Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
freediver:Anyone ever have, or witness, a shallow water blackout? Care to discuss?
I'm sorry to hear about your loss. You mention using proper dive gear above, are you a SCUBA diver? Diving of any kind has its dangers. If you are interested you might consider posting some details of this in the accidents and incidents forum where it could serve as a warning to others.emmava18:my older brother died five years ago of shallow water blackout when he was 19. he was under water for about 10 minutes before he was found and the resussitation failed. aparently if it had worked he may have been seriously brain damaged.
he had been hyperventilating before going under water. it seems clear to me that doing this is the most ridiculous risk and it should be discouraged by everyone. he learnt about it at Coral Cay (a conservation company) which organise conservation programmes which you can pay to help out at. my brother saved for a long time to pay to be part of one of their programmes, and i remember his emails saying that he felt like he was destroying the coral rather than helping it. so i don't think they're a great organisation at all. especially as they condone hyperventilating before going under water. they should discourage it actively as it increases chance of shallow water blackout by a huge amount. free diving is a hugely irresponsible sport in my opinion. use proper diving equipment, or don't try to stay under water for any considerable length of time. what is the point in that, when you could die the most pointless of deaths by running out of breath. what a waste of life and a brilliant person and brother.
I agree with that statement one hundred percent. It's usually the goal oriented dives that lead to a hightend danger of black out. And spearing falls smack dab into that catagory. I think spearing can be just as safe as competitive freediving but unfortunately most spearos don't take the time to dive safe. If they even have a buddy they are typically spearing at the sametime several meters apart which totaly nullifies the advantage of having a buddy. I'm not trying to get down on spearos I'm only pointing out that it's an all to common problem among the spearing community imo.freediver:it was while spearfishing, which is inherently more dangerous than freediving.