| Narcosis
You will probably have been taught that nitrogen narcosis can start at about 30m an it can affect divers in different ways. Divers can become happy, very focussed on the gauges, or do strange things.......
A couple of years back I was diving off Gozo and my buddy for the holiday was a diver with some 25 dives. On the first dive we were at 30m when she started you act odd and looking around. Using international signalling we established that she could hear a shark swimming around.......
A few days later also at 30m and buddied together again I was searching around some rocks at the edge of a long drop off, and looked up to see that my buddy had swum off somewhere. I did the usual 360, and looked up, no sign. So I looked down. It is weird to see someone disco dancing on the sea bed. It can also put a buddy in a difficult situation-I had about 100 bar left and two minutes of no deco time. I was not deco trained at the time. I made the choice to go down, turned out to be 45m before I reached her.
Narked divers can often be very disorientated, my buddy swam along the slope and not up. So she literally had to be dragged up the slope. This is were the "incident pit" bit comes in........Buddy realised that she was lost, low on air.........her dive watch had a flat battery.....I had 17 mins of deco to do.......so how much did she have to do....... anyway we get up to 9m and start lying on the sea bed to do the long deco stop, buddy becomes positively buoyant, so I opted to lie on top to hold her down........then buddy runs out of air........good job I still had some air left.
It all ended happily but it was a bit close at times.  |