I've written about this before, but my worst dive to date was a training dive that, in retrospect, I had no business doing. I was anxious about the people I was diving with (because they were way more experienced than I was, and I was afraid they'd be impatient with me, and as it turned out, they were), worried about being in the dark (the dive was not originally supposed to have been a night dive), and worried about the skills. It began badly, with multiply mucked up S-drills and corking, and went on to some narcosis, midwater disorientation, getting off the line on ascent and losing ALL sense of where I was in the water, discovering I couldn't read my depth gauge at night (bifocals in the mask followed shortly), needing to be escorted to the surface by the instructor, where my weight belt promptly fell off.
I sat on the seawall after with tears in my eyes and wondered if I had any business diving.
Luckily, the instructor and my buddy were both very kind. Nonetheless, I have avoided that buddy assiduously ever since.
Lessons learned: 1) If you have significant concerns about your fitness to do a given dive, you probably shouldn't. 2) If you have signficant concerns about your ability to carry out any of the proposed parts of a dive, your team deserves to know about them BEFORE you get in the water. 3) You learn by stretching yourself, but going too far can result in big setbacks, even if nobody gets hurt.
I sat on the seawall after with tears in my eyes and wondered if I had any business diving.
Luckily, the instructor and my buddy were both very kind. Nonetheless, I have avoided that buddy assiduously ever since.
Lessons learned: 1) If you have significant concerns about your fitness to do a given dive, you probably shouldn't. 2) If you have signficant concerns about your ability to carry out any of the proposed parts of a dive, your team deserves to know about them BEFORE you get in the water. 3) You learn by stretching yourself, but going too far can result in big setbacks, even if nobody gets hurt.