After spending a good part of Thursday night at this incident and getting a couple lungfulls of smoke when the wind shifted, my lungs and sinuses didn't feel so good on Friday. Since I also didn't sleep more than about 1 1/2 hours, I called off Friday's diving. Today however, I popped an Aerosmith CD in the stereo and headed down to Whittier. Met a couple guys there who had heard I dive there a lot and wanted a tour guide. Sure! Since one of them was unknown to me I suggested a pretty easy dive down to the plane and back. The profile for this dive is a pretty mild slope in both directions with a max depth of 54' with the lowish tide. I noticed I had to pay attention more than usual to clear my ears on the way out (usually it's almost automatic - no effort), but no problems on the slow ascent.
The unknown buddy bailed on the 2nd dive, so the other guy and I buddied up and went to the tank car and debris pile. Same issues with ear-clearing as the first dive, but thought nothing of it. Max depth 71' and when my buddy reached the agreed-upon turn pressure, we headed upslope. This was a much faster ascent rate of ~ 10-15'/min. I had to slow that down a bit as my ears were squeaking and the sinus pressure was building. OW!! The ears cleared OK but the sinuses did not. The stops at 30, 20 and 10' helped a little, but I still had a screaming headache and blood-n-snot showing in the mask.
Loaded up on NSAIDs and generic sudafed and the headache's almost gone. Tomorrow's dives will most definitely be conservative and sudafed-assisted, though I'm not optimistic about finding a buddy due to the superbowl.
The unknown buddy bailed on the 2nd dive, so the other guy and I buddied up and went to the tank car and debris pile. Same issues with ear-clearing as the first dive, but thought nothing of it. Max depth 71' and when my buddy reached the agreed-upon turn pressure, we headed upslope. This was a much faster ascent rate of ~ 10-15'/min. I had to slow that down a bit as my ears were squeaking and the sinus pressure was building. OW!! The ears cleared OK but the sinuses did not. The stops at 30, 20 and 10' helped a little, but I still had a screaming headache and blood-n-snot showing in the mask.
Loaded up on NSAIDs and generic sudafed and the headache's almost gone. Tomorrow's dives will most definitely be conservative and sudafed-assisted, though I'm not optimistic about finding a buddy due to the superbowl.
and learned to never dive with sinus problems. I have horrible allergies and most of the spring/summer is spent in misery and unable to dive because of it. The best thing to do is lissen to your nose! if it's causing issues then don't dive at all untill it's clear, rx will/can cause blocks/reverse blocks quite easily.
