OWC - a big fear was realized, but everything is ok

[chickweed]

This past weekend, my 13 year old daughter and I headed to Destin FL to get in our open water dives. Hurricane Isaac messed with us, so we weren't able to dive in the gulf or the bay (that is a different sad story), so we did our dives at a natural spring one hour inland from the beach. We were in full wetsuits as the temperature of the springs is 68 degrees.

We made it through dives 1 and 2 with no problem. Day two (yesterday) we were back at the spring diving in a torrential rain. Visibility was lower than day one, but still, everyone seemed fine and I sensed that my daughter was comfortably confident as we got in the water. We did dive 3 with no issues. Dive 4, the very last skill of the entire course was mask removal and replace. I'm still not sure what happened, but I think that when the cold water hit her face, she closed up her airway... then not knowing why she wasn't breathing, she sucked water in her nose, went into panic mode and bolted to the surface with the instructor trying to hold her back.

I went up to comfort her and she decided she could give it one more try. After the instructor spent a little time on the surface practicing with her, she came back down, but now had a look of anxiety in her eyes. When it was her turn again, she pulled off her mask, she felt compelled to hold her nose and I'm guessing she did something that messed with her sinuses and she immediately felt pain (behind?) her ears. She quickly cleared her mask and told the instructor she needed to go to the surface. So, we all surfaced.

The pain behind her ears was a mystery... the instructor checked out all the other sensory tests and she seemed fine other than that pain. We were told that I should take her to a doctor, but an hour after the fact, the pain was gone and she was left with a mild headache.

As she and I were debriefing, we concluded that a good thing that came out of this is that she now has a very clear picture of what panic can do to you, and she has a more mature understanding of why it is important to know and practice the skills we learned in the course.

Now, I've got to figure out how to get her some pool practice and to get her back in the open water to finish that last skill.

 

[TSandM]

First, a question about how the skill was done. Was she kneeling, or horizontal? When you take your mask off in a kneeling position, you don't have to tilt your head back very far to allow water to run down the base of your nose into your throat. This happened to me during the mask flood and clear skill in my OW class. I choked and wanted to bolt, but the instructor wouldn't let me. This WON'T happen if the person is horizontal and simply tilts the head back, because it's almost impossible to get your face beyond the plane of the vertical if your body is horizontal.

This is also an easy skill to practice in a pool or even in a sink or bathtub -- breathing through a snorkel with the mask off requires the same airway control, and you can do it in a bucket.

Having the experience of panic may not be a bad thing, if your daughter learned to recognize the sensations so that she can control them the next time. On the other hand, if all it did was raise her overall anxiety level, it may make it more difficult to cope next time. Spending the time at home working on desensitization will be very important in that case.

 

[chickweed]

We were kneeling.

 

[electrix]

Recently I was " just observing " an OW class, most of the students were having trouble clearing their mask, they would start clearing looking straight ahead and then end up looking almost straight up. I was taught and tell students to look at their belly button then start clearing and it will be clear by the time they are looking straight ahead.