Could you do it?

[D_B]

Thank you for your posts Lamont, I think I have enough understanding now, that I would go up with someone if they snatched my reg and bolted ( I did preface my earlier response on that thread with ... fear might cause me to pull the reg from there mouth .. I no longer think that would be the case)

As for this thread and would I be able to not save someone, if I knew that doing so would put me at great risk? I still don't know, but I do still think that it would make a difference if it was someone I know, or love.

Thanks for giving me a better understanding, Lamont, you too Jeff, and as always, good post by TSandM

I will add that I do feel responsible for my buddy's wellbeing and would do everything I could to help them .. they are my buddy .. I also think you should dive like your solo .. think about what you do first , "be prepared" like a boy scout, don't just blindly rely on your buddy (or DM) to help you out

 

[Diver Dennis]

What you quoted is a good attitude to have about decompression. It is incorrect to state that you can go only to 10 fsw and have to decompress though. At that shallow of a depth the ppN2 in even fully saturated super slow tissues is under the 1.0 ambient at the surface and the tissues will not bubble (you need an oversaturation / overpressurization gradient in order to form bubbles). For the tissue compartments which can reach close to saturation in a recreational dive the tissues can also withstand roughly 2 times or more oversaturation over ambient before there is significant bubbling on a direct ascent at 60 fpm. That is what defines an "NDL dive".

Now there is decompression and offgasing that needs to occur on those dives. You'll probably feel better and you'll bubble to offgass a lot less if you treat all NDL dives as deco dives and do slow ascents. You may also run a risk of DCS if you do NDL dives with fast ascents over a long period of time (the larger the numbers the more it may catch up to you). It may be particularly bad to do back-to-back rapid ascents since the free phase bubble load from the first rapid ascent may get shunted on the second dive and cause fairly bad type 2 DCS.

So, yes, you want to be cautious in your day-to-day diving and minimize your DCS risk. But, no, you don't want to be overly fearful of DCS in the event you've got something that is really potentially life threatening going on. You simply have not ongassed enough inert gas into the fast tissues which are going to bubble significantly enough to give you a bad hit. Your blood will only have about a 2.5 x oversaturation compared to ambient and that can be tolerated. This is different from a technical diver who may have 5x or more oversaturation compared to ambient in their fast compartments and needs to do some decompression or they'll explosively foam in their blood (or you drop back down like Sheck did and turn a 5x oversaturation in a 2.5x oversaturation which is tolerable).

Do you want to do 100 dives like this? No. Do you want to do 100 dives like in sets of two repetetive dives? Hell no -- that's particularly bad since bubbles from the first dive may shunt on the second. But on a single dive to save a buddy, the risks of type 1 DCS (pain) are probably 1 in 100 or lower, and the risks of type 2 DCS are probably neglibible.

I think someone mentioned breathing fast as you go up. Is that a good procedure? I would like to know what you suggest as the proper procedure in the event this happens. Again, I admit that I thought DCS was more of a factor in this scenario and was wondering if there was something you could do to mitigate it if you find yourself being dragged up. Obviously, getting negative and trying to slow them down, if you have time, would be one thing.

 

[TSandM]

Jeff, you're my kind of diver.

When I dive, mentally I have made a commitment to my buddy or buddies to be there for them -- to be a resource and an aid, and to do whatever is within my power to help them (which is why I really need to practice the toxing diver rescue that I bombed so badly in the last class I took, as Kirk knows ). Peter and I have talked, for example, about what happens if you're in a cave and something goes wrong, and you end up with enough gas to get one person out, but not two. What would you do? I don't know the answer, because I think the people who are saying you can't know what you'll do until you're there are quite right. But I can't see myself swimming off and leaving someone to drown if there is any hope of saving them at all.

 

[piikki]

I think D_B summed up a bit what this thread has done. Given a little more info for making a smart decision in a situation that regular/newer OW divers maybe consider to be extremely dangerous when it indeed may be is not.

I’d be interested in hearing more about other examples, like OP’s original example, Chad. Established knowledge of consequences regarding those kinds of situations must be harder to come by – and there is another boogieman lurking. If you know you will run out of air yourself, get possibly lost or swept away while ending up in depths you never encountered… would you go save someone? It’s way easier for the ones who know and trust their chances of getting hurt are minimal to state they’d never yank a reg out of someone else’s mouth. What about in a situation where the risk is more unknown but pretty grave. What about when your gut says odds are really not in your favour if you go to help – do you still do it?

I have an example that reveals what a monster I am. I was on a charter where two men bragged how they had just ran out of air on 120ft dive that day. One added joyfully how he “runs out or very low on air nearly every time” hehe. The wreck we were diving was at 95ft in swift current. Both men had trouble getting off the boat, one had tank on backwards and it had to be swapped, and then they proceeded drifting under the vessel before being able to grab the line. We had tried to sway the captain from telling that the wreck’s silty cargoholds can be penetrated - to no avail. These guys were going in. Their equipment was less than average OW diver – for example snorkeling fins on one, and definitely no reels etc.

When waiting for our chance to get into water in this mess, we looked at each other with buddy. “We are staying on the other side of the wreck from these two”. Then I said to buddy “ and make sure you won’t go saving them from the dark holds because then I will be forced to come too”. I am nearly 100% sure I would not have ventured to overhead to risk our lives in an environment that I have not trained for - even if I expected someone to die because of no intervention. I still think it would have been stupid to make possibly 4 victims out of sheer stupidity of two.

 

[FredT]

As a quick aside, due to a "critter interaction" I've been forced to do an emergency buoyant ascent from about 160' in about 15 seconds without getting bent. Very special circumstances posted elsewhere but it does prove that even a very fast ascent from deep is not necessarily as deadly as PADI scare tactics would lead beginning divers to believe.

Deep excursions, also if short, are not as deadly as some believe either. Most divers will find that what they can do in an emergency is way beyond what they THINK they can do. The real danger is to trust that the adrenaline rush can compensate for gross stupidity. It can't. Stupid can still get you very dead very fast. When the world turns brown react quickly with a reasoned response and all survive. Get stupid about it and nobody does.

FT

 

[cerich]

I would much rather have a very fast uncontrolled assent from 120' having been there only a minute or two than a very fast uncontrolled assent from 60 ' after 40 minutes.

On deep no deco recreational dives it is your fast tissues that limit you, on shallow it is slow tissues (somehwat simplified), on deep dives you have much less residual loading whole body wise when you follow recreational no deco. tables

 

[gangrel441]

Though I assumed that the risk of a rapid ascent is a bit higher than many of you more experienced divers state, I do agree that there is no such thing as a risk-free rescue. The risk is one of the factors that must be assessed (often, in the blink of an eye). I did learn to dive back in the days when recommended ascent rate was 60fpm, there were no safety stops, and navy tables were the norm for recreational diving. In an actual rescue, a safety stop would never even cross my mind. With the buddy rocketing for the surface, I would have done what I can to arrest his ascent while he is on my air. If that became impossible, I would have probably pulled my reg back, though I am seriously rethinking that after reading many of these posts.

I do believe, as has been stated here already, that a rescue of a diver who has gone much deeper than planned, especially one who has exceeded MOD on a Nitrox dive, or a diver heading beyond recreational limits on a single AL80. Of course, the go/no go decision is far from cut and dried, but these situations put the rescuer at considerably higher risk.

 

[drbill]

I've made some rescues over 45 years of diving. However, I don't think one really knows how far they would go to save another person by endangering their own life until the situation actually presents itself in real time.

I'd like to say I'd risk my life to save any of my regular buddies, but I can't say that with any certainty. The proof would be in the pudding. Fortunately 85-90% of my diving is solo, so the only one I need to worry about "saving" is myself!

 

[WJL]

The real danger is to trust that the adrenaline rush can compensate for gross stupidity. It can't. Stupid can still get you very dead very fast. When the world turns brown react quickly with a reasoned response and all survive. Get stupid about it and nobody does.

FT

This is a good point, but my (limited) experience with adrenaline in emergencies is that it pretty much makes you stupid. It's as if the messages your brain is sending you are all in capital letters and phrased as simple commands. E.g., RUN AWAY! HIDE! HELP THAT PERSON! DO SOMETHING!

It's when you get the adrenaline-fueled DO SOMETHING command that you tend to do the very next thing that pops into your brain. This way be good or it may be bad, but the compulsion is hard to overcome.

Adrenaline is a CNS stimulator that is heavily biased toward action, to the severe detriment of contemplative thinking. It is released into the brain when doing something - anything - is generally better than doing nothing. Which is why training and training and training to the point of rote response is a good idea - so you don't have to think, you just react.

 

[FredT]

Step one is to think the word PANIC! to remind you not to. Once the proper action is quickly determined the adrenaline rush is fine.

FT