barb once bubbled...
That is one of my worst fears - finding a body or part of one.
I just don't know how I would react if that happened to me.
What did you do? How did you feel?
to tell you how i felt you need to know that I am a firefighter and have been on search and reacue for many years, i have done several body recoveries and have delt with numerous casualties of auto accidents over the years.
but when you are going into this type of situation you have a game face on and you have been trained to deal with this stuff.
well on this dive i was with two friends and we where all doing our depest dive to date 350 feet, so there was some anxiety there. then we set our edn to 180 as we have done many 200 foot air dives without incedent. so we backed it off a little.
upon descending we had an expected bottom time of 12 minutes, when we ran into the guy we had not reached our final depth we spent a little time there discussing what we should do, raise him, leave him, etc. I went down and hovered about two feet abouve him and could make out that he was just a skeleten now so raising him was not an opption. we decided to leave him and send back a recovery team.
how i felt at this time was more narced than i had ever been, and uncomfortable narced, and got to thinking how easy it would be for me to be in that exact smae situation, right now, i couldn't get it out of my mind. it was the narcosis messing with me. i ran into this situation without my game face on and i was deep underwater with so many unknowns. it became scary, as we ascended, at about 250 feet the narcosis went away like a light switch being flipped and i then could reflect on all the thoughts that where going through my head down there, the doom, the fear, the uncomfortableness, was all a result of narcosis.
as we sat in deco i was wondering who he was.
what i found out later was my buddies in deco knew him and one even went to his funeral, so i can only imagine what they where thinking.
I now set my END no deeper than 130 and usualy have it closer to 100. I have since done more than a 100 dives deeper than 300 feet and have never experience the same effects.