My first training Ice Dive.
Getting in the hole I found that I couldn't get myself to exhale properly, I was breathing high in my chest and not getting all the air out, so the hole crew tossed some more weight in my pockets. As I went down through the hole I was honestly more than a little freaked out by both the light change and just passing through all the ice.
Once under we started swimming out to the end of the rope. The lead was the instructor, another student was on the first drop line, I was on the second on a drop line. I immediately began having buoyancy problems, but being already a tad disoriented, I didn't realize I was basically going straight down until I hit the bottom at around 35'. The hole was giving out rope thinking of course that we were swimming out.
I hit the bottom, and caused an immediate silt out. I realized I was having problems with buoyancy, swam up a few feet, and finally and started adding air to my BC. I tried to look at my gauge and see where I was, but I couldn't see it in the silt.
I didn't realize I had put too much air now in the BC, until I cleared the silt and slammed my back into the ice. I rolled over to see what I hit, and trying to let some air out of my BC, accidently caught my dump valve and went down into the silt till I landed in the ground again. By this point I was tangled up in the rope pretty badly as well.
This seemed like forever, but it was only really a few seconds. My instructor had put the second student in the hole and was coming back down for me, and at this point I was just in something of a panic. When he got to me I was still in the silt, trying to figure out which way was up. He grabbed my harness and tried to swim us up at a slow pace. By this time the silt had made it's way up to where we couldn't see the hole. I'm trying to untangle the rope I'm pulling on it to unhook it from around my body.
Of course, three pulls on the rope means "Get me the hell out of here," so away I went. Since the surface crew had already had a diver brought up informing them of a problem, they wasted no time getting me out. So I shot from about mid-way in the silt up to the ice (ouch) and then out the hole.
They got me out, got me out of my gear, and put me on O2 as a precaution as soon as they heard I'd bounced twice.
So I'm sitting there feeling like crap, and I'm catching a few mumblings about how the vis was ruined, so I'm feeling guilty about that as well.
Lessons learned:
(1) if you can't descend and you know you're weighted properly, the solution is not more weight.
(1a) I'm in charge of my weight, no one else.
(2) if you're uncomfortable with a dive, stop and work that out first. I'd have done much better if I'd have just gone down the 3' of ice and back up a time or two before doing the dive.
(3) when things go wrong, don't do the first thing that comes into your mind (air in the bc in my case) as the solution. Even when it's the right thing to do, if you aren't calm you'll probably do it wrong.
On the positive side, after going home, getting a good night's sleep, and having a bit of a talk with my instructor over the prior day's events, I completed 3 good dives on the weekend and found ice diving to be one of my favorite pastimes!