My First Deep Dive (Very Minor Mishap)

[EmJay]

Hi All,

This is my first post on SB, but I have been lurking for some time. There is so much valuable information here that I recommend these boards as reading to any new divers I come across. Also, just a quick thank you to the divers who share their knowledge and experiences here!

Anyway, onto the real reason for this post. I am a newly certified diver (certified in November, did my qualifying dives in Sodwana Bay). I have 10 dives so far, so I am still very inexperienced. I did 5 boat dives in Sodwana Bay and loved each and every one of them. No incidents at all. I decided to do my Advanced course as there are some dive sites in SA which require an Advanced certification and I would like to do some dives in Malta in a year or so, so this certification is building towards those dives.

Yesterday, my group and I were to do our deep dive to 32m/104ft. We were diving in our local quarry (sadly, I am land locked). We swam about 25m/82ft to a buoy and were to descend down a line to an old motor vehicle which was sunk to 32m. We were then all supposed to kneel on the roof of the car. We planned to only be down there for 8 minutes, to look around, do a simple sum on a slate to see the effects of nitrogen narcosis and then ascend up the line. There were only 4 students and 2 instructors, so all very safe.

I went down the line to the bottom with no issues. As I was positioning myself to kneel on the car, I felt that I was very heavy (we were warned about it, but I didn't really know what to expect) and I started slowly falling backward. I put my hand down on the roof of the car to steady myself and managed to cut up my middle left finger pretty badly. I remember looking at my hand and it was bleeding pretty badly, but knew were were only down there for a very short time, so decided to push the cuts closed with my other fingers and assess the wound on the surface. We did our dive (needless to say, I got my sum wrong). I was heavily narc'ed; viz was extremely bad (about 1.5m/5ft, it was pitch dark and freezing (16c/60f in a 5mm wetsuit). Managed to do my deep and safety stops without trouble. The wound was bleeding pretty badly on the surface though. Managed to get it cleaned out. Had to get a tetanus shot and xrays done on the hand to see if the wound was clear from debris. All is fine now thankfully. I suppose getting a scar on my first deep dive would make a pretty cool story. :blinking:

In hind sight, should I have rather signaled to the instructor that there was a problem and went up to better assess the situation? I am concerned that the effects of nitrogen narcosis was impairing my ability to assess the situation. What would have you guys done?

Also, does the effect of narcosis lessen as a diver gets more experience? And do any divers here keep up with tetanus shots?

 

[Kevrumbo]

On adaptation to Deep Air and Nitrogen Narcosis:

"Moreover, our results suggest that experienced divers can discriminate between the behavioral and subjective components of narcosis. . .It has been proposed that the intensity of narcotic symptoms could be used by divers to gauge the extent of performance loss (10). The present results indicate that this advice is inappropriate for adapted divers because the two components of narcosis [behavioral and subjective] uncouple in a direction that could lead to an overestimation of performance capabilities --a potentially dangerous situation. On the other hand, the question arises as to whether adaptation confers any benefits on the diver, since performance efficiency is not directly improved and could be overestimated. In this regard, it could be argued that a reduction in symptom intensity reduces the possibility that attention will be focused on subjective sensations rather than the task at hand." [i.e. Subjective, sensations awareness vs. Situational, task-at-hand awareness??]

http://cradpdf.drdc.gc.ca/PDFS/zba24/p154358.pdf

 

[MaxBottomtime]

A tetanus shot was required before I could take my open water course, and I have one every ten years. I would have aborted the dive immediately for a serious cut.

 

[victorzamora]

It all depends on how "serious" the cut was. Besides the fact that it was rusty metal, would you have sought medical attention? If not, then probably no need. If so, then yes you should've aborted. However, I really think it's up to you. Tetanus isn't going to onset quickly enough that you needed to be RUSHED to medical attention, and there weren't sharks in the water so.....I call you pretty safe, unless it was a severe cut requiring some medical attention beyond a band-aid.

Best way to ask: Did you get stitches? The answer to that is the answer to whether or not you should've aborted, in my opinion.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

I'm going to disagree with the assertion that this was all planned very safe. No it wasn't. The questions you ask show you were not properly briefed on this, the dive was poorly planned, execution even worse, and the whole thing a cluster from the get go. A properly planned deep.dive would have gone over all the contingencies. You would not have been told to kneel on a rusty hunk of metal. The tasks would have been more dive related. You and your assigned or chosen buddy would have been making eye contact the whole way down in a horizontal descent and stopped a few feet above the bottom or in this case car so that no one was falling anywhere. Had the instructors knew what they were doing your accident would not have happened. Unfortunaty this is all too typical.

Sent from my DROID X2 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Steve_C]

Been deep in a quarry. Cold and dark as you say.

I think Lapenta is correct that there were some problems but I will suggest that having divers horizontal and unanchored in 5 ft of dark as he suggests can be problematic if treated as a day dive.

I think that it should have been treated as a night dive. Every diver should have had a marker lights and other lights.

But maybe they did this.

 

[Michael Guerrero]

Unrelated to your question, I would wear gloves. If it's not cold enough for neoprene gloves, you can buy a pair of Atlas Fit gloves that don't offer thermal protection, but are tough and protect your fingers.

Outside of that, what these guys said. Kneeling on rusty metal is a bad idea. Not establishing neutral buoyancy is a bad idea. Doing a low-viz dive without the proper illumination is a bad idea. Wearing a 5mm wetsuit for a 60F dive to 100' seems like a poor choice depending on your endurance for cold.

 

[Mustard Dave]

EmJay,

You say you have 10 dives under your belt - before the dive in question, what depths had you dived to? Also, how did you feel about your weight - did you feel confident that you were correctly weighted? Had your instructor done a proper weight check during previos training? Do you feel the instructor taught you enough about weight? Did you have any more or any less weight? Were you using a larger cylinder for the deep dive? Were you used to diving in poor visibility? What agency was the course run through?




Emjay was taken to 32m for her first deep 'experience' dive - does anyone think this is normal? What do the standards say? I note this is 2m more than the PADI AOW certification depth. My AOW 'deep' dive was to around 22m, which is the deepest part of the nearby quarry, and something you almost need a shovel to acheive. We looked at the effects of water pressure on a plastic bottle, differences in colour and compared depth gauge readings. Narcosis was discussed, but at that depth it was never going to be an issue. We were addvised that just because we were qualified to 30m, we shouldn't rush to that depth, but gradually work up to it. Taking recently qualified divers to depth, cold water, and with poor visibilaty seems a bit reckless.




As for feeling narced in these situations, in my experience stress makes an enormous difference. The first time I felt narced was in Malta on the wreck of the Xlendi. I was swimming around the wreck at about 40m and I dipped down to about 43m, which was the deepest I'd ever been. I felt slightly light-headed so I came back up a few metres and felt normal again. Since that dive, I never felt narced again at similar depths.

I dived to 50m on air, in cold, dark water, and felt no different to any other dive. A few months later, I went to Nemo 33 (the world's deepest swimmming pool). The water is crystal clear, it is warm and there is very little to worry about. Dive 1 was very easy. There is a circular shaft that goes down to 34.5m. In the shallows, the pool opens out in to a sqare with a number of rooms and air pockets. We dropped to the bottom for a few minutes before a Belgian fella chased us off the bottom (they are very strict about how long you can stay down there for) and had a bimble around the rooms at the top. For dive 2, it was hammered. When we dropped in, the bottom of the pit was covered in divers trying to get 34.5m on their computers. Afterwards, my buddy said we could have taken out our regs and breathed the bubbles coming up from the bottom. Again, we were chased off the bottom and I started my ascent. I was a metre or so off the bottom and then felt upteen divers with the buyancy skills of a poorly goldfish with a knackered swim bladder banging into me and almost kicking my reg out of my mouth. At this point it fellt lke the pit was rotating. There are some rails arranged like a ladder on one side of the pit, so I swam over grabbed one and tried to focus on it. After a few seconds, and after the others had got above me, I felt fine.

Narcosis is a funny thing as it seems to affect different divers in different ways, and at different depths. I know some that do ridiculous deep air dives who claim to be unaffected and some who instantly feel it at a particular depth. I have also heard varying accounts of what narcosis feels like. I do believe that it is possible to be narced off your box without knowing it. You usually find out you are narced when the brown stuff hits the air moving device and you have to think fast. It is entirely likely cutting your finger could cause this.



P.S. You will enjoy Malta. Getting used to deep diving is recommended as a lot of the dive sites are in the 30 - 40m range. If you need a suggestion for a dive centre, I can recommend Buddies in Bugibba (http://www.buddiesmalta.com).

 

[maniago]

Unrelated to your question, I would wear gloves. .... Doing a low-viz dive without the proper illumination is a bad idea. .

+1 on all the above. I never ever dive without gloves - even on the warmest day, in which case I use a pair of mechanics gloves form your local parts store or hardware store - they fit tight and cost nothing really. I don't always take a light unless I know viz is poor, which it usually is where I dive - too many good uses for a light.

 

[miketsp]

Did you get the opportunity to see that blood looks green at depth or did you have lights?