Lessons Most frightening moments

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After seeing how the post I wrote about the reverse block resonated with people, I would like to make another post today, namely about the most frightening moments I've ever had.

It's easy, particularly for novice divers, to think that people like myself, with decades of experience, thousands of dives and a deck of c-cards have everything under control and nothing bad ever happens.

I wrote about the reverse block because of that. I wanted to show that I am still human and I can still make mistakes. On the internet there is a strong tendency for (technical) divers and instructors with a lot of experience to project an image of themselves as always solving problems correctly, always making the best decisions, and in the case of instructors in particular, having a monopoly on good ideas that lead to perfect students diving perfectly.

None of that, of course, reflects reality at all.

So I will start. I urge experienced divers to share their own stories.

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First
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1985. I was certified as AOW and we were making a deep dive along a wall. The bottom, for all intents and purposes, at the bottom of the wall was unsurvivable. A diver who diving with a group slightly ahead of us got caught in a large ball of discarded fishing line that he didn't see. He started sinking. The incident started at 42 meters. My buddy and I had just started our dive and we saw this happening. Nobody in his group did. We went after him. This was the first time I had dived deeper than 42 meters. I couldn't tell how deep we were when we caught him because the (analogue) depth gauge I was using was pinned at its maximum depth. This was also my first deco dive or at least my first dive where I was "off the tables" and unable to to know how to ascend. I was, at that time, unaware of oxygen toxicity, gas management and ascent protocols. We returned (at a rapid pace) to 30ft. (10m) and waited there until our tanks were empty on the assumption that any damage done by our deep incursion would be fixed by that. Upon surfacing we didn't know if we were going to get the bends or not. I was, frankly, scared. It still gives me the heebiejeebies to think about this incident more than 30 years later. We did something there that was completely out of control (also the rescue) and we got off easy.

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Second
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2002, I think. I was working as a DM. We temporarily lost a diver during a dive. The situation was that we were on a platform at 25m and doing some exercises for the AOW (deep) dive. A group of divers (maybe 6) descending LANDED on us and kicked up so much silt in their attempts to slow down before impacting the bottom that the visibility went from 5m to black-out in a matter of seconds. I grabbed the two divers right in front of me and dragged them out of the silt cloud. One of them turned out to be our diver and the other one turned out to be one of the idiots who landed on us. We were missing a diver. We surfaced. Naturally our divers were told to surface if they became separated but this diver did not. He remained where he was and waited to be rescued. On the surface we decided that I would search for the missing diver because I had the most experience of everyone (including the instructor). At that point I was a DM but I was already technically trained. I had very limited time. I went back down and eventually found him but it was luck. He survived and my beard got grayer overnight. If I couldn't have found him in the next 5 min his death would have been on my conscience until I died. This was so frightening to me that I nearly abandoned all plans I had to become an instructor.

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Third
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The accident. My team saved the life of a diver who ran out of air during an AOW training dive (by another group, not mine) and was left for dead on the bottom at 18m. We acted quickly and professionally and got him into the hands of paramedics within about 10 min. As an aside, the fact that the Dutch paramedics were able to be on scene so quickly was no small part of this! He looked dead when we retrieved him. He lay in coma for several weeks after the incident. Doctors had basically written him off when -- unexpectedly to all -- he woke up and subsequently made a reasonable (albeit not full) recovery.

The impact on myself and on the members of my team was substantial, particularly because of what we viewed as our 'mistakes'. One diver (the DM) stopped diving. He started hyperventilating during the descent to find the "body" and after that he started to hyperventilate on EVERY dive. He stopped diving.

To me it changed EVERYTHING about how I view training and my role as an instructor. I didn't organize things on the surface as well as I could have, if I had had a second run at it. Yes, I had the EMS on site in 10 min. Police, paramedics, trauma doctor, helicopter, fire department with a boat, a private boat.... all of that I had..... but I was overwhelmed and not communicating as well as I could.

Someone tried to chase my (uncertified) OW students into the water to go search. He didn't know that they were uncertified and I ripped him a new one in a way that I regret, giving in to the emotion. An NOB (CMAS) instructor showed me by example how to control the dive site in a way I had never learned, I missed seeing a diver (the DM who caused the accident) displaying passive panic. It only became apparent to me when they had to take him away by ambulance when he collapsed.... it was MUCH more messy scene than I had ever imagined and I was not in control as well as I would expect from myself. At one point, once the EMS had control of the surface situation I grabbed another diver (a DM) and went searching myself. This was a mistake. I can't get over the mind set that drove me to ACT when I SHOULD have been coordinating! I'm like the guy who charges into a burning building because I can't fight the urge to DO SOMETHING! I HATE that about myself.

Since that time (it's been years) I've been replaying that event in my mind and thinking, "if I had only done XXXX then YYYY". It drives me CRAZY to think that if we were sharper we could have found him 30 seconds or a minute earlier and his recovery could have been better. The fact that he survived is utterly astounding. These things never end like that.... but I feel responsible for the fact that it took so long.

This was a formative moment in my diving. I considered stopping as well but eventually decided not not to. To this day I cannot -- and will not -- teach or participate in the Rescue course, even though I may be the one instructor in my circle who is most qualified to talk about the differences between theory and practice. It's just too intimidating.
 
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As a newbie diver, i descended down to approx 100 ft to check out a nice wreck with some buddies that ive met.
Everything started out fine, we descended down the line, had our look around and decided to start heading back once one of us reached 100 bar.

Unfortunately , the local guide seemed to be confused at some point as to where the line is, as we did not want to surface in open blue water with out a marker ( a lot of boat traffic and some waves).
As we kept looking for the line, i had noticed my air is starting to go dangerously low, when i hit 50 bar i told him im going up, line or no line, i still had to do my safety stop.

As i was about to start to ascend with a buddy, the guide rushed over to me, pulling me on the leg and telling me to wait, sort of pleading.
As a newbie, i didn't think much of it and thought "Maybe this guy knows what he is doing, maybe the rope is right near by and i cant see it, ill wait for a second. "

With all of the excitement and a little bit of pressure i did not notice my air supply was running out very very quickly, as i remembered to check my SPG i had seen the needle between the 10 bar and 0 bar marker, needless to say this has caused almost instant panic and a minor heart attack.

Luckily, i always keep an eye out for where my nearest air source is, so i knew my buddy was not far away. i instantly started swimming his direction (about 25 feet) and signaling that ive run out of air.

After he gave me a confused look for a moment or two, he realized what has happened and pulled his octo towards me.

As i was reaching for his octo, mere seconds from reaching it, my air supply ran out. it was my first time experiencing this in real time, and it felt like somebody has clamped my mouth.

Thankfully, i managed to grab his octo with no fuss and we both instantly started to ascend , not really giving a **** about the local guide who bugged off to seek someone from the group.

After hopping back on the boat, i noticed the local guide and his buddy pop out of the water with the guide himself breathing off the guy's octo....

Needless to say this was a real wake up call for me, but also an interesting experience to learn from.

the subsequent shouting on the boat that came almost instantly after that was quite amusing as well, everybody was giving this guy **** for the stupid things he did and he couldn't seem to be phased by it, he kept to claiming what he did was the right thing... go figure...
 
On a vacation to warm water, a Canadian "snowbird", overweight and significantly aged, began doing "calisthenics" in front of us on the boat ride out, scantily dressed in a traditional Canadian garb - Speedo.... :fear:

The most terrifying event in my 30 year scuba life...
 
On a vacation to warm water, a Canadian "snowbird", overweight and significantly aged, began doing "calisthenics" in front of us on the boat ride out, scantily dressed in a traditional Canadian garb - Speedo.... :fear:

The most terrifying event in my 30 year scuba life...
I have been present for similar terrifying events, good thing we both lived through them, to tell the tale
 
@scubadada

Yeah, it was fun and nice until things started going bad towards the end, could have ended much worse.
Thankfully no one was hurt and i had gone back to that location with a different guide to fully experience it under regular conditions. it was great.

scuba diving became a huge passion for me sine then, and i currently have 140 logged dives in almost a year, just completed my safety & dept specialties as well. Always looking to improve my skills and enjoy diving some more.
 
@scubadada

Yeah, it was fun and nice until things started going bad towards the end, could have ended much worse.
Thankfully no one was hurt and i had gone back to that location with a different guide to fully experience it under regular conditions. it was great.

scuba diving became a huge passion for me sine then, and i currently have 140 logged dives in almost a year, just completed my safety & dept specialties as well. Always looking to improve my skills and enjoy diving some more.
Glad to hear. You would probably agree with me that there is absolutely no good excuse for running out of gas.
 
Glad to hear. You would probably agree with me that there is absolutely no good excuse for running out of gas.

I totally agree, i cannot even think of a situation like that happening to me now. I always check.

Altough its not excuse, those were the days i just started diving and really didint have much experience at all. especially with deep dives.
Now i know roughly how much air i use at different depths, back then i did not think of the fact that the deeper i go the quicker ill run out of air, so i never thought of checking the SPG more frequently . Thankfully, lessons were learned from these mistakes.
 
This is exactly why I will not go dive with another DM until I feel confident to make these kinds of decisions on my own. As you can see by my number of dives, I am new to diving but I have people I trust around me. All my dives have been with the same DI who knows me, my skills and my history. I want to go dive other places but if I ever end up diving with a DM like the one in your story, I want to know enough to make decisions. I know it will be a while before I get there though.

So I have my own story - not anywhere near as scary as yours - and some on this board may laugh at my silly newbie experience. But it was my first real lesson in safety.

I was on my 4th dive for my OW. I was the only person in the group who wasn't at least AOW. That was my husband. Everybody else on the boat was rescue, DM or DI. My husband and I were the only ones on the boat with less than hundreds of dives - a very seasoned group who all had their eyes on us.

My husband/buddy was having problems with his regs during the dive - occasional wet breath. He wasn't phased by it. Towards the end of the dive, we were at about 20 feet just coming up for our safety stop when his regs started failing intermittently. He was only a few feet from me and I pointed to my octo. He reached for it and tried to pull it towards him but couldn't.

There is this thing some people/dive ops do where they bend the octo hose and put it in a D ring on a BC. I'm not fond of the practice but there was no keeper on my rental BC so that's the way I set up my gear. The group descended to the sandy patch, and as people started to swim away for our dive, my husband approached me and gave me a carabiner as a tank banger - at a point when nobody else in the group could possibly have noticed. I clipped it in the first spot I found. Turns out it was in the loop in the octo hose. This is why my husband couldn't grab it later when his regs were failing. He ended up doing a CESA and was fine.

But I have huge guilt about that. Should I have know better than to clip it where I did? Should my husband have know better than to give a newbie a carabiner? We talk about this a lot. Our last dive trip (my second) didn't give us the opportunity to buddy - he got sick and we had only one dive together. But this next trip, we will be working with our DI on things like buddy breathing (I'm better on air than he is :wink: ) and other things we should be able to do as buddies. I am also doing my AOW on our next trip.

I would appreciate any advice from you and the other seasoned divers on this board about things we should be working on together on our next trip.

What I have done since that dive (lessons learned)
- bought a dozen octo keepers to make sure I will have a supply just in case the one on my BC is missing
- realized that underwater is not the best place to add something to my gear
- bought my own BC so I will be super familiar with it
- bought my husband his own regs :wink: mostly because he will never trust rental regs again

something happened on your open water test dive. fourth dive ever. not your fault. I too also had a problem on my open water test dives. third dive my reg registered 650 psi on way up and at that point it was completely empty. the tank that is. swam over to DM and let him know at about 40 ft deep and used his octo. next dive before going in the new reg registered 3700 psi on an aluminum 80. he said just come up at 1400 instead of 700 and it should be about right.

after that i spent all my money i had on a top of the line titanium reg thats bullet proof. and an air integrated dive computer. and i take them everywhere no matter what. I dont trust any resort dive masters ive ran into some that are down right crazy. was dynamited in the philippines and the dive master was letting us all know its ok no problem dont panic. Uh huh.....
 
I was diving with my buddy Tim about twenty years ago on a site in 170 feet a few miles offshore. We had a dive plan that included 23 minutes on the bottom followed by a thirty minute+ ascent. We dived our plan and even hung a few extra minutes at twenty feet to watch jellies float by. I was getting cold so I headed up to the boat. I rinsed and disassembled my gear, showered and changed into dry clothes while I waited for Tim.

I went out on the bow to see if he was coming up anytime soon and his bubbles were nowhere to be seen. I told myself I would give him ten more minutes before calling the Coast Guard. I waited fifteen minutes and was about to get on the radio when he surfaced a couple hundred feet in front of the boat. We each had double 120s with two 40 cu ft deco bottles. I was up in a little over an hour while he was under for two hours. I was angry and amazed at the same time.

When Tim got on the boat he told me he likes to swim up current after finishing deco to feel like he really dived rather than simply floating up and down a line. It wasn't long after that that I stopped inviting him on the boat. A couple of years later he disappeared while diving at Farnsworth Bank, a series of offshore pinnacles off the backside of Catalina Island. His body was never found. When I heard he was missing I immediately thought that he was just swimming up current, except this time he failed to surface.

I've known a few other divers who died while diving but this one hit me the hardest. It was easily preventable but probably inevitable. We used to tease him about not logging his dives. We told him to do it so we could later write about his death. He always found that funny.

Im new but this sounds dangerous to me to go to 170 ft alone and it sounds like you both made many deep dives like that. I always thought when you solo dive you dont dive technical? Isnt the risk of gas narcosis very high at those depths? Anyway just a newbie asking questions but it seems that might have been the cause of the ex dive buddy passing?
 
I'll add my scariest self inflicted moment. (buddies and others in the water gave me a different kind of scare occasionally)

A few words of synopsis: Inadequate planning, lack of training, unexpected conditions and poor decisions making all added up to a bad situation I placed myself in. In hind sight: pivotal moment in my diving where I began dedicating funds to quality specialized instruction. It was when I realized being comfortable underwater and having good mentors in one environment doesn't translate to safely diving in unfamiliar situations. Being experienced underwater doesn't mean trained for all conditions.

First off, it's years ago and my worst experience in untrained cave diving.

Discovered an unlined passage of a cave, belly bottles / slung tanks tight passage. Had a ball of string with me. Laid it until I ran out of line. Decided to continue exploring a passage a little further. No obvious side chambers or forks.

Or so I thought.

I reach my 1/2 and turn the dive heading back out. To my horror I didn't realize the ceiling was heavily silting as result of my bubbles (and probably sloppy finning) and I was in less than 1ft viz. (Couldn't see my hand at 1/2 arms length.) No line. I'm now feeling my way along the wall by memory. Expecting a turn in the passage.

Not feeling it.

I continue to a dead end. Now retrace in 0 viz. Find the passage which was lower than I remembered. Viz improves. Enough particulate in the water to reassure me I'm retracing my path. Narrow section. Tanks off, continue to wiggle.

Jammed. Wedged in a restriction that I didn't remember being so tight. Continue. Stuck worse. Realize I've jammed myself into a dead end. Back out eventually.

Air a concern.

Discover another narrow passage. Looks familiar. Wiggle through. Back on track. Continue to my line.

Pull my line as I go. Bad co2 headache from forced conservative breathing expecting to run out of air before the exit. (dead calm and iron will counting to maintain a slow full breathing pattern that stretches each breath)

Exit uneventfully, continued swimming subsurface in open water. 14 breaths later the reg breathed heavy and I was out of air. Marveled at why I bothered to waste time removing the line as I went.

I hope the take away lessons learned are obvious. Any questions welcome. I realize I was nearly a statistic.

Humbly,
Cameron

P.s. My other significant scare was buddy separation (3ft viz) from a special needs diver who needed assistance. I found him unharmed. But it was horrifying for the 2-3 minutes it was ongoing.


aaaaaaaaaand this is why ill never cave dive. I know I would love it and ive sat in 60 ft of water at cave entrances and the feeling is awesome going in a bit with a huge entrance but I hear too many stories of tunnels under water including from my dad who cave dived around 1962 or 63. Dangerous stuff.
 

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