csholer
Registered
hi everyone, just had my first "incident" and was looking for ideas on what may have occurred. first my experience, i'm a newby, ow cert in dec 2007, have adv.ow, nitrox, peak, search & recovery and rescue classes done. 36 dives. buddy has ow cert since 2006 and adv.ow, 25 dives. so the setting- 2 dives in morning at a local mine pit(40+ acres water all natural runoff) he's got 2pc 7mm w/o hood & rental gear and wrist comp. i have new poseidon bc, older scuba pro regs archimedes2 comp.1pc cressi 7mm w/hood. both of us have gloves and boots and fleece long underwear and wool socks. i had 12lbs and he had 12lbs on.so we get setup do buddy checks, go over signals do a weight check in water. discuss and agree on plans for dive and emergency actions.so we begin by short swim out to about 20' and descend.i was checking him constant because he had not dove in about 3 months. we hit about 20' deep and my right ear quit equalizing. so we ascended a few feet and i cleared out and we resumed . no sweat. dove to 47' total dive time 17 minutes. short but water was cold. 75 degrees to 10' then sudden!!! 52 degrees. but still not bad. dive one ended no probs, safety stop, all good. out of water 45 minutes. began 2nd dive. initially great. was rather like a wall dive, saw big catfish and some bass. stayed about 35' and slowly worked up to about 25 over about 10 minutes following catfish. i started to get cold and decided to signal ascend a few feet to warmer water,i turned and reached to tap him when my vision suddenly swum. it looked like he was shooting backwards and forwards at me. (he wasn't) and then i got light headed and tingly all over. at this point my brain split in two and one side screamed PANIC!!FREAK OUT!!! and the other side said calm down you're still breathing and you know what to do. so i signal up and over to him and we began trying to ascend... thats right trying. we were stuck at 25 feet trying to go up kicking for all we were worth while adding tiny bursts to our bc's. finally after what seemed forever, but was really only about 5 minutes we started creeping up and got to 15' and did a 5 minute stop and cleared out. longest damn safety stop i ever had telling my freaked out side to shut up while i got out of there. anyway upon surfacing, my buddy said he felt the exact same vision thing at the exact same time and the same difficulty ascending. can anyone shed any light on this? obviously i did something wrong, just can't figure out what. oh and total dive time was 20 minutes. both dives we each used 600 or so lbs of air.
