Panic/Hyperventilation during wreck dive (~80 ft)

[p0werline]

I am new to the forum and wanted to share my story, as I feel that experience is the best teacher.

I was doing a wreck dive in Cancun last week when I experienced this. It was a wreck dive with a depth of around 80ft. The group consisted of myself, 3 other divers and the DM. We descended to the wreck and everything was going fine. As we descended, a school of beautiful eagle rays were drifting by the wreck site. We reached the bottom and started to swim towards the wreck. The current was rough, and made swimming difficult. As we went around the wreck, I spotted to eagle rays near me and swam up to get a closer look and some footage. The current picked up, and I had to swim hard to keep up with them. After getting a good look, I slowed up......and that's when it hit me. I started breathing heavily and couldn't catch my breather. I suddenly felt like I was breathing through a straw. I looked up and saw how far the surface was and I started to panic. I was breathing hard but felt like I could not get enough air. I tried to slow myself and focus on my breathing, but continued to breath hard. I stopped swimming and grabbed the side of the wreck. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, and it started to subside. I found the anchor line, and held steady until I was semi under control of my breathing. My group noticed I was gone, so I kept an eye on them until they looked up and gave them the sign that I was going to surface. I slid up the line slowly, taking my safety stop and finally surfacing.

I wanted to share this story so that everyone can learn from it. I can assume I experienced overexertion and started to hyperventilate. I did not think how hard I was swimming to see the marine life, and I almost paid a heavy price for it. But takeways from this experience were to stay calm and try to control your breathing when something like this happens. Literally one of the scariest experiences of my life.

 

[Trailboss123]

Thanks for sharing and glad you are well! I do not think it is uncommon for people to realize how quickly the heart rate and thus one's breathing can increase when task loaded or heavily exerting ones self under water. Much like sprinting on land while running or sprinting on a bicycle, there is a slight delay cardiovascularly between the initial effort and the onset of the elevated heart rate and heavy breathing to compensate. Once it hits you, all you want is more oxygen. This is further exacerbated under water, where the conditions and environment can also induce immediate panic or anxiety, which would rarely happen on land where there is plentiful oxygen and no perceived threat of not obtaining it. What you ultimately did was the correct response. Stop, think and then act. By stopping to try and swim against the current and finding a place or a way that you could minimize or eliminate cardiovascular effort allowed your heart rate to slow back down, which allowed you to get your breathing under control and reduce your perceptual narrowing and further risk. Lesson learned indeed.

 

[t-mac]

Thanks for sharing. Seems like you did everything right. I've had similar feelings several times and it is always related to exertion and ultimately overbreathing my reg, just like you described with the current picking up. Grabbing on and calming down was the right move.

 

[fmerkel]

there is a slight delay cardiovascularly between the initial effort and the onset of the elevated heart rate and heavy breathing to compensate. Once it hits you, all you want is more oxygen.

I'm being picky here. All you want is to get rid of more CO2. The oxygen is plentiful at depth. Good post.
For me it's kind of like people calling our tanks O2 tanks.

You acted sensibly. You are not going to fare well bolting from 80' already out of breath.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

You did the right thing in stopping and relaxing. One of the things that popped into my mind was what reg you had? When I taught at this shop that is now out of business, the students were given low quality regs that were hard to breath from. Those that dove with me after certification in my gear were amazed at the difference.

 

[INQuarryDiver]

Kosta,
What reg do you use?

 

[t-mac]

Taking up on the insinuation, would a different reg actually prevent someone from over-breathing it, which seems like what may have happened to the OP? Once a reg is fully open, it is designed to deliver air at ambient pressure, which puts the same theoretical limit on all regs as to over-breathing. In this regard, are there really "good" and "bad" regs or is it perhaps more an issue of how it is maintained (if it is an issue at all here)?

 

[gfaith]

@p0werline .. Reading your report reminded me of a dumb thing I did recently. Chasing ocean critters can get us into trouble in heavy currents for sure. To continue my part, we me and my buddy/wife, were on a dive in Roatan when the DM took off like a bullet. He had spotted a really nice turtle that was quite a distance from the group and guess what? I took off like a slower bullet too. We did get the turtle to turn and swim back right through the group of 8 as I remember. My buddy/wife, smarter than me, did not try to keep up with me and the DM she did get some nice pictures of the turtle as I tried to slow and deepen my breathing. Here is where I am headed; dive with a buddy and do not leave your buddy. Oh yeah try not to chase ocean critters they are tough to catch.. and I know better. You did well learn the lesson.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Kosta,
What reg do you use?

In the past when I taught, I used my Apeks XTX50's. Now I use a SP MK25 Evo with a G260 second stage.

Taking up on the insinuation, would a different reg actually prevent someone from over-breathing it, which seems like what may have happened to the OP? Once a reg is fully open, it is designed to deliver air at ambient pressure, which puts the same theoretical limit on all regs as to over-breathing. In this regard, are there really "good" and "bad" regs or is it perhaps more an issue of how it is maintained (if it is an issue at all here)?

One of the specs I look at when buying a reg is how much air it can provide. I have seen differences between higher and lower end regulators. My pool regulator assembly is not high end, and there is a big difference.

Now I did not service the regs the students were using. But I do know the shop owner bought the cheapest ones he could get from a second shop that also went out of business. A friend of mine was the shop manager/tech at the second, and he was fighting with the owner over the quality/maintenance of those regs. At the first shop, all the regs were hard to breath from, and they were worked on by a number of techs. Did all the techs do a bad job? Possibly. But there is a difference in how much air can flow through different designs, and thus I asked the question.

 

[divezonescuba]

Definitely a difference between makes, models, and to a lesser extent even within models. I just finished servicing four identical regulators for a family and some turned out being slightly easier to breath than others. That is also why the servicing specs provide a range of acceptable performance for a given regulator.

I experienced the same overbreathing issues once while sawing foam floatation with a handsaw in a plane underwater. I had to stop working. This was with an upper end regulator from one manufacturer. The next time I went there, I used another high end manufacturers reg. No matter how hard I sawed, I did not experience the same overbreathing issue.