JonG1
Contributor
Do you have a link to the thread pls Cathal
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Post in thread 'Anxiety that doesn’t seem to leave'Do you have a link to the thread pls Cathal
Diving a rEvo since 2013. I should have bailed out once but I was not able to. I had a massive panic attack coming up from a wreck. I was at 55M on the ascent with 100 mins of deco left and my breathing went off the charts for about 3 minutes. During those 3 minutes I absolutely knew that even if it meant a rapid ascent I could not get off the loop onto a 2nd stage.
I managed to get my breathing back to normal after about 3 minutes and the next day I ordered a BOV! I posted the reason for the panic attack on another thread.
To answer your first question, yes, I was not able to physically stop breathing for long enough to take the DSV out of my mouth and put the OC reg in.2 questions:
When you say that you knew you could not get off the loop, what do you mean? You could not physically or psychologically get yourself to take the DSV out of your mouth long enough to switch to an OC reg? Or you knew that you did not have enough BO gas to handle the rate at which you were breathing?
You said the triggering event was "diver error" (in the other thread). Was it an error in the way you assembled or were diving your unit? Or an error nothing to do with your actual CCR?
To answer your first question, yes, I was not able to physically stop breathing for long enough to take the DSV out of my mouth and put the OC reg in.
To answer your 2nd question, its a bit longer - The unit was working fine and it had been built correctly. The context is important here, I was diving the unit 2 years at this stage, it was my first deep dive of the year, I had just finished the MOD2 the year before. So basically a newbie at deep stuff.
I had built the unit the night before, it was working perfect, the wreck(Justicia) was a 3 hour steam out. So while packing the unit onto the boat I turned on the Dil and inflated the wing a small bit when putting the unit on the bench on the boat. I then turned off the dil (or so I thought) and ran the cargo strap across the unit to secure it to the boat.
At this stage, the cargo strap was running across the rEvo MAV and unbeknown to me it was pressing down on the Dil button. To make this worse I had actually not shut off my dil cylinder fully. My dil cylinder was actually still open just a fraction but enough. Between the 3 hr steam out, the engine noise and being in the cabin I never heard the hissing of the dil going into the loop or the OPV firing, I also never noticed when kitting up the contents gauge that would have shown that there was about 5 bar of dil left.
When kitting up on site the main clue that I missed was when I put the loop in my mouth, it was over pressurised, I never stopped to check out why. My other main error was that I never bothered to check my contents gauges kitting up as I was a **** hot CCR diver and sure I had checked them on shore.
When prebreathing the unit worked fine. I pressurised the wing and I injected dil into the loop. I first noticed something was up at about 6-10M when going down the shot. It was hard to breathe off the loop so I pressed the MAV a couple of times as I dont use the rEVO ADV. I heard nothing, at this point I am at 15M and I press it again and still nothing and I am now at 20M and approaching the lazy line junction on the shot where I place my name tag.
I now can't breathe. I check my dil gauge and its zero. So I pull out the LP whip off my BO and connect it to the MAV and it works fine and I am breathing normal. So decision decision, do I turn the dive or do I keep going down? I go down off course as I have a perfectly good rebreather with new sorb, 5 working cells and now an Ali 80 cft of Diluent plumbed into the unit. Another massive mistake.
But as I descend my mind is frantically racing with worry as to what had happened to my diluent, what happened? So I continue on in this frame of mind for 40mins at 70M. I was absolutely miserable on that dive and on the ascent at 55M or so thats when the panic attack occurs with a 100 minutes of deco left.
I experienced a panic attack on every dive thats season and it only went away over the course of the winter. The next year I was fine. So yes, the entire incident was preventable and it was user error, one that I learned a hard lesson from tbh.
It was 7 years ago now. I had a separate dry suit Inflation bottle, I’m guessing I entirely relied on that for inflation throughout the dive, yet another whopper of a diver error on my part!Many, many thanks for sharing that story! Such a good opportunity to learn from other people's experience!
New question, just for my edification: What did you use for wing and/or suit inflation once your onboard dil was empty and you had your offboard plugged into the MAV? Guessing you had separate drysuit inflation and you used drysuit for buoyancy through the dive?
Note to self: do a few rounds of hose switching drills: wing, drysuit, offboard dil, offboard O2...It was 7 years ago now. I had a separate dry suit Inflation bottle, I’m guessing I entirely relied on that for inflation throughout the dive, yet another whopper of a diver error on my part!