Lessons Most frightening moments

After seeing how the post I wrote about the reverse block resonated with people, I would like to make another post today, namely about the most frightening moments I've ever had.

It's easy, particularly for novice divers, to think that people like myself, with decades of experience, thousands of dives and a deck of c-cards have everything under control and nothing bad ever happens.

I wrote about the reverse block because of that. I wanted to show that I am still human and I can still make mistakes. On the internet there is a strong tendency for (technical) divers and instructors with a lot of experience to project an image of themselves as always solving problems correctly, always making the best decisions, and in the case of instructors in particular, having a monopoly on good ideas that lead to perfect students diving perfectly.

None of that, of course, reflects reality at all.

So I will start. I urge experienced divers to share their own stories.

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First
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1985. I was certified as AOW and we were making a deep dive along a wall. The bottom, for all intents and purposes, at the bottom of the wall was unsurvivable. A diver who diving with a group slightly ahead of us got caught in a large ball of discarded fishing line that he didn't see. He started sinking. The incident started at 42 meters. My buddy and I had just started our dive and we saw this happening. Nobody in his group did. We went after him. This was the first time I had dived deeper than 42 meters. I couldn't tell how deep we were when we caught him because the (analogue) depth gauge I was using was pinned at its maximum depth. This was also my first deco dive or at least my first dive where I was "off the tables" and unable to to know how to ascend. I was, at that time, unaware of oxygen toxicity, gas management and ascent protocols. We returned (at a rapid pace) to 30ft. (10m) and waited there until our tanks were empty on the assumption that any damage done by our deep incursion would be fixed by that. Upon surfacing we didn't know if we were going to get the bends or not. I was, frankly, scared. It still gives me the heebiejeebies to think about this incident more than 30 years later. We did something there that was completely out of control (also the rescue) and we got off easy.

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Second
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2002, I think. I was working as a DM. We temporarily lost a diver during a dive. The situation was that we were on a platform at 25m and doing some exercises for the AOW (deep) dive. A group of divers (maybe 6) descending LANDED on us and kicked up so much silt in their attempts to slow down before impacting the bottom that the visibility went from 5m to black-out in a matter of seconds. I grabbed the two divers right in front of me and dragged them out of the silt cloud. One of them turned out to be our diver and the other one turned out to be one of the idiots who landed on us. We were missing a diver. We surfaced. Naturally our divers were told to surface if they became separated but this diver did not. He remained where he was and waited to be rescued. On the surface we decided that I would search for the missing diver because I had the most experience of everyone (including the instructor). At that point I was a DM but I was already technically trained. I had very limited time. I went back down and eventually found him but it was luck. He survived and my beard got grayer overnight. If I couldn't have found him in the next 5 min his death would have been on my conscience until I died. This was so frightening to me that I nearly abandoned all plans I had to become an instructor.

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Third
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The accident. My team saved the life of a diver who ran out of air during an AOW training dive (by another group, not mine) and was left for dead on the bottom at 18m. We acted quickly and professionally and got him into the hands of paramedics within about 10 min. As an aside, the fact that the Dutch paramedics were able to be on scene so quickly was no small part of this! He looked dead when we retrieved him. He lay in coma for several weeks after the incident. Doctors had basically written him off when -- unexpectedly to all -- he woke up and subsequently made a reasonable (albeit not full) recovery.

The impact on myself and on the members of my team was substantial, particularly because of what we viewed as our 'mistakes'. One diver (the DM) stopped diving. He started hyperventilating during the descent to find the "body" and after that he started to hyperventilate on EVERY dive. He stopped diving.

To me it changed EVERYTHING about how I view training and my role as an instructor. I didn't organize things on the surface as well as I could have, if I had had a second run at it. Yes, I had the EMS on site in 10 min. Police, paramedics, trauma doctor, helicopter, fire department with a boat, a private boat.... all of that I had..... but I was overwhelmed and not communicating as well as I could.

Someone tried to chase my (uncertified) OW students into the water to go search. He didn't know that they were uncertified and I ripped him a new one in a way that I regret, giving in to the emotion. An NOB (CMAS) instructor showed me by example how to control the dive site in a way I had never learned, I missed seeing a diver (the DM who caused the accident) displaying passive panic. It only became apparent to me when they had to take him away by ambulance when he collapsed.... it was MUCH more messy scene than I had ever imagined and I was not in control as well as I would expect from myself. At one point, once the EMS had control of the surface situation I grabbed another diver (a DM) and went searching myself. This was a mistake. I can't get over the mind set that drove me to ACT when I SHOULD have been coordinating! I'm like the guy who charges into a burning building because I can't fight the urge to DO SOMETHING! I HATE that about myself.

Since that time (it's been years) I've been replaying that event in my mind and thinking, "if I had only done XXXX then YYYY". It drives me CRAZY to think that if we were sharper we could have found him 30 seconds or a minute earlier and his recovery could have been better. The fact that he survived is utterly astounding. These things never end like that.... but I feel responsible for the fact that it took so long.

This was a formative moment in my diving. I considered stopping as well but eventually decided not not to. To this day I cannot -- and will not -- teach or participate in the Rescue course, even though I may be the one instructor in my circle who is most qualified to talk about the differences between theory and practice. It's just too intimidating.

 

[tomfcrist]

I was in Keg largo years ago, diving 2 other tech divers. They wanted to go to the engine room on the SG. I didn’t take them there, but dropped into the pump room on the stbd side aft of the superstructure.

I dropped down and leveled off, there was line already laid on the fwd bulkhead, so I didn’t run a reel. I traversed the pump room to the port side and exited. I waited for about 2 minutes and didn’t see them. I decided to go back in and check on them and was greeted with a plume of silt billowing towards me from the stbd side. As I transited to the stbd side in zero vis, the line on the forward bulkhead ended in a break. I tied in my reel, and searched for probably 6-7 minutes for the other two divers...never found them, so I exited the stbd side in hope that I would find them waiting. Nope. I moved aft to the fantail and saw them down by the ramp just cruising around like everything was cool.

When we got back on the boat, one diver told me their deco bottle bolt snap came lose and it dropped to the bottom of the compartment and caused the siltout. They exited where we entered, and waited for about 5 minutes before they took off about their business. Quote “you are a big boy and we figured you would be fine”.

Wasn’t really scary for me as much as it was stressful and aggravating. Easily the worst dive I’ve ever done.

 

[billt4sf]

In 200 dives I’ve had a few bad ones.

The first still repeats on me the way Diver0001 described, but not as severely. My wife and I had about 20 - 30 dives, we had just completed AOW. Some people would be more skilled with this number of dives, but we weren’t. We did not have control over our buoyancy, but at the time – we didn’t really know that. We thought we were “pretty good”. Rubbish!

We were in Kona Hawaii at a large and well-known shop which had been recommended by several on this board. We had been with them on a number of dives and had just finished the AOW with them. I saw the poster for this night dive where you look for pelagic critters, “pelagic magic” I think it was called.

The protocol was that each diver had a weighted vertical line, to which a line from their BC was attached in a fashion that allowed the diver to ascend & descend at will. The boat goes out into the open ocean where there are a few small currents and you use your light to find these amazing translucent critters. Salps, IIRC.

Wife jumped in. I jumped in. DM was around somewhere, as were maybe 6 other divers.

I quickly realized that I was not able to stay at one depth, nor was my wife. I solved the problem by making myself negative, staying vertical, and finning slowly. That enabled me to stay sort of at a given depth, though it was hard to do so as I had no way to see the surface or a reef underneath. At a few points during the dive, my head broke through the surface unexpectedly.

My wife solved the problem by (gulp) making herself negative and going down as far as the line combination was letting her. Basically she was hanging by the tension on both lines, kept there only by the clip on the end of her BC line and the fact that the weighted line had a solid objet tied to the end. A couple times I went down to her and tried to signal her to come up a bit, but I did not know the correct hand signals and she didn’t know what I was getting at.

In retrospect we (especially she) could have easily died. If either of these clips had gone, she probably would have sunk, and then what? We replay this in our minds from time to time and it scares the s*&t out of us.

That was the point where we STARTED to learn that we can’t just do any dive. We STARTED to learn what “controlling your buoyancy” means. We STARTED to learn the characteristics of various types dives and the skills required.

We had just completed AOW and we thought we were “pretty good”. YIKES!

It’s 5 years later and we still talk about it with dread.


Everything worked out great and now we're REALLY scared!

 

[Kimela]

Diver0001 wrote: "What shops COULD do here is to be more assertive in getting people in for at least an initial evaluation, or have someone from "slachtoffer" help come and do a debriefing and make people more aware of their options for getting help."

This is a wonderful idea! And it's fantastic that services are offered as part of your medical insurance in the Netherlands. It might seem like a conflict of interest (might discourage instructors from staying in the business), but I wonder if it might help to include this information in instructor training so that if/when they are witness to an incident they will already know to take advantage of the services offered - and to encourage others to do the same.

 

[Diver0001]

@Kimela. It can't be included in the instructor training. Instructor training is uniform world wide and the agency needs to account for conditions in Northern Europe, where it is well organized, and in countries like the US where medical and psychological care is well... much more dependent upon the individual choices people make.

We all have it in the Netherlands, but I doubt very much that trauma care is something every American or everyone in other countries with similar 3rd world type access to medical care at the basic level has. Scuba Agencies can't make standards unless the rules are same in every country.

What agencies could do, however is include a session about local possibilities in the rescue course. Personally I handle this in the OW course because ... well.... OW students are at relatively high risk and as I said before I don't see them in rescue so I can't tell them later. I've had negative feedback from colleagues about this because I don't twist words and I tell students at the OW level that realistically speaking accidents can happen and A, B, and C happens when an accident happens in our local area.

My colleagues tell me that I should delay telling that stuff until the rescue course, but (a) I don't teach rescue and (b) I want my students to be prepared if they decide never to take rescue.

R..

 

[MaxBottomtime]

I was diving with my buddy Tim about twenty years ago on a site in 170 feet a few miles offshore. We had a dive plan that included 23 minutes on the bottom followed by a thirty minute+ ascent. We dived our plan and even hung a few extra minutes at twenty feet to watch jellies float by. I was getting cold so I headed up to the boat. I rinsed and disassembled my gear, showered and changed into dry clothes while I waited for Tim.

I went out on the bow to see if he was coming up anytime soon and his bubbles were nowhere to be seen. I told myself I would give him ten more minutes before calling the Coast Guard. I waited fifteen minutes and was about to get on the radio when he surfaced a couple hundred feet in front of the boat. We each had double 120s with two 40 cu ft deco bottles. I was up in a little over an hour while he was under for two hours. I was angry and amazed at the same time.

When Tim got on the boat he told me he likes to swim up current after finishing deco to feel like he really dived rather than simply floating up and down a line. It wasn't long after that that I stopped inviting him on the boat. A couple of years later he disappeared while diving at Farnsworth Bank, a series of offshore pinnacles off the backside of Catalina Island. His body was never found. When I heard he was missing I immediately thought that he was just swimming up current, except this time he failed to surface.

I've known a few other divers who died while diving but this one hit me the hardest. It was easily preventable but probably inevitable. We used to tease him about not logging his dives. We told him to do it so we could later write about his death. He always found that funny.

 

[chimong]

At that point all the divers were "parked" at 18m with a couple of DM's while the instructor took students 2 by 2 into the depths beyond the platform to 24 or 25 meters in order to conform to the standards for the deep dive. This took several minutes per buddy-pair.

Hi Rob, it sounds like this course has a very small teacher to student ratio. 1 instructor and 10 students maybe? Is this how big classes often are in Netherlands? I'm curious because I might move to Netherlands in the future. I just got certified OW this past summer and after reading this I wonder if I should be very careful choosing places to further my dive training in Netherlands. In my OW class it was one teacher and me and another student, and although the instructor was relatively inexperienced I was happy about the fact that she has always kept an eye on us. Should I always choose a class where I can get undivided attention from the instructor? Thanks!

 

[Trailboss123]

Hi Rob, it sounds like this course has a very small teacher to student ratio. 1 instructor and 10 students maybe? Is this how big classes often are in Netherlands? I'm curious because I might move to Netherlands in the future. I just got certified OW this past summer and after reading this I wonder if I should be very careful choosing places to further my dive training in Netherlands. In my OW class it was one teacher and me and another student, and although the instructor was relatively inexperienced I was happy about the fact that she has always kept an eye on us. Should I always choose a class where I can get undivided attention from the instructor? Thanks!

You always have the option of paying a little extra to do a private class/course. This is a very good option for certain students. My wife is a perfect example of someone who will get way more out of instruction in a 1:1 or 1:2 setting than in a larger group.

 

[Diver0001]

Hi Rob, it sounds like this course has a very small teacher to student ratio. 1 instructor and 10 students maybe? Is this how big classes often are in Netherlands? I'm curious because I might move to Netherlands in the future. I just got certified OW this past summer and after reading this I wonder if I should be very careful choosing places to further my dive training in Netherlands. In my OW class it was one teacher and me and another student, and although the instructor was relatively inexperienced I was happy about the fact that she has always kept an eye on us. Should I always choose a class where I can get undivided attention from the instructor? Thanks!

It depends on the instructor and the school. Some schools bundle up their classes and run them all together which can put 10 or 12 students in the water with maybe 2 instructors and some DM's. I've even seen schools send out groups that big who were all taking DIFFERENT courses that could executed at similar depths (for example, PPB AND Drysuit AND OW in one group... one enormous, chaotic group).

In the case where the accident happened that I described the group was was extremely large in my experience. I believe there were 8 or maybe 10 students with 1 instructor and 2 DM's. That's very unusual for our conditions.

Personally I won't teach courses in our conditions with more than 4 students because I can't deliver the quality I expect of myself in the confined part of the course if I can't give students focused individual attention. In open water visibility is too limited to risk having more than 4 novice divers in the water at one time. For me the limit is 4. When I see schools with 10 or 12 students diving some of them split that up into two groups of 5 or 6 but some do not and when they do not the ensuing chaos can be mind boggling.

I always work together with at least 1 DM, even in the pool. For open water dives I'm happy to have 2:1 supervision most days (this is common in our area) and for certain dives, like the deep dive I arrange for 1:1 supervision. On rare occasions the shop has grumbled about those conditions but those are my conditions. Those conditions are non-negotiable and I've learned the hard way not to compromise on that.

The shop has had students in the past who wanted 1:1 instructor attention. The shop, obviously, sells them that if they ask for it (for a premium). I don't like those. I think students learn best when they learn with another diver at their own level for the simple reason that mistakes are part of learning. For some advanced specialties 1:1 attention makes a lot of sense (navigation & deep, for example) but at the OW level I think 1:1 is overkill and can be counter productive.

I taught my daughter 1:1 and realized after she was certified that the only buddy she had ever had was me.... and she initially had trouble diving with other novice divers because of that. On one dive we went with a group of random divers on vacation (none of whom were novices) and my daughter said to me after the dive that she thought in the first 5 minutes of the dive that there was an accident happening but then she realized that this is just how they dive. She had never been exposed to anyone with less than perfect buoyancy control.... and the flip side was the guide who was with us was also confused. He had never seen an OW diver *with* that level of buoyancy control. He kept thinking that my daughter was too far off the bottom when, in fact, she had chosen to be diving at exactly that distance above the bottom and not a centimeter deeper or shallower. He kept dragging her to the bottom and signing to stay there and she kept going back to where she was before. Eventually I had to intervene and let him know that I would watch her myself.

That was a bit of a learning experience to me. Now, when I have a student who wants 1:1 instruction, particularly at the OW level, I invite other people I know (ex students or even my daughter) to dive along as the student's buddy. That way the student is learning from other divers who don't have 30+ years of experience and don't always look completely sorted at every moment.

But I digress. What you will find here is that many instructors will apply 2:1 supervision (2 students to 1 instructor or DM) but there are a growing number who also cap the number of divers they will teach at one time. In my (entirely head-strong opinion) I think in our conditions if the instructor is teaching more than 4 students at a time you could legitimately ask yourself if they care much about quality.

R..

 

[wedivebc]

So my scary story happened about 5 years ago. I was teaching a rebreather class, one student, a smaller woman with not a great deal of diving experience but her husband was a rebreather diver so she wanted to become one as well. We were on about the 5th ocean dive of the class and we were diving from shore because the water was too rough for the boat to go out. We have a nice secluded bay near by where we could be in the lee of the wind and the waves would be minimal. Our dive plan was to swim about 45 minutes to a max depth of 100ft but average about 50ft then back by the same route which would return us to the secluded bay. On the way back at about minute 60 my student started to flail around in the weirdest way. At first I thought she was having a convulsion but after making eye contact I saw she wasn't but she was unable to explain what was going on and wanted to go up. I helped her make a controlled ascent but when we got to the surface I realized what a mistake that was. There were 5 ft waves breaking over our head. My student was awake but would not respond to any questions I asked concerning what was wrong so I decided to head for the nearest shore to get out of the water. Second big mistake, as we approached the shore I saw the white water churning as it crashed against the rocks and here I am towing an unresponsive diver to a tumult of waves and rocks crashing. I told her "wait for the wave to lift you then crawl as fast as you can up the rocks, give me an OK if you understand" nothing... I repeated the instructions...nothing. OK I roll her over on her back, wait for the next wave then push her as high as I can letting the rebreather take the brunt of it as it crashed into the rock. Second wave, push higher. I then see a lady walking along the rocks and I call to her for help, she walks away. I have my student locked into a rocky crevasse she is breathing OK but not responding to my instructions. I started to remove my heavy gear as I was still partially submerged when a guy comes out of the house the lady had disappeared into and comes and helps my student get up to safety. He left me there to fight it out for myself as I still was not completely safe but I guess that was OK as my student was the main concern. Meanwhile my student's husband and a friend were at the entry point and could see something going on. I can't imagine what they must have thought when not one but two ambulances arrived on the scene. It seems the lady had called 911 in response to me calling for help and since there had been a dive fatality at the same spot only a couple of weeks before the over-reaction was warranted.
In the end the student was OK, she had experienced a double cramp from the long swim back and ended up with a case of passive panic.
I take full responsibility for taking a student out in such bad weather conditions and underestimating the outcome of surfacing in that mess. Although the damage to the rebreather from being pounded on the rocks was ugly it did not affect the operation and saved the student from a severe thrashing.

 

[wedivebc]

Story number two, and I expect to get flamed for this. My buddy and I were diving a very remote cave. We had planned this for weeks, even had a member of the local caving club, (not diving) who were interested in what we might find in there had taken the time to clear the bush and make the road passable for my truck to get near the entrance. The cave entrance looks like a mud puddle with a creek spilling out of it and I didn't think there was room to get in. My buddy puts on his drysuit and grabs a 40cuft bottle under his arm and goes for a quick look. Five minutes later he come out shouting, "that thing goes!". So we suit up and head in. Aaron goes first laying line from an exploration reel as he proceeds. At one point the cave floor goes up and around a giant column and Aaron had decided to go on the high (far) side of the column rather than what I felt was the easier passage being the low side. He made it through the restricted passage around the column and signalled for me to follow. I started in and soon got stuck. There is no worse feeling than being stuck in a head down position in my books. I tried to wiggle and shift to different angles but could not make it through. I signalled to Aaron that I couldn't get through and to go ahead without me. So away he went and I started back feeling a little ashamed of myself. About that time I thought I will have another go at it so I tried again and after a couple of minutes got through feet first. Now I'm swimming like crazy to catch up with Aaron. After about 20 minutes and no Aaron in sight I get to an even worst restriction and knew I would never get through. I head back knowing Aaron was not expecting to see me although I did consider leaving a note on his line. As I got back to the column I decide I would leave the line for short time in order to take the high side which I was convinced was bigger passage. Well it wasn't I got royally stuck. My arms above my head not able to touch anything, my hips and rebreather forming the perfect wedge. I started to feel panic coming on but gained control, telling myself I have about 6 hrs worth of oxygen likely more if I relax and Aaron will see me when he comes back anyway. It was a long 6-7 minutes before I felt a tug on my fin. He quickly assessed the situation and was able to pull me out.
This incident had an impact on me and I knew if I did not go back and dive that cave again I would never forgive myself. My next dive went much better and I discovered the trick to getting through that first restriction although I never did get past the further restriction I at least felt good about overcoming the fear of getting stuck in a cave.