OW Checkout DIve Near Miss

[b1gcountry]

<This post has been moved from the Mishap Analysis Subforum>

What Happened:
I was 16 when I took my PADI OW course 11 years ago while on vacation in Kauai. The instructor seemed competent and friendly, but I had no experience to judge her by. Only one other student was in this class, a guy about my age. We were both very comfortable around water, strong swimmers, and we both did well in the course.

Day1+2 classroom and pool. No Problems.

Day 3 Two dives at a local shore dive. Very calm conditions, several dive groups there. Pretty eye-opening experience, but no major problems.

Day 4 We plan the final two certification dives at an area with a large breakwater which formed a sort of harbor with a narrow mouth (I remember munitions were stren about the bottom, but I forget the site name.) The seas were about 4' around the opening of the breakwater, and had a long period. Inside the harbor, the waves were more like 1-2'. A Divemaster Candidate whom we never met before tagged along to get credit towards her Internship.

We drop in off a high pier with a giant stride. I was a bit nervous going in this way, and I dropped my weight belt when I splashed in. When the group descends, I realize what happened, and the instructor has to re-surface to find out what happened. I tell her and she retreives the belt.

After we all get down and started the dive, I relaxed. We head towards breakwater entrance. There is surge from the waves overhead, but I was not exerting myself on the way out. We turn around at around 35-40' on a flat bottom. I immediately notice the surge is a lot worse in this direction, and I have to exert myself to keep up. The divemaster, Instructor, and other student all seem to have an easier time with it, and I begin to trail them.

After a while of exertion, I notice my beathing getting harder. My SPG read next to nothing. The group is about 6-10' in front of me, and I have no means of getting their attention. I realized I had two options: 1. Swim balls-out for the instructor, and hope I make it before I die, or 2. Perform a controlled emergency ascent. I remember thinking it through in my head very rationally, but I know it was only a second. I decide to swim to the instructor.

Swimming all out, I sucked the absolute last breath I could from my regulator a few seconds before coming within grasp of her fin tip. I continually rehearsed the signals I would give her when I got her attention: "Low on Air" "Buddy Breathe". I signalled her, and she grabbed my BC Strap before fumbling for her octo. It felt like an eternity, but I managed to restrain myself and not grab the reg from her mouth. We both gave thumbs and ascended. I remember her being excited about how I handled the situation when we reached the surface. That was definitively not the thought going through my own head at the time.

We swam back to the dock, and I generally felt like an idiot. To top things off, I had problems exiting over this rocky area, and sliced my hand open on some sharp rock. When we got back to the truck, there was no first aid kit. After a long surface interval, I did complete my second dive uneventfully, and the instructor's enthusiasm did help to get me over the shock of it.

I will follow this up with another post of what I learned.

 

[b1gcountry]

There are a lot of points where things went wrong in this dive. Certainly, many people did many things wrong throughout, and luckily the outcome was positive. Instead of meaning this as an accusatory tone, I'd like to go through what could have been done better on the part of everyone involved, starting with myself.

Personal Improvements:
The main lesson I took from this incident, not surprisingly, is the importance of being responsible for your own air. I definitely did not check my air enough, and I was not aware of my increased consumption rate once I started exerting myself. Upon reflection, I've realized that once I turned into the current, all my efforts started to center on simply keeping up with the group, and I focused in on just that. Up until that point, I had been able to monitor my air, and conduct the previous dives without any problems. I think it was primarily the addition of STRESS and TASK LOADING that really caused me to lose track of all situational awareness during this dive. The OW course up to this point introduced a minimal amount of stress during diving up until this point. Also the whole experience, especially of monitoring my air supply, was still new to me, and as such was not truly ingrained in my head. In other words, I knew how to monitor my air supply, but because I had very little experience, it took real concious effort to do so, and when I became distracted by the stress of having to fight the surge, all concious effort went out the window, and I reverted to doing what I do my instinct. So not only do you need to be able to perform skills while diving, you need those skills to become almost instinctive, so that you no longer have to think about it.

Another mistake I made during the course of the dive is one that I am still trying to learn:that is to speak up and communicate when I am having difficulties, or apprehensions. The first instance is when I was entering from the pier. I was nervous about jumping from that height into a deep ocean with SCUBA gear on. Again, that stress caused me to forget my training, and I forgot to hold onto my weight belt. When I started swimming into the surge, again I became stressed, and again, I did not speak up. Both mistakes could have been avaoided if I had spoken up to my instructor and told her I was feeling apprehensive. On the dock we could have spent some time getting comfortable with the idea of the giant stride, or I could have found a shorter entry point, and worked up to the larger one. Under water, I could have let the instructor know I was having a hard time keeping up, and we could have slown down, and kept closer together. She would have known I was stressed, and that would have let her know to monitor me more closely. Nobody likes to be the one admit that they are stressed, and perhaps need to take a moment to slow down, but proper communication really could have prevented this issue from ever happening. One of the reasons I think this lesson is hard for me is that it doesn't catch you every time. You might feel stressed, not tell anyone, and wind up having the best dive of your life. Or you might wind up like me and OOA at 45'. If you are having a problem, and don't speak up about it, you are essentially trusting yourself to fate, and hoping the problem will work itself out...and most of the time it will, BUT sometimes it won't. This doesn't mean I was wrong about not speaking out about my issues in this particular case where I got caught, it means I was wrong EVERY time I didn't speak out, even if the other times I didn't get caught.

Next Installment: I look at my equipment issues

 

[b1gcountry]

Equipment Improvements:
The biggest glaring equipment issue I've noticed about this dive is the amount I was overweighted. Looking at my logbook for the dive, i notice that wearing an old rental 3mm shorty, I was wearing 16pounds of lead. According to my logbook, I was only wearing 12lbs the day before. I can't remember why I increased my lead. My last time wearing 16lbs was in 45degree water wearing a full 7mm farmer john, hood, gloves, and booties (although I did have a steel-100). Wearing all this extra weight on my belt I believe is really what made me so inefficient against the surge. I was in pretty decent shape at the time, no worse than anyone else in the group, and if I had been properly weighted I wouldn't have had so much trouble keeping up with everyone.

Another inconvenience was from my fins. The fins I was wearing were rentals, and they really didn't fit me well. I have size 15US shoes, and it is hard to find things in my size. The fins I was wearing were open heel fins, but I was not wearing any booties, and the fins were too wide in the pocket, but not long enough, so my feet were cramping up and the fin was cruching my toes. I mentioned this was an inconvenience, but this really did add to my stress levels during this dive, which was the cause of most of my problems, as I noted in the post before this.

Long story short, the poor (for me) equipment contributed a lot of stress for me, and helped cause this problem. Of course, the problem with both of these, and the reason I didn't speak up about them was simply because I didn't know any better. That's where my next post will lead into when I talk about the mistakes the instructor made.