First, a hello to everyone, I think this is actually my first post.
Anyway, my daughter and I are relatively new divers, we always dive in Coz together, neither of us has ever been narc'd, but on our last trip one of our group got narc'd and it scared the crap out of both of us. We were doing Palancar Bricks if I remember correctly, down around 100' or so, I'm tail end Charlie in a group of 6 divers, my daughter is right in front of me. In front of her was a sub-group of 3 women.
We come to the edge of a wall, all of a sudden one of the women goes over the edge and starts kicking straight down. I'm looking at her, thinking "*** is this woman doing??" The divemaster sees her and starts banging the crap out of his tank. No response. He goes after her, probably caught her about 140' or so. Pulls her back up to our depth, and he's giving her all the signals - "Are you OK?" She's nodding, giving the signs, all looks good. Until he lets go of her, at which point she reaches down and pickles both of her weight bags and starts shooting to the TOP like a cork now. The divemaster is right behind her the whole way, fighting to slow her down while the rest can do nothing but watch and wonder what the HELL is going on. All the way to the surface they go, we can barely see them.
So the rest of us kind of circle the wagons, thumbs up, let's go up, but SLOW. I fully expected to be boatless when we got there, I figured sure as heck the lady was bent over sick and they'd be flying to shore and we'd have to swim in or flag down the nearest boat. So we get up to about maybe 30', took our sweet time getting there, all of a sudden HERE COMES OUR DIVEMASTER BACK DOWN!!!!!??????? And he's motioning us to follow him, we're going to finish the dive??? Sure enough, that's exactly what we did. Maybe 20 mins later now we come up for good, here's the narc'd lady in the boat, and she's laying in the sun like nothing happened. Besides the fact, of course, that she said she had absolutely no memory of any of it.
So that was our first, and hopefully last experience with narcosis. What still boggles my mind is that the lady appeared to have absolutely no ill effects (besides the memory fuzz-out) despite what appeared to be a completely WRONG ascent. Lesson learned for both my daughter and myself, without question. We started paying a LOT closer attention to each other for the rest of that week.
Anyway, my daughter and I are relatively new divers, we always dive in Coz together, neither of us has ever been narc'd, but on our last trip one of our group got narc'd and it scared the crap out of both of us. We were doing Palancar Bricks if I remember correctly, down around 100' or so, I'm tail end Charlie in a group of 6 divers, my daughter is right in front of me. In front of her was a sub-group of 3 women.
We come to the edge of a wall, all of a sudden one of the women goes over the edge and starts kicking straight down. I'm looking at her, thinking "*** is this woman doing??" The divemaster sees her and starts banging the crap out of his tank. No response. He goes after her, probably caught her about 140' or so. Pulls her back up to our depth, and he's giving her all the signals - "Are you OK?" She's nodding, giving the signs, all looks good. Until he lets go of her, at which point she reaches down and pickles both of her weight bags and starts shooting to the TOP like a cork now. The divemaster is right behind her the whole way, fighting to slow her down while the rest can do nothing but watch and wonder what the HELL is going on. All the way to the surface they go, we can barely see them.
So the rest of us kind of circle the wagons, thumbs up, let's go up, but SLOW. I fully expected to be boatless when we got there, I figured sure as heck the lady was bent over sick and they'd be flying to shore and we'd have to swim in or flag down the nearest boat. So we get up to about maybe 30', took our sweet time getting there, all of a sudden HERE COMES OUR DIVEMASTER BACK DOWN!!!!!??????? And he's motioning us to follow him, we're going to finish the dive??? Sure enough, that's exactly what we did. Maybe 20 mins later now we come up for good, here's the narc'd lady in the boat, and she's laying in the sun like nothing happened. Besides the fact, of course, that she said she had absolutely no memory of any of it.
So that was our first, and hopefully last experience with narcosis. What still boggles my mind is that the lady appeared to have absolutely no ill effects (besides the memory fuzz-out) despite what appeared to be a completely WRONG ascent. Lesson learned for both my daughter and myself, without question. We started paying a LOT closer attention to each other for the rest of that week.
.... , but hopefully I won't have a next time and that buddy doesn't show up. It surely was bazaar.
