (not that I actually did them, just simulated since on a patient with a pulse chest compressions can certainly cause damage), Ashley was pulling Jason in with a packstrap carry and about half a second after they got him down and supine I was at his side with my hands interlocked as they should be for compressions over his sternum and just counting without pushing down so I didn't jack him up. I ran three cycles of CPR and was starting the fourth when our instructor told us to cut the scenario and it was finished.

Here's the statistics & info for the recap: From the time we responded on shore until the time we descended to search for the missing diver took 1 minute. From the time we found the missing diver, surfaced the missing diver, and then egressed the victim and began CPR on the beach took 4 minutes. The entire rescue was over in only 5 minutes. I had to laugh because our instructor was standing next to our AI as we did all this, and as me and Jason descended near the left buoy this time because Jason had a hunch he had hid it next to the other buoy this time, and our instructor said when they were watching us swim out to our quadrant, he was like "watch where they go, if they go where I think they will this isn't going to take very...goddamnit! So much for hiding the stupid buoy." I thought that was pretty funny. Our instructor said that as far as our ratings for the class go, on a scale of 1 to 5, he not only gave the entire class a 5, but he gave every individual person a 5 as well due to the excellent plan we came up with, the outstanding execution of it, the excellent rescue breaths & chest compressions I simulated, and the remarkably short time it took for the entire rescue.

While we were bull****ting around afterwards, it was friggin' hilarious because Ashley apparently has this phobia with geese....bad experience with them in the past where she was on a picnic and basically she and her friends threw some geese alittle food, and after they scooped it all up they swarmed her and her friends and they had to stand up on a picnic table kicking at the geese trying to get them to go away while scared ****less. Well, I happen to be an ******* and my instructor has even me beat, so when this revelation came out about halfway through Sunday, our instructor threw some food near the table to feed the geese and Ashley was like "***, don't make them come over here!" so he threw some food under the bench seat she was on at our picnic table and...oh dear god, our instructor has a picture of her standing up on the picnic table kicking at them since they basically went over to the food under her seat and she proceeded to freak out, lmao! It was classic...she was standing up there for like 3 minutes so Mark (our instructor) was like "...man this is beautiful, I wish I had a camera" and someone was like "damn I wish I had my phone on me, it can take pictures" so Mark was like "oh yeah!" and took out his camera and got a few pictures of Ashley standing up on the picnic table.

Well, anyway after we were BSing like I was saying after the rescue scenario was done, we were at the same picnic table and Ashley was on her tarp about 15 feet away stripping off her wetsuit (she had a bikini on underneath unfortunately 'cause she's a friggin' hot girl) and getting her stuff ready to take up to the car, and Mark was throwing pieces of food gradually near her tarp to try to get the geese to go attack her and Jason was throwing pieces of a muffin too, and while I was watching this I was like "hey Jason, give me some of that...naw not the whole muffin, just part of it" and I slowly creeped over to where Ashley was and left a trail of muffin bits that went right up to her tarp. Was hilarious because as Ashley saw me do this, she picked up one of her fins and was like "goddamnit Tim, stop that!!" and started flicking the food away. I was laughing my ass off because the geese had already came over to get the food so she started swinging the fin at them and they started taking off in the other direction like "ok f this the food ain't worth it", and as this all happened, Mark had sneaked up behind her and pinched her back while making a sound like a goose honking, and oh god.... Ashley screamed at the top of her lungs, swung around, and started chasing Mark while beating him over the back of the head while he was laughing and holding his arms up behind himself as he ran at the same time. My stomach hurt for like 20 minutes because I was laughing so hard....crap I'm so lucky she didn't come after me with the fin, lol.

Anyhow, Mark told us that his AI, Robin, commented that we were the best rescue class they've seen yet, and he concurred, and then explained to us that his Divemaster program is by invitation only since he doesn't want any zero-to-hero crap, however, because of how exceptional we completed the Rescue class, including how well we've progressed from when we were Open Water students (we had Mark teach OW, AOW, and Rescue so far so we've all known each other and been taught by Mark since last August), we're all invited to do his DM program at our discretion. So I'm a Dive Master Candidate now...couldn't have asked for a better conclusion to the class.

 

[emttim]

I ran out of character room but funny note to add to my last post is that I did the entire Rescue class with one air fill on my HP steel 100, lmao. I know the depth wasn't that much at around 18 or 20 feet, and the dives were short, but being able to do five dives on one tank and still have 800 psi leftover is just legendary. God I love that tank (and so does everyone else in my class after seeing it).

 

[dive_lover88]

Wow! great course you did!. Congrats on the rescue course and the DM course invite.

 

[zen_man]

congrats emttim!

 

[TSandM]

Congratulations on the class. It sounds like a good one.

One comment, though. Short arms or no, it is not a good idea to lift anything with your own BC. If you lose grip on the unconscious diver, YOU will begin to shoot for the surface, and the unconscious diver will sink. Using the other diver's BC for buoyancy ensures that, if you are separated, at least he will go to the surface.

It's actually not that difficult, if you get the other diver's head and shoulders at about your solar plexus. Inflating their BC then jams them up into your chest and abdomen, and it's easy to reach the inflator, and the two of you are pretty much locked into one unit. I've been able to do this a number of times with buddies in doubles.

 

[emttim]

Congratulations on the class. It sounds like a good one.

One comment, though. Short arms or no, it is not a good idea to lift anything with your own BC. If you lose grip on the unconscious diver, YOU will begin to shoot for the surface, and the unconscious diver will sink. Using the other diver's BC for buoyancy ensures that, if you are separated, at least he will go to the surface.

It's actually not that difficult, if you get the other diver's head and shoulders at about your solar plexus. Inflating their BC then jams them up into your chest and abdomen, and it's easy to reach the inflator, and the two of you are pretty much locked into one unit. I've been able to do this a number of times with buddies in doubles.

Hmm, ok, well I'll have to work on that skill then with my buddy so I'm comfortable in my ability to get an unresponsive diver to the surface if I ever actually have the need to do so (although I'm hoping not). Thanks for the tip!