After spending a good part of Thursday night at this incident and getting a couple lungfulls of smoke when the wind shifted, my lungs and sinuses didn't feel so good on Friday. Since I also didn't sleep more than about 1 1/2 hours, I called off Friday's diving. Today however, I popped an Aerosmith CD in the stereo and headed down to Whittier. Met a couple guys there who had heard I dive there a lot and wanted a tour guide. Sure! Since one of them was unknown to me I suggested a pretty easy dive down to the plane and back. The profile for this dive is a pretty mild slope in both directions with a max depth of 54' with the lowish tide. I noticed I had to pay attention more than usual to clear my ears on the way out (usually it's almost automatic - no effort), but no problems on the slow ascent.
The unknown buddy bailed on the 2nd dive, so the other guy and I buddied up and went to the tank car and debris pile. Same issues with ear-clearing as the first dive, but thought nothing of it. Max depth 71' and when my buddy reached the agreed-upon turn pressure, we headed upslope. This was a much faster ascent rate of ~ 10-15'/min. I had to slow that down a bit as my ears were squeaking and the sinus pressure was building. OW!! The ears cleared OK but the sinuses did not. The stops at 30, 20 and 10' helped a little, but I still had a screaming headache and blood-n-snot showing in the mask.
Loaded up on NSAIDs and generic sudafed and the headache's almost gone. Tomorrow's dives will most definitely be conservative and sudafed-assisted, though I'm not optimistic about finding a buddy due to the superbowl.
The unknown buddy bailed on the 2nd dive, so the other guy and I buddied up and went to the tank car and debris pile. Same issues with ear-clearing as the first dive, but thought nothing of it. Max depth 71' and when my buddy reached the agreed-upon turn pressure, we headed upslope. This was a much faster ascent rate of ~ 10-15'/min. I had to slow that down a bit as my ears were squeaking and the sinus pressure was building. OW!! The ears cleared OK but the sinuses did not. The stops at 30, 20 and 10' helped a little, but I still had a screaming headache and blood-n-snot showing in the mask.
Loaded up on NSAIDs and generic sudafed and the headache's almost gone. Tomorrow's dives will most definitely be conservative and sudafed-assisted, though I'm not optimistic about finding a buddy due to the superbowl.