Question Made some bad decisions, advice appreciated!

[darwinaward]

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!

 

[jadairiii]

The biggest worry is that you found yourself a little deeper than you expected and you hit the up button. That, to me, is a really terrible response, and is indicative that you are way, way over your head in this kind of dive. You need to take 3 steps back and remember how screwed up it felt alone and at night.

My exact thoughts when I read the post. Fact is, being at 50' should not have elicited any type of "emergency" response from you. Simply navigating back in the direction of the shore would have solved your problem.

Slow and steady wins the race.

 

[BlueTrin]

OP that’s an interesting choice of nickname

 

[SlugLife]

Even if you did something reckless and stupid, you seem to be reaching out for advice and looking to improve. The good news is you're alive and weren't injured worse. In some ways, consider yourself lucky this once, but you may not be so lucky next time. I can imagine several scenarios (entanglement, getting lost, etc) where this dive could have killed you; perhaps the likelihood of death was 5%, but would you really want to play "Russian Roulette" with a 20-chamber revolver?

The way most diving safety is structured, is such that you can do 1000s of dives without severe injury or death. Every time you come back safely from a dive, is the opportunity to dive 100s or 1000s more times. With the proper training, experience ,and equipment in time you could be doing super-advanced dives eventually. However, if you rush into dives beyond your experience and skill, all that does is practically ensure you won't be able to do those dives because you'll be injured or dead.

For example, if you dive into a wreck 5 times, you might come out safely each time and think "I've got this!" Then the 6th time, you experience a bad silt-out, can't find the exit and drown. If you had waited, received the appropriate training, you could have done 1000s of wreck dives instead. If you properly train up and practice, then a 60ft, solo, night-dive might be one of those things you can safely do a year from now.

The other thing to recognize is your own psychi. I won't pretend to read your mind, but speaking in vague over-generalizations, you appear to have a sort of "macho" streak, and your natural intuition of what you can safely do in regards to diving is miss-calibrated. Learn the way our brain-miss-calibrates and compensate for that. I'm not judging you for this mis-calibration, these things are normal and I have dozens of similar "re-calibrations" I've had to do over the years.

Go back to your training. I know it feels like "training wheels" but just do it, most of everyone else wears these same "training wheels" on our way to more "impressive" dives. Eventually we're off safely doing all sorts of dives like cave-diving, zero-visibility, solo-diving, and so-on. And we got there through doing the "hard work" (it's fun work, but requires patience) of pursuing training and experience, and taking things one step at a time. Rushing into something isn't impressive. Instead it just says someone is reckless, impatient, and lazy.

Do your want your diving "legacy" to be that one diver who did something reckless and stupid and nobody is surprised he's dead? Or rather eventually become one who is responsible, put in the "hard-work", and is worthy of being looked up to?

 

[tursiops]

The way most diving safety is structured, is such that you can do 1000s of dives without severe injury or death. Every time you come back safely from a dive, is the opportunity to dive 100s or 1000s more times.

I take the point of your post, but this is not really how the probabilities work. An injury rate of (say) 1 in 10,000 dives does NOT mean that you can dive 9,999 times before you have an injury. It just means that 2 injuries are unlikely in 10,000 dives. You can get injured an any dive, be it the first one, the next one, the 100th one, whatever.

 

[SlugLife]

I take the point of your post, but this is not really how the probabilities work. An injury rate of (say) 1 in 10,000 dives does NOT mean that you can dive 9,999 times before you have an injury. It just means that 2 injuries are unlikely in 10,000 dives. You can get injured an any dive, be it the first one, the next one, the 100th one, whatever.

I'll write an encyclopedia next time.


But yes, Tursiops is correct about how probabilities work. A 1/1000 chance can occur on your next dive, or 10000 dives from now.

 

[Seaweed Doc]

DarwinAward, kudos to you for recognizing the errors you made along the way. Also, as folks noted, using proper buoyancy control procedures, especially at depth, is critical to any diving. Day or night, solo or buddied.

I don't want to beat you up, but would add some advice.

1. Your post reads as though you didn't previously dive the site during the day. Before trying a night dive on a site, I'd want to check it out in daylight.

2. Question for you: Did you have a completely redundant air supply? A separate tank and reg set? I can't advise you to dive solo (agency rules for me), but if you're going to do it anyway at least have a redundant system.

I'm not too concerned about the night aspect, though it does add complexity. I had a student doing AOW as her 5-9th dives because she really lacked confidence and (for good reasons I won't go into) trust in authority figures like dive instructors. Dive #9 for her was a night dive and it was like a switch got flipped. From that point on she's been a confident, competent diver. I don't see a problem with a newly certified diver going out at night if properly trained to do it.

 

[johndiver999]

I think night dives are scary. I'm afraid of the dark and never sleep without some light (or as flashlight by my side). I think night dives are significantly more stressful, however once a person feels comfortable doing them, day dives just seem a lot easier, so I think they are good for training, even if the person has little interest in continuing to night dive or - loves run on sentences.

 

[Alaskan Scuba Dude]

I'm surprised you didn't get vertigo on the descent.

 

[GiraffeMarineSalvage]

It's great that you came hear to ask questions and highly encourage you to build up your skills gradually over time with quality dive buddies.

Risk of diving solo multiplied with risk of diving at night dramatically increased your risks compared to either relatively new experience on its own and simply surviving in spite of a series of decisions leading to an unintended outcome is never a sound measure of success. Were you lucky or were you good?

Also, as a side note: the likelihood of getting run over by a boat propeller when on the surface isn't necessarily very high if not in a busy harbor, BUT the consequences if propped are at best dire and most likely death...

 

[tursiops]

I don't see a problem with a newly certified diver going out at night if properly trained to do it.

....with a buddy.
Night was not the mistake. Solo was the mistake.