Narc Panic at depth

[cerich]

am I the only one troubled by all the "pat-on-the-back" posts here? Good job! you did well! you came out alive!

some of you are missing the point! 145ft ON AIR! this dive became a statistic before a toe touched water. DUMB DUMB DUMB.


you want to avoid massive narcosis? NO DEEP AIR!

Yeah, she didn't pay enough attention on her Scuba course and allowed herself to be pulled into a trust me dive by an Instructor, who in her limited experience had reason to believe.

But you know what? You DONT KNOW WHAT YOU DONT KNOW, she now knows and anybody reading this whole post now knows that some instructors simply suck.

I recently spoke with two Instructors not tech who were on a tech course, their instructor told them to plan a dive to 100 and when they got in the water said follow me and went to 140 with both his students in tow. Then he disappeared. Yeah the instructor was horrible but his students also share some blame, who should know to plan the dive and dive the plan. They passed the course but are smart enough that now they are getting better training at the same level because they know the course was below par.

We all need lessons in life and not getting hurt while the lesson is taught is a great thing.

Chris

NAUI Course Director/Tech Instr. 17055

 

[Tavi]

Sometimes I get a "Dark Narc" in the Great Lakes. Now all my dives near home that are over 100' I use Helium.

In Warm Caribean waters this narc occurs much deeper for me. I'll go deeper before using Helium.

Part of my term "Dark Narc" is that sense of impending doom.

Glad you got back okay, and learned something!!

BTW, all of my regs are Apeks. Never had a problem at any depth.

 

[Quarrior]

This week was scary. We were diving the Blue Hole in Belize, which is an 130 foot dive. You head pretty much straight down and then swim into a cavern. Further ahead there's another drop off to 165 feet. You have an 8 minute bottom time and head slowly up.

Everything was great until we hit depth and then what I can only assume was a narcosis panic hit me. Took water in the reg and had a lot of trouble breathing, let alone anything else for a while. Thoughts of drowning at depth filled my head, and my chest was pretty constricted.

Well, I got out. I just focussed on breathing for as long as I had to, and told myself it was just the narcosis. I held the reg in my mouth with my hand. Probably due to the panic, my gauges showed I hit 145 feet on that dive.

I nearly lost it, but luckily kept breathing. Anyone else experience this sort of thing?

Surlytart,

I'm curious, you mention there is a drop off further into the cavern that goes to 165 fsw. Was the dive plan to go into that cavern and dive to the 165ft depth?

I'll not make durogoratory comments about a new diver going to 130ft because I did the same thing, fortunately for me I had no problems and like Dr Bill I don't seem to be affected much by narcosis at depth.

With regard to comments of folks saying they don't dive air below 100ft, that's fine for them. I do and do it regularly, but not below NDL as that is all I am trained and qualified for, at least for now.

 

[sea nmf]

am I the only one troubled by all the "pat-on-the-back" posts here? Good job! you did well! you came out alive!

some of you are missing the point! 145ft ON AIR! this dive became a statistic before a toe touched water. DUMB DUMB DUMB.


you want to avoid massive narcosis? NO DEEP AIR!

OK. I, too, did the Blue Hole as a relatively new diver. I did the OW, AOW, DD, and Rescue with PADI straight through. (I know . . .) I had about 9 rec dives after all of the training dives. Then I went to Belize. I know NOW that I was stupid but didn't then.

Yes, I did a "trust me" dive. To add to that, I was buddied up with someone I did not know. The ONLY word of caution was "you will want to keep going deeper so make sure you don't".

Well, we descended to the 130' limit and, sure enough, my buddy kept going. I did descend a few more feet myself to grab his fin and indicate that we needed to ascend (there's no critters down there to see anyway - the topography was cool, though).

Anyway, I did go past 130' TO GET MY BUDDY. It may have been dumb but I still feel that it was the right thing to do. When I say a few feet, I think I got to 140'.

Anyway, passing judgement on someone who indicates that they were probably narced and then saying they were DUMB, DUMB, DUMB is not constructive. They know they did the wrong thing, the depth was by ACCIDENT and narcosis contributed to that. AND they learned a valuable lesson.

My 2 psi . . . .

 

[Quarrior]

OK. I, too, did the Blue Hole as a relatively new diver. I did the OW, AOW, DD, and Rescue with PADI straight through. (I know . . .) I had about 9 rec dives after all of the training dives. Then I went to Belize. I know NOW that I was stupid but didn't then.

Yes, I did a "trust me" dive. To add to that, I was buddied up with someone I did not know. The ONLY word of caution was "you will want to keep going deeper so make sure you don't".

Well, we descended to the 130' limit and, sure enough, my buddy kept going. I did descend a few more feet myself to grab his fin and indicate that we needed to ascend (there's no critters down there to see anyway - the topography was cool, though).

Anyway, I did go past 130' TO GET MY BUDDY. It may have been dumb but I still feel that it was the right thing to do. When I say a few feet, I think I got to 140'.

Anyway, passing judgement on someone who indicates that they were probably narced and then saying they were DUMB, DUMB, DUMB is not constructive. They know they did the wrong thing, the depth was by ACCIDENT and narcosis contributed to that. AND they learned a valuable lesson.

My 2 psi . . . .

Very well said. :yelclap:

 

[Amphibious]

Anyway, I did go past 130' TO GET MY BUDDY. It may have been dumb but I still feel that it was the right thing to do. When I say a few feet, I think I got to 140'.

Anyway, passing judgement on someone who indicates that they were probably narced and then saying they were DUMB, DUMB, DUMB is not constructive. They know they did the wrong thing, the depth was by ACCIDENT and narcosis contributed to that. AND they learned a valuable lesson.

My 2 psi . . . .

Narcosis is NOT an accident. you learn about it's effects before you are ever certified. So any dive below 100ft a diver should expect narcosis. excusing diving too deep as a narcosis iduced accident is shifting the blame and excusing DIVER ERROR.

Opps! it was just Narcosis's fault, not mine ! Can I have your gear when you die?

 

[pickens_46929]

some of you are missing the point! 145ft ON AIR! this dive became a statistic before a toe touched water. DUMB DUMB DUMB.

you want to avoid massive narcosis? NO DEEP AIR!

Narcosis varys from dive to dive and person to person. One person can be very suseptable to narcosis and another might not be. Newer divers that have never experienced even a little bit of narcosis or rather recogonized narcosis, don't know the effects some times. Plently of people talk about narcosis but until you feel it and are able to recognize the symptoms of it... you just don't know.

In clear, warm water with a good mental attitude I generally don't feel narcosis until much deeper than cold, dark dives when I might have a bit of apprehension (eg. wreck penetration or overhead environment).

Until I went with an instructor for my PADI deep and Tech deep dives, I had no idea what narcosis was like. Mind you this wasn't the simple slate or padlock, or writting your name backwards. This was a dive planning slate with specific tasks (10 of them), start and end pressures, buddy's pressure and identifying specific things at depth.

That training dive helped immensely on a couple recent cold, dark and deep dives... 90' in really dark cold water... at 90' with a 39 F water temp... I could feel the wah wah's were creeping in and I knew to be more cautious... ascend a bit... not work so hard and pay that much more attention.

While I don't agree taking new divers to such a depth... 145' on air in warm, clear water might not be deep to some divers comfortable with such a dive.

I was recently in cave country when an instructor got narc'd hard at 130' during a PADI Deep class and was "assisted" by one of his DMs... At the surface, he had no recollection of the dive being called or how far into the skills they got.

He had done the dive before, many times, but like decompression sickness... it might just be your day.

 

[Amphibious]

wow, some of you people really scare me. who certified you? WahWahs? they invented trimix for a reason.

fact is anyone that wants to dive 165ft on air should have an understanding of the effects of narcosis.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

wow, some of you people really scare me. who certified you? WahWahs? they invented trimix for a reason.

fact is anyone that wants to dive 165ft on air should have an understanding of the effects of narcosis.

While I can agree with the sentiment, I think you're focusing on the wrong issue ... because there was way more wrong with this dive than the breathing mix, and had she run out of gas at depth the type of mix she was breathing would've been rather irrelevent.

I don't remember it being difficult to pull air, exactly... just to process it. I'm pretty sure I was hyperventilating, and I know I sucked air. It was a total of 20 minutes under water and I killed 2900 PSI.

Surlytart, if you're still following this thread I'd like to address the above quote ... because it tells me, quite simply, that you are not ready to be doing this type of dive ... and that the only thing that kept you out of a serious situation was luck.

First off, let's address the gas consumption. You say that you killed 2,900 psi ... out of what? Were you using a standard AL80? And did you complete this dive with only a 100 psi reserve? If so, then you cut your safety margins far too short ... and are very lucky you didn't run out of gas.

Also, I realised after that I should have probably had an 8 minute decomp stop (I think we did 5). For future reference, is this something to worry about? I was definitely off the RDP.

Blowing any required decompression time is a very, VERY bad idea. I realize that Belize has an excellent recompression facility ... but it's 2-1/2 hours away from the Blue Hole by boat. And you have to ask yourself if this sort of dive is worth the risk of possibly never being able to dive again. Before allowing yourself to go into deco, you need to progress beyond a reliance on the RDP. Even more troubling is that, given the earlier comment it would appear you wouldn't have had enough gas to honor your deco commitment in any case. That is simply a situation that no diver should ever allow themselves to get into ... it's a recipe for disaster, and I would seriously recommend that you rethink how you dive before attempting another deep dive.

What if your reg had, in fact, malfunctioned? What if someone else's had ... or someone swam up to you and slashed their hand across their throat. You'd have been in an impossible situation.

Deep diving requires more careful planning than that ... you need to have thought about these questions, and prepared for them, before attempting dives like that. There are bodies in the Blue Hole that were never recovered. Don't allow one of them to be yours.

I've always been troubled by the way the local dive companies market the Blue Hole to divers who are clearly not qualified to go to those depths. I don't blame you for wanting to do this dive ... I was a new diver when I was there, and understand the allure of wanting to see such a famous place. But I DO blame the marketeers for allowing their clients ... many of whom are too ignorant and poorly trained to know better ... to put themselves into the situation you faced.

You don't know what you don't know ... and I won't ask you to trust me on this ... but I fear that the only thing that keeps some of these divers from coming home in a body bag is pure, dumb luck.

One final question ... was the dive fun? Because in reading the initial post it doesn't sound like it. But at least it was an exercise in stress management, and I guess that's something positive to take away from the experience ... as long as you make it a learning one.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[sea nmf]

Narcosis is NOT an accident. you learn about it's effects before you are ever certified. So any dive below 100ft a diver should expect narcosis. excusing diving too deep as a narcosis iduced accident is shifting the blame and excusing DIVER ERROR.

Opps! it was just Narcosis's fault, not mine ! Can I have your gear when you die?

Sorry I was unclear. I know that narcosis is not an accident. What I meant was that the depth she went to appeared to be as a result of narcosis. The narcosis was not an accident but the going to depth was (at least it sounded as if it was not intentional but the narcosis caused confusion - I could be wrong about this - I wasn't there).

In other words, you can be influenced by narcosis and NOT go deeper. Also, I did not mean to imply that just because someone has narcosis they are not responsible for the dive. Believe me, I am NOT one of those folks that don't take responsibility. I was simply pointing out that the depth was not intentional.

There are, in fact, some risks we take when we are new (and again when we are complacent) that we should not take. Sometimes it is as a result of the dangers not being stressed enough (as in "who certified you") or not paying attention, or youth. It really doesn't matter which it is, they are risks.

I wouldn't do a trust me dive NOW. But I didn't know what I didn't know when I was new. It is boards like this that help in getting that information out. Good for us!