Continued:
At this point the cave starts opening up. I started focusing on breathing slower, and relaxing, as I rode my scooter home. At 2000 feet, I picked up my second stage with huge relief and clipped it off. Remember that at this stage, I thought that my primary 85’s were both empty. Given that, I should have deployed the second stage in order to have an alternate source of gas at the ready. I didn’t. I can only put this down to my deteriorating state of mind.
The next 1400 feet were pretty uneventful. But just 400 feet from fresh air, the inevitable happened – my stage started breathing hard. No problem, I thought, just deploy the other stage… but I just couldn’t get to it fast enough. I was fumbling unsuccessfully with the clip, realizing with mounting disbelief that I just wouldn’t be able to do it fast enough. I was about to drown less than 400 feet from the exit, with an untouched stage on me! Rapidly running out of options, I did the only thing that I could think of – I went back onto the flooded loop, hoping to get enough breaths out of it to finish deploying the stage. It was with incredible relief that I found that I could breathe through the gurgling loop, and that the now soaking wet scrubber wasn’t yet putting out nasty enough fumes to be unbreathable. I really do believe that if it had been unbreathable, I would not have been here today to tell this story – even though I had huge amounts of unused gas on me. However, I got lucky, and within a minute I deployed the stage, and was once more breathing from a good source.
By now, I was mentally a complete wipeout. I headed out breathing that last stage, just hoping that there wouldn’t be yet another problem, as I really believe that I no longer had the mental capacity to deal with it – I was mentally drained. It had completely freaked me out that I had almost drowned only a few hundred feet from the exit, and there was nothing rational about my state of mind. Less than 10 minutes later, finally breathing my oxygen, I lay in disbelief at how badly the dive had gone, and how lucky I was to be breathing, alive, and able to exit. After about an hour of deco, I surfaced to a silent, dark summer’s night, very happy to be breathing uncompressed gas.
When I had removed all my gear, I started doing a post mortem. The first big shock was that I actually had 1500 psi in one of my 85’s! What I had assumed was an empty tank in the restriction at 3500 feet was merely a rolled-off tank. I simply hadn’t checked, in my panicked state. But the equally scary thing was, I had an empty 85, an empty 80, 1500 psi in the other 85, and 2000 psi in the second 80. I had gone through well over 300 cubic feet of gas to travel 4800 feet with the current, using a scooter for most of that distance. I’ve done 4000 feet into flow before using less than 80 cubic feet in the same cave, many times!
What had gone wrong? I remember writing once, that there is rarely such a thing as a real emergency in the caves. The key to surviving an incident such as the one that I had just encountered is to SLOW DOWN and THINK! That night, I did not follow my own advice. I repeatedly allowed myself to be conned into believing that I was running out of air, when in fact I had hours of reserve on me. I repeatedly neglected to check valves and gauges in my excessive zeal to exit the cave. And in my rush, I accidentally made a jump… silted out the cave to the point that I then lost that line… had a roll off that I misdiagnosed as an empty tank… and attached my last redundant source of gas without stopping to deploy the reg. That’s four major mistakes in a row that occurred from not slowing down and thinking, and each time, instead of realizing what had created the error and methodically fixing it, I allowed my mental state to deteriorate even further and then started moving ever faster, ever more carelessly, with a spiraling descent into a set of circumstances that really could have resulted in a drowning… while I had well over 100 cubic feet of available gas that poor planning made unavailable to me.
Put differently, it turns out that I’m not as rational as I thought. I actually do believe that I’m usually reasonably calm under pressure. But a very difficult 10 minute scramble through a restriction started a narrowing of my perception, and every problem after that moved me into an even more panicked, illogical state of mind until the truly inconceivably dumb move – not deploying my last stage’s reg – very nearly killed me.
What did save me? The answer is simple - huge gas reserves (and a bit of dumb luck). I had over 400 cubic feet of bailout gas on a dive that I had calculated needed about 100 under perfect circumstances. I needed every one of the 4 cylinders – admittedly because of an error of judgement on my part, but still, had I not had that second stage as well as two steel sidemount tanks (which seemed like insane overkill before the dive), I would now be dead. And the fact that a badly compromised loop gave me a couple of minutes of decent breathing gave me the latitude I needed to fix my idiotic error.
My takeaways –
1) On a rebreather, calculate how much gas you need for bailout or for reserve, and at the minimum, double it. On OC, it is simply not enough to just apply the rule of thirds, particularly in a complex system or when doing exploration. Thirds is an overly simple rule, and will not save you in low flow or if a secondary problem strikes. When I hear teams planning “team bailout” where between the team members they barely have enough gas to get one person out, or when I hear divers planning thirds in no-flow caves like Peacock and Mexico I cringe – on this dive I had enough theoretically to get 4 divers out, yet needed all of it. Remember, when an emergency strikes, you will need way more gas because of your panicked state of mind and because of the added time needed to deal with the emergency than you usually do. Plan accordingly. Rules like thirds are a starting point and an insufficient, bare minimum. They are not the final answer. I would really appreciate it if instructors taught this, and got their students to always turn below thirds in all but caves with howling flow and huge passages – and particularly that they enforce such an approach in places like Peacock.
2) Once you’ve planned properly, when a situation occurs that gets your attention, keep reminding yourself of what an outrageous amount of gas you have on you, and use that time to move as rationally and slowly as you can. Don’t stop doing your normal checks and protocols because of your desperation to get out of the cave. This really is an example of slow and careful being ultimately safer and probably even faster than a flat-out dash to the exit.
3) At every transitional point when moving from one gas source to another, use that time to ask yourself – just how much gas do I have in each tank? Are the tanks truly opened, and am I sure that they haven’t rolled off? Do I have an alternate to go to if my current reg stops working for any reason? Where exactly is that regulator? Are the others stowed so I don’t accidentally pick up a non-functioning reg when I need one? Be methodical and organized at all times. The same applies to any jumps or T’s. When your rationality is compromised, it is even more important than usual to make sure that your navigation is going correctly. Pick up your spools, markers and arrows, and as you’re doing so, run a mental check that the information that these devices are giving you ensures that you are still swimming to the exit.
I’m not proud of this dive, or of how close I came to a less auspicious outcome. But I’m willing to air my appalling performance in public in the hopes that each of you will reconsider just how well you will perform in an emergency, and how well you’ve planned for that emergency. Keep thinking, slow down, and allow yourself huge reserves of gas. This is particularly important on bigger dives, but equally important on even the shortest one. I hope that sharing this experience will change someone’s behavior enough to allow them to survive a dive that would otherwise have killed them.
At this point the cave starts opening up. I started focusing on breathing slower, and relaxing, as I rode my scooter home. At 2000 feet, I picked up my second stage with huge relief and clipped it off. Remember that at this stage, I thought that my primary 85’s were both empty. Given that, I should have deployed the second stage in order to have an alternate source of gas at the ready. I didn’t. I can only put this down to my deteriorating state of mind.
The next 1400 feet were pretty uneventful. But just 400 feet from fresh air, the inevitable happened – my stage started breathing hard. No problem, I thought, just deploy the other stage… but I just couldn’t get to it fast enough. I was fumbling unsuccessfully with the clip, realizing with mounting disbelief that I just wouldn’t be able to do it fast enough. I was about to drown less than 400 feet from the exit, with an untouched stage on me! Rapidly running out of options, I did the only thing that I could think of – I went back onto the flooded loop, hoping to get enough breaths out of it to finish deploying the stage. It was with incredible relief that I found that I could breathe through the gurgling loop, and that the now soaking wet scrubber wasn’t yet putting out nasty enough fumes to be unbreathable. I really do believe that if it had been unbreathable, I would not have been here today to tell this story – even though I had huge amounts of unused gas on me. However, I got lucky, and within a minute I deployed the stage, and was once more breathing from a good source.
By now, I was mentally a complete wipeout. I headed out breathing that last stage, just hoping that there wouldn’t be yet another problem, as I really believe that I no longer had the mental capacity to deal with it – I was mentally drained. It had completely freaked me out that I had almost drowned only a few hundred feet from the exit, and there was nothing rational about my state of mind. Less than 10 minutes later, finally breathing my oxygen, I lay in disbelief at how badly the dive had gone, and how lucky I was to be breathing, alive, and able to exit. After about an hour of deco, I surfaced to a silent, dark summer’s night, very happy to be breathing uncompressed gas.
When I had removed all my gear, I started doing a post mortem. The first big shock was that I actually had 1500 psi in one of my 85’s! What I had assumed was an empty tank in the restriction at 3500 feet was merely a rolled-off tank. I simply hadn’t checked, in my panicked state. But the equally scary thing was, I had an empty 85, an empty 80, 1500 psi in the other 85, and 2000 psi in the second 80. I had gone through well over 300 cubic feet of gas to travel 4800 feet with the current, using a scooter for most of that distance. I’ve done 4000 feet into flow before using less than 80 cubic feet in the same cave, many times!
What had gone wrong? I remember writing once, that there is rarely such a thing as a real emergency in the caves. The key to surviving an incident such as the one that I had just encountered is to SLOW DOWN and THINK! That night, I did not follow my own advice. I repeatedly allowed myself to be conned into believing that I was running out of air, when in fact I had hours of reserve on me. I repeatedly neglected to check valves and gauges in my excessive zeal to exit the cave. And in my rush, I accidentally made a jump… silted out the cave to the point that I then lost that line… had a roll off that I misdiagnosed as an empty tank… and attached my last redundant source of gas without stopping to deploy the reg. That’s four major mistakes in a row that occurred from not slowing down and thinking, and each time, instead of realizing what had created the error and methodically fixing it, I allowed my mental state to deteriorate even further and then started moving ever faster, ever more carelessly, with a spiraling descent into a set of circumstances that really could have resulted in a drowning… while I had well over 100 cubic feet of available gas that poor planning made unavailable to me.
Put differently, it turns out that I’m not as rational as I thought. I actually do believe that I’m usually reasonably calm under pressure. But a very difficult 10 minute scramble through a restriction started a narrowing of my perception, and every problem after that moved me into an even more panicked, illogical state of mind until the truly inconceivably dumb move – not deploying my last stage’s reg – very nearly killed me.
What did save me? The answer is simple - huge gas reserves (and a bit of dumb luck). I had over 400 cubic feet of bailout gas on a dive that I had calculated needed about 100 under perfect circumstances. I needed every one of the 4 cylinders – admittedly because of an error of judgement on my part, but still, had I not had that second stage as well as two steel sidemount tanks (which seemed like insane overkill before the dive), I would now be dead. And the fact that a badly compromised loop gave me a couple of minutes of decent breathing gave me the latitude I needed to fix my idiotic error.
My takeaways –
1) On a rebreather, calculate how much gas you need for bailout or for reserve, and at the minimum, double it. On OC, it is simply not enough to just apply the rule of thirds, particularly in a complex system or when doing exploration. Thirds is an overly simple rule, and will not save you in low flow or if a secondary problem strikes. When I hear teams planning “team bailout” where between the team members they barely have enough gas to get one person out, or when I hear divers planning thirds in no-flow caves like Peacock and Mexico I cringe – on this dive I had enough theoretically to get 4 divers out, yet needed all of it. Remember, when an emergency strikes, you will need way more gas because of your panicked state of mind and because of the added time needed to deal with the emergency than you usually do. Plan accordingly. Rules like thirds are a starting point and an insufficient, bare minimum. They are not the final answer. I would really appreciate it if instructors taught this, and got their students to always turn below thirds in all but caves with howling flow and huge passages – and particularly that they enforce such an approach in places like Peacock.
2) Once you’ve planned properly, when a situation occurs that gets your attention, keep reminding yourself of what an outrageous amount of gas you have on you, and use that time to move as rationally and slowly as you can. Don’t stop doing your normal checks and protocols because of your desperation to get out of the cave. This really is an example of slow and careful being ultimately safer and probably even faster than a flat-out dash to the exit.
3) At every transitional point when moving from one gas source to another, use that time to ask yourself – just how much gas do I have in each tank? Are the tanks truly opened, and am I sure that they haven’t rolled off? Do I have an alternate to go to if my current reg stops working for any reason? Where exactly is that regulator? Are the others stowed so I don’t accidentally pick up a non-functioning reg when I need one? Be methodical and organized at all times. The same applies to any jumps or T’s. When your rationality is compromised, it is even more important than usual to make sure that your navigation is going correctly. Pick up your spools, markers and arrows, and as you’re doing so, run a mental check that the information that these devices are giving you ensures that you are still swimming to the exit.
I’m not proud of this dive, or of how close I came to a less auspicious outcome. But I’m willing to air my appalling performance in public in the hopes that each of you will reconsider just how well you will perform in an emergency, and how well you’ve planned for that emergency. Keep thinking, slow down, and allow yourself huge reserves of gas. This is particularly important on bigger dives, but equally important on even the shortest one. I hope that sharing this experience will change someone’s behavior enough to allow them to survive a dive that would otherwise have killed them.
