Intentionally vague use of “emergency situation” to encourage people to share. If you handle emergency situations as a profession, what’s a particularly interesting one.
Intentionally vague use of “emergency situation” to encourage people to share. If you handle emergency situations as a profession, what’s a particularly interesting one.
It’s been a long time, but last one was about 20 years ago. Me and my friend Danielle had just finished our open water scuba diving courses together, and went to do our first dive with a group from the dive shop - including one of our instructors who was leading it.
It was a shore dive, we all walk in in our drysuits and I stupidly drop my mask and lose it in the silty water. Danielle starts swimming around looking for it, while most of us are chatting above the surface. We’re in about 3’ of water at this point on the beach, I’m literally standing up next to her, so danger is the last thing on my mind.
Suddenly someone asks me if Danielle is ok, I turn around just as she stops moving, grab her by the bcd and pull her up. She’s blue and not breathing. The instructor is already on his way over, gives her some rescue breaths and she immediately comes back. We pull her to the shore and she’s coughing up water, paramedics roll up shortly after and take her to the hospital just in case.
She has gotten air stuck in the boots of her dry suit and was stuck inverted. Instead of doing the recovery roll we were trained, or inflating her bcd, she panicked and as a result somehow lost her mouth piece.
She never dived in cold water again, although we did go to belize several months later to do a bunch of diving. I kept up the cold water diving.
It really made me appreciate how panicking can completely fuck you over, and made me a very safety conscious diver. I always stay close to my buddy and keep a close eye on them.
“Dave Not Coming Back”
(Bushman’s Hole incident)
When we went to belize, a dead diver had been pulled out the week before from the blue hole. It had been down there a couple years, hands and head long gone, but identified by the rented camera still attached to it.
When i went diving in Bali our dive lead was ex military, and would tell us stories of doing body recoveries where they’d surface and just immediately go to a hyperbaric chamber. That just seems asinine to me.
I’ve gone diving around 200 times, it’s absolutely gorgeous and I’d recommend it to anyone, but it’s not something you should take risks while doing.