AfterDark
Contributor
You're 200 feet back in the cave, kicking along and enjoying the scenery. Looking at your SPG you decide it's time to turn around and head out. But when you turn around you realize that the flutter kick you were taught in your OW class kicked up the silt behind you ... and your way out looks like an opaque wall. Having not been trained, it never occurs to you to zero the line before swimming into that mess. And having never experienced anything like it before you don't realize just how it'll be until you suddenly can't see a thing. Completely blind, you lose your direction. You bounce off the walls a few times, making the soup even thicker, and realize that you don't know whether you're going into or out of the cave anymore. You can't see your gauge, but you know that the single tank you're wearing has to be getting low. Furthermore, all this stress is causing you to breathe heavier than normal. There's no option to surface. There's nobody to help you. You don't know what to do.
How calm do you think you're going to be when it suddenly occurs to you that unless by some miracle someone comes along to help you, you're going to die here?
Panic is the body's natural response to being faced with a problem you don't know how to resolve. It's an instinct we're all born with. On land, it provides a last-resort method of keeping us alive. In the water, it's a death sentence.
I can pretty much guarantee you that every untrained cave diver (and most trained ones) who ever died in a cave was in a state of panic as they sucked that last breath out of their tank ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
Zero vis; just another RI shore dive no big deal.