Should I be dead? (Last night's dive)

[cavemanxxx]

Glad to hear u made it back in one piece. It sounds to me that you were diving beyond your capabilities. I do underwater photography, and regularly get facinated with some animal and stick there.......... even with the task loading and the distractions of subjects, i can say i ever ran out or got suprised.

No, i aint the world best diver, but there is one fundemental........ i think you should opt out of dives which maybe out of your depth, and you should be true to your self and not proud to say " no, I will give this one a miss"

Accidents can happen, but are maybe externally induced accidents i.e. attacked by trigger fish, hit by an un-expected down current..... but OOA and situations u described, it sounds like you should not have been there to start off with.

500 Lbs should of been enough for quite some time, there should not have been any panic, or need to urgently buddy breath

 

[MercutioATC]

You say that your buddy thought you said that they thought you had 100psi left and needed to buddy breathe when you really had 500psi left and asked to buddy breathe.

Were you low on air or not?

I fully recognize my position as a newbie here, but what's the problem (in practical terms) with being at 500psi on an ascent? For that matter, what's wrong with 100psi if you're still breathing?

I've never had to buddy breathe before, but I hit 500psi on my safety stop on my 8th dive (total) about 2 weeks ago. I was 15' from the surface with 2 minutes to go, so I didn't sweat it.

Had I been at 60' and hit 500psi, I'd have signaled an ascent and still had time for a nice slow ascent and a safety stop. If you weren't narc'ed, why the urgency at 500 (or 100) psi?

 

[Scuba]

We got down to depth fine, swam around and looked at lost anchors etc. down under the trees. It was nice and calm. I was keeping an eye on my air (started with 3K) and when I reachd about 1500 we started setting up for our ascent. We began our ascent and slowly started surfacing. Somehow between 120' and 60' when I looked at my console, I was down to about 500 lbs. I asked for a buddy breathe. I started breathing and couldn't reach my console. It was night and we where suspended at about 60' with no ascent line and I became disoriented. I *wrongly* assumed that we where still at about 60' doing a short safty deco (I don't have a comp but usually follow my buddies comp which is bad but I seriously can't afford $400-$800 for a dive computer right now). I was happily breathing off my buddies octo when out of nowhere my head broke the surface! I had enough time to say, "This is bad" before dumping all my air. I draw a blank on what happened after that.

And yes, I probably was 'narced. I tend to get real peaceful anywhere past 60 or so feet and just don't care about much.

You display narcosis symptoms, as others have pointed out. Disorientation, loss of manual dexterity, fixation of ideas, poor judgment, memory loss.

As you probably know narcosis affects different individuals differently and this can vary from dive to dive. You may be quite susceptible, and should be extra cautious and diligent monitoring your "condition".

Learn all you can about narcosis and the measures you can take to ameliorate its effects. Use of different gases. Ascend slightly as needed from level where impairment is noticed until it clears, then try descent again. Make it an instintive habit to check your gauges every 1 or 2 minutes. LIMIT your DEPTH to non-impairment level.

 

[the sharkman]

Dude,
I'm not going to bag on you. Who hasn't made mistakes. I'm just glad that your alright. While thinking and re-thinking this whole scene, also keep in mind that diving with three is WAY different than with two. Way different. I enjoy it with three, but you all need to be on the same page. Glad your ok.
:guitar:

 

[Knavey]

MercutioATC once bubbled...


Had I been at 60' and hit 500psi, I'd have signaled an ascent and still had time for a nice slow ascent and a safety stop. If you weren't narc'ed, why the urgency at 500 (or 100) psi?

If I were at 100 psi indicated, you might REALLY want to start taking actions as if you were out of air. When was the last time your pressure gage was actually calibrated to a standard? I work on/read a lot of gages on a daily basis in the power industry. We calibrate our transmitters every 6 months but RARELY does a gage get worked on until it looks like its not working right. Some of those calibrations don't last the week on the transmitters (for you guys with hoseless) so take care of your equipment. And our crap doesn't get dragged through the mud, banged up against a tank, or otherwise abused like many gages are in the dive community. That 500 psi reading may really be your last breath if you are looking at it pessimistically. At 100 psi, every breath you take might as well be the last one on the tank.

Anyone here know the standards for a dive gage accuracy? 10%? 1%? On a 5000psi gage with 10% allowance on accuracy, 500 psi might really be ZERO! Anyone in an LDS that actually works on these gages want to let us know the answer?

If I am at 500 psi, my dive had better be in the final minutes. If I am at 100 psi, I will probably be breathing off of someone else or have them VERY close at hand.

Urgency is perhaps the wrong word...at those numbers, you had better be in COMPLETE control of your situation, because it can only go downhill fast from there until you hit the surface.

That being said, I am EXTREMELY happy to be reading about this as an analysis where we can actually critique the involved divers. Too often this would have been an accident/death report. Asemili, thanks for letting us in on your dive, and I am glad that I am able to learn from it just like it sounds like you are doing.

 

[MercutioATC]

And no, I wouldn't be comfortable at 60' with 100psi under any circumstance. I've just heard of divers that have the "surface with 500psi" rule so ingrained that they treat it almost like an OOA situation.

 

[pipedope]

The dive profile is not so bad but that bounce at the end has major potential for BIG problems.

Drill this into your head for emergency response;

1. Breathe
2. STOP
3. Breathe
4. Think
5. Breathe
6. Act
7. Breathe
8. Check results
9. Breathe
10. repeat as needed

Now go read about bounce diving and deco at the WKPP site;
http://www.wkpp.org/decompression.htm
Read the whole thing but especially the bounce dive part;
http://www.wkpp.org/articles/Decompression/why_we_do_not_bounce_dive_after_diving.htm


Remember, in most problem situations it is FAR better to do nothing than it is to do the wrong thing.

Specifically, don't dump your BC at the surface. You are on the surface, you KNOW you are low (out?) on air. You don't know if you will get DCI or not. If you were embolized badly you would know it. Stay at the surface until everything is sorted out. If you skipped a *manditory* stop you may want to go back down and do the stop. Commercial divers (and the Navy) do most of their deco in a chamber and they are allowed 5 minutes between surfacing and getting back under pressure in the chamber so there is no rush.

I would always prefer to be dealing with a case of DCI on the surface than looking for a body at depth.

I thank you for having the courage to post your story.

 

[jbichsel]

Sounds a lot like Travis, Windy Point, down into the old pecan groves.

I've got probably over 150 dives there. One bad experience getting caught in fishing line at 120'. My buddy and I had to take turns cutting each other out and exceded NDL.

Our instructor found us at 60', beginning our deco stops. We wrote on our slates what happened, showed him our computers (USD Datascan 3). He went back and brought stage bottles. We took 2 hours to get back to air. We then spent time taking fish hooks out of our wetsuits. I had 11, Marc had 15.

This was in 1992 or so. We stopped doing deep dives off Windy Point.

Luckily we had surface suppoprt, it was daylight, and we didn't panic.

 

[SCDiver]

Ok his last post was at 7:29 PM last nite..... has anyone heard verbally from asemili yet? He should be through the 24 hr period if he isnt in a chamber somewhere.

asemili get back with us on a status update....

 

[polkster13]

Let me first of all start off by saying that I too have experienced a similar situation several years ago. I was doing a solo class and did a 100 foot night dive with the class and then we were to split off and return to the surface by our selves. My first mistake was tring to follow the other divers down too fast and not accilamating to the colder water which caused me to hyper-ventilate. I felt that my regulator was not giving my enough air, so I switched to my backup and after several attempts to clear it, was still getting water with my air. Not a lot but enough to start a panic. I looked around and everyone else had dissappeared. I then switched back to my primary (which was extremely difficult to breath on) and started an OOA ascent. My computer was screaming at me the whole time I was asscending (as I was going too fast, but at the time I did not case! I just wanted to get out of there). I made it to the surface, swam back to shore and then dropped down to twenty feet and stayed there for about 10 minutes. I then surfaced and stayed at the surface for another 10 minutes before exiting the water. My maximum depth was around 96 feet and I was there for only a couple of minutes. The point here is I was attempting a dive that I was not prepared to do nor was I comfortable doing and I tried to do it anyway. Pride got in the way of common sense.

Since that episode, I have gone back and gotten additional training including my Rescue Diver and am currently working on my DM. I have also decided not to do any solo dives at night. I am just not comfortable with that (dive within your personal limits). I have also switched from a jacket style BCD to a backplate with wings. I have also switched to a 7 foot primary hose for buddy breathing. I now only dive solo in the day and my maximum depth is 60 feet (and only if I can't find a buddy to dive with). I am currently switching over to a DIR gear configuration. I am not quite DIR compliant but I am trying to get there. I won't ever be completely DIR compliant as I will still dive with other divers that are not DIR divers.

One thing you said you did was buddy breath from your dive partner's octo which was on his inflator hose. Even when I was using that setup, I was taught that if your buddy says he is OOA you give him your primary and then the diver with air switches to his octo if it is on the inflator hose. You then being on a longer hose should have given you plenty of room to access anything you needed, including guages. If you were in fact breathing off of an octo attached to an inflator hose (being a remora) I don't see how you could have done anything except let your buddy control the ascent. And as long as you have air in your tank, regardless of what your pressure guage says, you should not switch to your buddy's system unless you are practicing an OOA situation. In fact it would be a good idea to start practicing a short OOA drill at the beginning of every dive, especially if you are diving with someone that has dissimilar equipment to yours.

You and I are both very lucky to be alive and I have changed my approach to diving and I hope you will do the same. I will also say that your best investment you will ever make in diving would be a DAN membership.