Underlying Fears
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uranylcation
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So my most visited sites along Oregon coast average 5 to 10 ft of vis normally, and on bad days I can hardly see my hand and often hit bottom before I could see it. No problem for me. But during my first dive in Clear Lake, which is famouse for the ultimate visibility, I was totally disoriented for some good minutes. Everything just became so unreal, and my bubblies soon started going sideways. I would never expect spacial disorientation under such condition before, it just caught me off guard. Of course it did not take too much effort going from muddy to clear, and once I figured it out, the rest of dive was a total enjoyment.
So long as you realise that your bubbles should be going straight up (except in a current), it should be fairly easy to properly orientate yourself with regards to up/down. If you can't see your own bubbles, then I would wonder why you would be in the water in the first place.
After that it comes down to relax, breathe and relax some more.
My buddies and I dive Beaver Lake quite often. We were there last weekend matter of fact, we dove the Day Use area by the Bluffs (the gate is locked till March). I always joke that Divers around here should get the Night and Low Vis cert with their open water card lol. The visibility will get better, the amount of rain we have had has really impacted the norm.
As to the heebie jeebies, my first experience came at the Mob House on Lake Tenkiller. We were diving in maybe a foot of vis and I rounded a corner and saw a hand sticking out of the silt, scared the piss outta me. Turns out a long time ago a dive shop put a mannequin in the lake and the arms fell off. lol. I am no expert, but continuing to dive Low Vis has pretty much solved my worries of the unknown. Now if there were alligators or crocodiles in Oklahoma I wouldn't be diving, those scare me.
As to the heebie jeebies, my first experience came at the Mob House on Lake Tenkiller. We were diving in maybe a foot of vis and I rounded a corner and saw a hand sticking out of the silt, scared the piss outta me. Turns out a long time ago a dive shop put a mannequin in the lake and the arms fell off. lol. I am no expert, but continuing to dive Low Vis has pretty much solved my worries of the unknown. Now if there were alligators or crocodiles in Oklahoma I wouldn't be diving, those scare me.
Diver Dan 28,
You mean like this one?
This is from Alexander Springs State Park, Florida. This little guy is only 4 feet long or so, but I did see his big brother when I was snorkeling downstream, swimming by with a fish in its mouth. The gator could only see my snorkel top, but I could see the whole gator except for the nostrils and eyes. It stopped in front of me, and I didn't move for about five minutes. Finally, because there was a crowd yelling at me, I broke the surface to answer and the alligator saw me, turned and swam straight into what I thought was the far bank, but was actually a reed wall. When I was watching it, I said that if it dropped that fish, I was outa there!
SeaRat
You mean like this one?
This is from Alexander Springs State Park, Florida. This little guy is only 4 feet long or so, but I did see his big brother when I was snorkeling downstream, swimming by with a fish in its mouth. The gator could only see my snorkel top, but I could see the whole gator except for the nostrils and eyes. It stopped in front of me, and I didn't move for about five minutes. Finally, because there was a crowd yelling at me, I broke the surface to answer and the alligator saw me, turned and swam straight into what I thought was the far bank, but was actually a reed wall. When I was watching it, I said that if it dropped that fish, I was outa there!SeaRat
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I actually at times prefer low vis diving. I find it relaxing as there are no visual distractions. Freshwater I don't worry about sharks, jellyfish stings, or kraken. I have a reel I will tie off and gradually expand my dive area to get a an hour or longer in the water. In one foot of vis you can see a helluva lot. If you choose to!
One of my biggest pet peeves is to hear an instructor at a local site say to a student complaining about the low vis "don't worry about, once we're done you'll never have to worry about this again. Just sign up for the trip to XXXX (that I am going to make several hundred bucks on) the shop is doing next month! You can also get your AOW, and DM on it!" or other such nonsense.
When I have a student start to complain, which they rarely do since I thoroughly prep them on our local conditions, I take them back in the water and show them all the things there are to see.
Freshwater jellyfish at times, hundreds of tiny fish swimming in formation in the grasses on the bottom, the mussels and freshwater clams that filter the water and will open and close based on proximity of your finger, the bluegill nesting sites, and the "treasures" you can find in some of our lakes that are leftover from when they were not underwater. One of the coolest this last season was a mini bass baitball. It looked like a huge clump of algae at first under a dock. As I got closer it was the size of oh, three basketballs on top of each other and hundreds of tiny fish all just swimming around in a pattern that stayed tight.
You need to make the best of what you have and choose to be positive about it. I do my best to get my students so excited about local diving that seeing a catfish within a foot of them just staring them in the eye is almost enough to give them an orgasm!
The opportunities for macro photography may not be as colorful as Indonesia or as varied as the Caribbean, but they are there. Best of all you don't need to spend a day or two traveling and hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to get in the water.
One of my biggest pet peeves is to hear an instructor at a local site say to a student complaining about the low vis "don't worry about, once we're done you'll never have to worry about this again. Just sign up for the trip to XXXX (that I am going to make several hundred bucks on) the shop is doing next month! You can also get your AOW, and DM on it!" or other such nonsense.
When I have a student start to complain, which they rarely do since I thoroughly prep them on our local conditions, I take them back in the water and show them all the things there are to see.
Freshwater jellyfish at times, hundreds of tiny fish swimming in formation in the grasses on the bottom, the mussels and freshwater clams that filter the water and will open and close based on proximity of your finger, the bluegill nesting sites, and the "treasures" you can find in some of our lakes that are leftover from when they were not underwater. One of the coolest this last season was a mini bass baitball. It looked like a huge clump of algae at first under a dock. As I got closer it was the size of oh, three basketballs on top of each other and hundreds of tiny fish all just swimming around in a pattern that stayed tight.
You need to make the best of what you have and choose to be positive about it. I do my best to get my students so excited about local diving that seeing a catfish within a foot of them just staring them in the eye is almost enough to give them an orgasm!
The opportunities for macro photography may not be as colorful as Indonesia or as varied as the Caribbean, but they are there. Best of all you don't need to spend a day or two traveling and hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to get in the water.
dumpsterDiver
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I have a somewhat different view on fear and anxiety. It is natural to be afraid of water, it is natural to be afraid of sinking into deep water, it is natural to be afraid of things you can't see in dirty water, it is natural to be afraid when you begin to lose the most basic frame of reference.. up, down and especially "out" of the situation.
I think the first step is to acknowledge this fear/apprehension/anxiety. The individual needs to be taught methods and techniques to effectively deal with these physical challenges, but they also need to be able to combat the psychological stressors as well.
Progressive, incremental exposure that results in successful outcomes is probably best from my personal perspective. The stressor probably needs to be physical and psychological to be an effective "vehicle" to teach mastery of the external AND internal challenge.
The diver also needs to acknowledge the potential for irrational fear to come "knocking at the door". If these fears/thoughts are allowed to progress, a panic attack can occur. As best I can tell, the person needs to have some psychological strength and perspective to help them distinguish a natural level of fear versus an unwarranted level of fear.
About a dozen years ago, I was unexpectedly hit with a wave of irrational fear/anxiety that in this particular situation took me totally by surprise. I'm not sure it rose to the level of a "panic attack", but it was probably close. The potential for a horrible, unimaginably bad outcome was there, but I was able to calm myself down with an internal dialog. The weirdest thing was that it had not occurred before, it has not occurred again and i did not see it coming. The incident itself was not so important, but it was a good lesson in my personal level of anxiety control and also that there is the potential for really bad thoughts to creep into my own head - without warning.
FYI,, the incident was watching my wife and three kids pile into the van to go to the store or something and a wave of fear came out of nowhere that had me envisioning the potential that they just might - not ever come back... a terrible accident on the highway or something.
Even after many thousands of hours in the water, I still can feel irrational anxiety creep in. For example, I can snorkel in clear, warm, 80 feet deep water and be perfectly comfortable jumping in when I cannot see the bottom. But...run the boat out a bunch of miles offshore and jump off when I know the water is 1,000 or 2,000 feet (bottomless from my perspective) and it just has a different "feel" to it. This added level of anxiety is totally without any rational basis, sometimes it does not occur, but when it does, I don't ignore it, I acknowledge it, feel it and then go through an internal dialog that allows me to put it into perspective and essentially eliminate it completely within 2 minutes or something. It really is kinda ridiculous - I basically have to tell myself to stop being such a "GD, irrational Pussy - you've done this hundreds of times before".
This situation is nowhere near as "scary" as swimming in cold murky water and being dependent on a machine to live.
This example and many others give me the perspective that there is no substitute - that a diver needs to slowly progress through more challenging situations in order to develop the confidence and psychological tools to compartmentalize the fears/anxiety and to also be able to distinguish rational, justifiable apprehensions versus ones that they have dealt with successfully dozens or hundreds of times before.
It takes time and patience to be comfortable in dirty water and I personally do not like being in any water that I can not see 2-3 feet or so.. just too much potential for entanglement for me to find the experience enjoyable as a recreational pursuit. If there is any current that can push me into something, then I want even clearer water.
I think the first step is to acknowledge this fear/apprehension/anxiety. The individual needs to be taught methods and techniques to effectively deal with these physical challenges, but they also need to be able to combat the psychological stressors as well.
Progressive, incremental exposure that results in successful outcomes is probably best from my personal perspective. The stressor probably needs to be physical and psychological to be an effective "vehicle" to teach mastery of the external AND internal challenge.
The diver also needs to acknowledge the potential for irrational fear to come "knocking at the door". If these fears/thoughts are allowed to progress, a panic attack can occur. As best I can tell, the person needs to have some psychological strength and perspective to help them distinguish a natural level of fear versus an unwarranted level of fear.
About a dozen years ago, I was unexpectedly hit with a wave of irrational fear/anxiety that in this particular situation took me totally by surprise. I'm not sure it rose to the level of a "panic attack", but it was probably close. The potential for a horrible, unimaginably bad outcome was there, but I was able to calm myself down with an internal dialog. The weirdest thing was that it had not occurred before, it has not occurred again and i did not see it coming. The incident itself was not so important, but it was a good lesson in my personal level of anxiety control and also that there is the potential for really bad thoughts to creep into my own head - without warning.
FYI,, the incident was watching my wife and three kids pile into the van to go to the store or something and a wave of fear came out of nowhere that had me envisioning the potential that they just might - not ever come back... a terrible accident on the highway or something.
Even after many thousands of hours in the water, I still can feel irrational anxiety creep in. For example, I can snorkel in clear, warm, 80 feet deep water and be perfectly comfortable jumping in when I cannot see the bottom. But...run the boat out a bunch of miles offshore and jump off when I know the water is 1,000 or 2,000 feet (bottomless from my perspective) and it just has a different "feel" to it. This added level of anxiety is totally without any rational basis, sometimes it does not occur, but when it does, I don't ignore it, I acknowledge it, feel it and then go through an internal dialog that allows me to put it into perspective and essentially eliminate it completely within 2 minutes or something. It really is kinda ridiculous - I basically have to tell myself to stop being such a "GD, irrational Pussy - you've done this hundreds of times before".
This situation is nowhere near as "scary" as swimming in cold murky water and being dependent on a machine to live.
This example and many others give me the perspective that there is no substitute - that a diver needs to slowly progress through more challenging situations in order to develop the confidence and psychological tools to compartmentalize the fears/anxiety and to also be able to distinguish rational, justifiable apprehensions versus ones that they have dealt with successfully dozens or hundreds of times before.
It takes time and patience to be comfortable in dirty water and I personally do not like being in any water that I can not see 2-3 feet or so.. just too much potential for entanglement for me to find the experience enjoyable as a recreational pursuit. If there is any current that can push me into something, then I want even clearer water.
Exactly like that. Snakes, sharks, no biggie but Aligators, just put pure terror into me for some reason.Diver Dan 28,
You mean like this one?
SeaRat
This is about the most worrisome creature I have to contend with in most of my diving here. (See the crawdad photo below.)
DumpsterDiver, I understand to a degree what you are saying, but some of that comes from where you start in your diving career. I grew up diving, and diving in cold, limited visibility rivers here in Oregon. I started scuba diving in 1959, when I was 14. I took classes after having dived for about four years, and finally got certified LA County in 1963. I also was a swim team member, and the fear of "falling" while diving never entered my head.
Later, in the USAF, I got over my fear of falling by becoming a pararescueman (PJ) and Master Parachutist. So I don't even think in those terms when diving, and never have.
However, for people who start diving as adults, there are all kinds of phobias and fears to deal with. The fellow I have pictured is a Chinese guy who had just graduated from diving classes when he wanted to accompany me on a dive in the Santiam River. I knew a great little pool, and we dressed up and walked down to it. Almost as soon as his head went underwater, he was again at the surface trying to "climb" out of the water. In NAUI in those days, we called this the "panic exhaustion syndrome," and I had to get him to the shore and let him sit for a few minutes to get his head back in order. Then we tried again, with much the same results. The third time, I held onto his hand, and we simply got underwater in about 3 feet of water, sitting there. Then, again hand-in-hand, we started swimming in shallow water. After about five minutes of this, we moved into deeper water, and proceeded upstream. We found a paddle on the bottom, then a pair of cutoff jeans. I was hoping we wouldn't find a body in the pool, and we did not. Someone had been rafting and had last some stuff in the rapid just above this quiet pool. After about half an hour, we swam back downstream and exited, and he thanked me for my patience. This was his first open water dive since certification, and he really needed a confidence-builder. By keeping contact, we went one step at a time and he became more comfortable, then started enjoying the dive.
I like diving because I become weightless, I float, and it is like I am in outer space without having to worry about gravity anymore. That is the message I am trying to show with these entries. Fear of falling should have no place in diving, as this is the antithesis of diving's weightlessness.
Jim Lapenta, I really liked your post. I have not done any "travel diving" whatsoever. No resorts, but I continue to enjoy diving locally. Why? Because there is so much to see in my little strip of freshwater rivers. There is freshwater sponge, small insect nymphs, the red-sided shiners spawning in the early summer, Chinook salmon, steelhead, and twice I have seen sturgeon (once a six-footer which turned and hightailed it away when we met face-to-face, and one a 10+ footer which simply let me watch him for a few minutes, then leisurely swam upstream, turned around and swam back to look me over, then went upstream again). I dive with the SeawiscopeEY on my mask, so I can enjoy the very little life forms on the rocks and on the bottom. I watched a hydra feeding on a leaf, for instance, And I saw a sculpin feeding right under my nose with this device.
Ever Young: a true near vision aid for divers
Here is a video I made last summer of one of my dives which documented the salmon kills because of unusually warm water in the Clackamas River near Portland, Oregon.
SeaRat
Ps this new format doesn't allow easy modification of text; the term I used above should read "hyperpnea-exhaustion syndrome."
DumpsterDiver, I understand to a degree what you are saying, but some of that comes from where you start in your diving career. I grew up diving, and diving in cold, limited visibility rivers here in Oregon. I started scuba diving in 1959, when I was 14. I took classes after having dived for about four years, and finally got certified LA County in 1963. I also was a swim team member, and the fear of "falling" while diving never entered my head.
Later, in the USAF, I got over my fear of falling by becoming a pararescueman (PJ) and Master Parachutist. So I don't even think in those terms when diving, and never have.
However, for people who start diving as adults, there are all kinds of phobias and fears to deal with. The fellow I have pictured is a Chinese guy who had just graduated from diving classes when he wanted to accompany me on a dive in the Santiam River. I knew a great little pool, and we dressed up and walked down to it. Almost as soon as his head went underwater, he was again at the surface trying to "climb" out of the water. In NAUI in those days, we called this the "panic exhaustion syndrome," and I had to get him to the shore and let him sit for a few minutes to get his head back in order. Then we tried again, with much the same results. The third time, I held onto his hand, and we simply got underwater in about 3 feet of water, sitting there. Then, again hand-in-hand, we started swimming in shallow water. After about five minutes of this, we moved into deeper water, and proceeded upstream. We found a paddle on the bottom, then a pair of cutoff jeans. I was hoping we wouldn't find a body in the pool, and we did not. Someone had been rafting and had last some stuff in the rapid just above this quiet pool. After about half an hour, we swam back downstream and exited, and he thanked me for my patience. This was his first open water dive since certification, and he really needed a confidence-builder. By keeping contact, we went one step at a time and he became more comfortable, then started enjoying the dive.
I like diving because I become weightless, I float, and it is like I am in outer space without having to worry about gravity anymore. That is the message I am trying to show with these entries. Fear of falling should have no place in diving, as this is the antithesis of diving's weightlessness.
Jim Lapenta, I really liked your post. I have not done any "travel diving" whatsoever. No resorts, but I continue to enjoy diving locally. Why? Because there is so much to see in my little strip of freshwater rivers. There is freshwater sponge, small insect nymphs, the red-sided shiners spawning in the early summer, Chinook salmon, steelhead, and twice I have seen sturgeon (once a six-footer which turned and hightailed it away when we met face-to-face, and one a 10+ footer which simply let me watch him for a few minutes, then leisurely swam upstream, turned around and swam back to look me over, then went upstream again). I dive with the SeawiscopeEY on my mask, so I can enjoy the very little life forms on the rocks and on the bottom. I watched a hydra feeding on a leaf, for instance, And I saw a sculpin feeding right under my nose with this device.
Ever Young: a true near vision aid for divers
Here is a video I made last summer of one of my dives which documented the salmon kills because of unusually warm water in the Clackamas River near Portland, Oregon.
SeaRat
Ps this new format doesn't allow easy modification of text; the term I used above should read "hyperpnea-exhaustion syndrome."
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Here's a thought. There are fears that make sense and are real and those that MAY be imaginery. I like a lot of what DumpsterDiver says. I can be in 20' of water and farther from shore than I like with only a mild tidal current (today...), and a fear that I will cramp up (didn't-lots of finning, but also Potassium Pills...). We all have our issues and are different in how we respond. I hate spiders and kill them any time I can. My wife is a Life Coach--lot's of fears out there. Throw going underwater into it and who knows what pops out.
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