Newbie issues. What is your dive problems stats?

[fmerkel]

Classic mistake, letting small problems accumulate until suddenly they're a big problem.
It's a good thing to learn early and avoid from now on.

 

[Noemi]

It's a good thing to learn early and avoid from now on.

We are lucky to have surfaced fine and without bad consequences. It was a bad experience but a good learning one.

I made plans for the next dive to be shallow and mostly drills. A bit worried though - what if I am prone to panic? Hopefully it's just inexperience talking and I will feel better after some practice.

 

[Noemi]

I also realized that I shouldn't put all my trust into the buddy or dive guide. Bad for me and bad for the buddy.

What if when my mask was flooding they would have their own equipment failure? Or anything unexpected happened so we both couldn't keep our cool? Important question is how to prepare to this sort of situations...

 

[Rapid Star]

I also realized that I shouldn't put all my trust into the buddy or dive guide. Bad for me and bad for the buddy..

As divers we are ultimately responsible for our own safety! Having a good dependable buddy is nice, but it boils down to us as individuals to know when to continue and when to abort a dive. Reading your posts, if I had been in your situation where I couldn't stop my mask from flooding or was having ANY difficulties with my regulator I would have called the dive.

In my opinion it is better to call a dive and dive again another day then to push things to a point where it becomes a threat to my (or other divers) life

 

[ScubaJill]

I do have a very experienced buddy who is a Rescue Diver and can help in a difficult situation. He stayed amazingly calm while I was on the edge of panic and helped me sort out the issue fast.

At the last dive, I made a mistake of buying a huge sized mask. It kept flooding and after trying to clear it for about 5 minutes while following the group, I felt the creeping onset of panic and had to stop my buddy to try and sort out the issue. Didn't work, I started panicking more and lost the regulator for a second. Right away realized it won't work this way, so caught it, cleared and then since I couldn't calm down or clear the mask, we surfaced to fix the issue.

Continued the dive normally after that. I always make sure to check the air gauge often, so I notified my buddy about half tank, then 1200psi, then 1000, then 800 and then at 500 showed there is little air left. We started going up and he offered to share the air. I was surprised cause I thought my 500 would be enough to finish the ascent from 20ft. So not entirely OOA, but close enough.

The underwater time was about 45 minutes total including the attempts to clear the mask, and I didn't panic at all at 500psi since I wasn't entirely out of air.

Thank you for the advices! I do plan to take it slow and do the skill drills in safe shallow water until it's second nature.

At about 50 dives, I bought a new mask without trying it on with a regulator. On my first dive with it, I had trouble clearing it. And so on for the next 6 dives. I thought it was user error. It ruined my dives. I googled mask clearing techniques. (Mind you, I was comfortable removing my mask at depth and clearing it before I bought this new mask.) I changed back to my somewhat leaky mask and had no problems clearing it. I surmised that the skirt was too long for my face and when the regulator was in place, the skirt tended to roll inward, making clearing almost impossible. About 15 dives ago (50 dives later), I pulled out the un-clearable mask to see if I'd gotten any better with clearing and found that I still couldn't clear it.

I continue to have proper weighting issues. I hate putting air into my BC because I forget about it and float to the top. I also like to dive close to the reef and use my breathing to control my ascent and descent. I can generally handle most less-than-ideal equipment issues, because of my experience, but these things still plague me. The octopus on my new Hollis regulator was leaky and my dive would've been ruined if someone hadn't been there to fix it. I think I'm going to have to take a primer on scuba equipment.

Anyway, my point is that these things happen. You're in a new environment, everything is new to you. Take it slow. Learn how to trouble shoot issues and not panic. Can you breathe? Do you have enough air? Then you have time to figure things out.

 

[cubbiegirlem]

The one thing no one has mentioned is your comment that you'd thought you'd be fine when you saw you had 500 psi. Ordinarily you should have a goal to be back on the boat at 500 psi in case something does go wrong. In roughly 150+ dives I have gotten back on the boat with less than 500 psi three times. Once because I was chilling with some mantas at 15 feet below the boat so it was no big deal. The other two because I encountered unexpected problems on the way back to the boat (once a missing boat due to a mechanical problem and once a weight that fell out causing me to have to swim upside down my whole safety stop). For those last two, I would have run out of air had I not had a cushion. Most boats I have been on requested you back on the boat with 800 psi, but never less than 500.

I've been on dives where I felt more comfortable with a group, usually led by a divemaster. But if that is the case you need to tell whoever is leading the group (not just your buddy) when you're at a half tank (or whatever other level you agree on) so the group can turn around. Most dives I've done on vacation we have dove as a group led by a DM (but always still with buddy pairs) and the DM told us what signals to give with respect to air depending on the dive site, planned length, and depth. Usually the DMs then know where to turn around and will try to end up back under the boat or at the ascent line when the diver with the least air had 1000 psi. Then the buddy teams can surface whenever appropriate based on their air consumption. Of course this depends on whether you have a responsible person leading the dive. That isn't always the case, so I still will always make a plan with my buddy to make sure we know where we are and can get ourselves back to the boat with plenty of air. (ESPECIALLY for those DMs who say things like "don't worry about it and follow me... You can always breathe off my Octo." Belize was really the only place I saw that and I dove with a buddy with whom I agreed we would do our own dive.) But at any rate, the point is when diving with a group it doesn't help to only tell your buddy you're running low on air if you're both relying on following people who have no idea how much air you have left.

I'm sure with practice you'll get to the place where you're comfortable. But take it slow, don't push it, and dive within your limits. And that old saying is drilled into your head during OW for a reason--plan your dive and dive your plan.

 

[Noemi]

The one thing no one has mentioned is your comment that you'd thought you'd be fine when you saw you had 500 psi.

At my OW checkout dives, the instructor was always making sure we started going up when I still had 1200 or 1000 psi. This dive, I was communicating the tank pressure to my buddy every 200 psi or so after half of the tank, so I was surprised that he didn't give a thumbs up at 1200, 1000 and even 800.

Probably not very wise of of me, but I assumed he knew what he was doing (we were also swimming through kelp and he was trying to navigate us back to the entry point, so surfacing too early could've promised a long surface crawl, which we ended up doing anyways). I wasn't panicking at all, but realized we have to go up real soon, as the gauge got to the red zone. I wasn't sure he understood what I was communicating, so I was showing him the gauge in addition to hand signals starting at 1000.

At 500 he finally showed thumbs up, we started ascending and he offered me his octo. I initially didn't take it since we were going up in shallow waters, I could breathe normally and see the surface 1-1.5 meters up. At that point I was surprised about share air, assuming that if he wasn't looking alarmed that I had 500psi, then it could be a normal thing and we could go up as planned. Turned out he had over 1500 in HP100 at that point and wanted to avoid the unnecessary kelp crawl since we got a bit lost after the mask accident. Ended up crawling 200m on the surface and called it a day afterwards.

 

[Noemi]

After the dive I realized I was relying on other people to see me safe through the dive whereas it is I who has to be in charge of myself and noone else. I am actively changing my attitude and plan to practice as much as I can.

 

[Noemi]

Take it slow. Learn how to trouble shoot issues and not panic. Can you breathe? Do you have enough air? Then you have time to figure things out.

In addition to drills, is there a way to calm down at the onset of panic? At my unfortunate mask flood, I realized I couldn't clear it, but telling myself that I was holding onto a regulator and still breathing didn't help much. I tried to breathe deeper, but all in all, going to the surface and taking 5 minutes to catch the breath was what helped. Would've been much more challenging on a deeper dive...

 

[cubbiegirlem]

It seems like you have the right attitude by realizing you have to be aware of your own safety. You probably trusted your buddy overly knowing they were a "rescue diver." Nothing against your buddy, but if I had been with a new diver I would've made sure we were back within easy swimming distance of the boat at 1000 psi. But that only comes with communicating the plan BEFORE you get in the water. Just become someone is a "rescue diver" doesn't mean they're a great diver or are actively thinking about potential problem situations unfortunately. Some of the least safe sivers are divemasters and instructors! But it sounds like you have the right attitude and have learned from this to be responsible for your own safety.

As for avoiding panic, I would say slow down and breathe. Any time I get nervous I stop and think, "ok what will I do it x happens to manage the situation?" But honestly the biggest way to avoid panic is more training so you're better prepared to handle these situations. The two courses I would book asap are buoyancy and navigation. And practice the skills learned in both courses. I was recently diving with an inexperienced diver who went jetting off after a fish and "assumed I knew where I was going." It was partly my fault for not discussing the plan with her before hand (e.g let's take a heading and do an out and back or a wagon wheel), but thanks to my navigation training I was able to take headings as she went off at random and finally grab her and navigate us back to the boat. I didn't get nervous or consider it a "problem" at any point because my training had prepared me. So by taking more courses and then finding someone with whole you can practice those skills, you'll prevent panic before it comes in. In my local area, we have a quarry that is great to practice in (it's great to practice nav in a place with terrible via!) so you might look at whether there are similar inland options available for you to practice.