okinawadiver
Guest
Sorry this is a little long, but I wanted to show other newbies that no matter how comfortable you are after being certified you still need to take it slow, gain experience and be prepared physcially and mentally.
Since my last post... My son was born and I lost a brother in a car accident. Trying to get back to somewhat of a normal life I decided to finish my diving cert. The class work went very well and all the pool work built my confidence level. The first two dives were shore dives from a sea wall with easy access. Our max depth for those 2 dives was 35 feet. Everything went perfect. My confidence was really high by this point and I was very excited for the final 2 dives. When I got home I began to feel dizzy and light headed. I had some food and drank what seemed like a gallon of water. I was dehydrated, not sick enough to go to the hospital, but very close to having to.
What I should have learned from these dives... Even though everything went well, I didn't prepare my body for the dives. I was up late the night before with my son, I didn't hydrate myself properly and that morning I was in a rush to get out the door so I didn't eat breakfast. In addition, I didn't hydrate between dives or have a small snack. All of this lead to a bad after dive experience, not to mention that I was just lucky nothing happened in the water.
Dive 3-4. Unfortunately, just about the same scenario happened on these 2 dives. No hydration, no food, little sleep and rushed. Dive 3 went fine. Dive 4 went bad. We were at 50 feet and everything was going good. I was having trouble clearing my right ear all day but it would clear after a minute or less and I was able to continue descending. We were checking out the reef looking and looking at different things when my right ear had sudden pressure and it was painfull!! I panicked and instead of going up a couple of feet and getting relief and gathering myself I over-inflated by BC which took me to the top FAST!!! I had no intention going up to the surface but my panic made me forget that inflating my BC so fast would cause this. I did remember to keep breathing and tried to let the air out of my BC, but my reaction time was way to slow.
What I learned...Never panic when you have air. Asccend a few feet and give yourself a moment to get it together. The biggest problem here was that I was already begining to have a couple of other issues due to poor preparation. My mouth and throat were dry from being in the first stage of dehydration. I was at the deepest depth I had ever been and was a little excited and breathing a little erratically. With a dry throat and mouth I felt like I wasn't getting enough air but I was still doing relatively o.k b/c I looked at my gauges and saw that I had about 1800 left in air. But, when my ear didn't clear and the pressure took me by surprise I was unable to thinK rationally b/c I set myself up for failure.
The point I'm trying to drive home here is that you have to prepare you body as well as your equipment. All the best equipment in the world doesn't do you any good if your not prepared. Experienced folks feel free to add any additonal comments about what more, if anything, I could have done.
Since my last post... My son was born and I lost a brother in a car accident. Trying to get back to somewhat of a normal life I decided to finish my diving cert. The class work went very well and all the pool work built my confidence level. The first two dives were shore dives from a sea wall with easy access. Our max depth for those 2 dives was 35 feet. Everything went perfect. My confidence was really high by this point and I was very excited for the final 2 dives. When I got home I began to feel dizzy and light headed. I had some food and drank what seemed like a gallon of water. I was dehydrated, not sick enough to go to the hospital, but very close to having to.
What I should have learned from these dives... Even though everything went well, I didn't prepare my body for the dives. I was up late the night before with my son, I didn't hydrate myself properly and that morning I was in a rush to get out the door so I didn't eat breakfast. In addition, I didn't hydrate between dives or have a small snack. All of this lead to a bad after dive experience, not to mention that I was just lucky nothing happened in the water.
Dive 3-4. Unfortunately, just about the same scenario happened on these 2 dives. No hydration, no food, little sleep and rushed. Dive 3 went fine. Dive 4 went bad. We were at 50 feet and everything was going good. I was having trouble clearing my right ear all day but it would clear after a minute or less and I was able to continue descending. We were checking out the reef looking and looking at different things when my right ear had sudden pressure and it was painfull!! I panicked and instead of going up a couple of feet and getting relief and gathering myself I over-inflated by BC which took me to the top FAST!!! I had no intention going up to the surface but my panic made me forget that inflating my BC so fast would cause this. I did remember to keep breathing and tried to let the air out of my BC, but my reaction time was way to slow.
What I learned...Never panic when you have air. Asccend a few feet and give yourself a moment to get it together. The biggest problem here was that I was already begining to have a couple of other issues due to poor preparation. My mouth and throat were dry from being in the first stage of dehydration. I was at the deepest depth I had ever been and was a little excited and breathing a little erratically. With a dry throat and mouth I felt like I wasn't getting enough air but I was still doing relatively o.k b/c I looked at my gauges and saw that I had about 1800 left in air. But, when my ear didn't clear and the pressure took me by surprise I was unable to thinK rationally b/c I set myself up for failure.
The point I'm trying to drive home here is that you have to prepare you body as well as your equipment. All the best equipment in the world doesn't do you any good if your not prepared. Experienced folks feel free to add any additonal comments about what more, if anything, I could have done.