OP
darwinaward
New
Some context - I went solo shore diving at midnight with little overall experience (less than 10 total dives logged) and no redundant air source. Yes, I know how bad that sounds but it went fairly well overall. I know just the first sentence alone is enough to merit my username but I did take precautions to make sure I was reasonably safe.
I researched the site I planned to dive and it was incredibly shallow, going from around 10ft-25ft in depth. After that, I was told that there'd be a steep drop off to 60 feet. I planned to just descend early and swim out to the drop off then back so that at any point if I somehow did panic or had an emergency I could surface immediately without any big issues.
During the dive, I reached the drop off point and decided to swim along the edge before heading back, but the drop off was visually much less steep than I expected so unbeknownst to me, I was descending much faster than I thought. When I checked my gauges again, I was already almost at 50ft. I didn't completely panic but I did make the poor decision of immediately inflating my BCD a bit (didn't fully inflate but I did hold the inflate down for a solid second or so). I began to ascend a bit too quickly and I immediately realized my mistake so I deflated a bit but only enough to slow the ascent. The visibility was poor and it was night so I didn't have much to judge my ascent rate once I lost site of the bottom. I surfaced soon after and although I'm a bit hazy on how long the ascent took, I didn't feel like it was particularly fast, definitely not shooting to the surface at least, but it was much faster than I would have liked.
I made a second bad decision and instead of swimming on the surface back to shore, I decided to descend back down to around 20 ft and swim back to shore underwater. Upon surfacing and reaching the surf zone I immediately felt a little nauseous but I attributed that to my general motion sickness and the 3 feet swells. However, I'm now slightly concerned about DCS since I've also been a bit itchy and now have a bit of back pain although the nausea is mostly gone now. It's been a couple hours since I finished the dive.
I know I'm most likely overreacting and the best advice would for me to learn some common sense and not put myself in positions like this to begin with, but I'm just wondering how likely it is for me to have minor DCS and if so, if it's necessary for me to seek treatment. Thanks in advance!
I researched the site I planned to dive and it was incredibly shallow, going from around 10ft-25ft in depth. After that, I was told that there'd be a steep drop off to 60 feet. I planned to just descend early and swim out to the drop off then back so that at any point if I somehow did panic or had an emergency I could surface immediately without any big issues.
During the dive, I reached the drop off point and decided to swim along the edge before heading back, but the drop off was visually much less steep than I expected so unbeknownst to me, I was descending much faster than I thought. When I checked my gauges again, I was already almost at 50ft. I didn't completely panic but I did make the poor decision of immediately inflating my BCD a bit (didn't fully inflate but I did hold the inflate down for a solid second or so). I began to ascend a bit too quickly and I immediately realized my mistake so I deflated a bit but only enough to slow the ascent. The visibility was poor and it was night so I didn't have much to judge my ascent rate once I lost site of the bottom. I surfaced soon after and although I'm a bit hazy on how long the ascent took, I didn't feel like it was particularly fast, definitely not shooting to the surface at least, but it was much faster than I would have liked.
I made a second bad decision and instead of swimming on the surface back to shore, I decided to descend back down to around 20 ft and swim back to shore underwater. Upon surfacing and reaching the surf zone I immediately felt a little nauseous but I attributed that to my general motion sickness and the 3 feet swells. However, I'm now slightly concerned about DCS since I've also been a bit itchy and now have a bit of back pain although the nausea is mostly gone now. It's been a couple hours since I finished the dive.
I know I'm most likely overreacting and the best advice would for me to learn some common sense and not put myself in positions like this to begin with, but I'm just wondering how likely it is for me to have minor DCS and if so, if it's necessary for me to seek treatment. Thanks in advance!
