Veterans Day Dive

With the weekend looking like crap me and a buddy decided Wednesday was our best bet. Arriving around sunrise, I already see Big Jim and Andrew off loaded and about to hit the water waiting for Steve to catch up. We hit the water after them and paddle out to a spot that rewarded me with a 20.5" olive last weekend. As we past Big Jim and his group I can hear him cheering and hollering for Andrews Sheep, I kept thinking Damn, guess early bird gets the worm. We check out the local kelp only to find blues and olives nothing interesting enough to shoot. So I decided to follow the structure out into deeper water. A couple of dives and I find some great rocky structure 55' deep. During my next dive I catch a glimpse of a Vermilion, fully aware of me, very smart and skittish, leaving me with only a distant missing shot. I decide to keep working the area and move a little deeper only to run into another Vermilion. This time I wasn't going to lose, sneaking up on him I line up my shot and think, I probably should of turned on my GoPro, I do a quick GoPro on and BOOM nice unicorn shot stoning him, I was stoked! He measured out to be a nice 21" Verm. Unfortunately we had a incident on the water and had to call it a day only after a couple of hours. I wont go into detail but when you can attend a FII level 1 course ASAP, it could save yours or someone else life. Here is a short video of me taking the Verm enjoy!



V/r
Rob

Nice shootin' Tex! 
Waiting to hear about the "incident".
The more info shared the better for all of us n the long run.
Hope everything turned out OK..

Nice shootin' Tex! 
Waiting to hear about the "incident".
The more info shared the better for all of us n the long run.
Hope everything turned out OK..

Everyone turned out to be ok, and there will be a follow up post about the incident.

Rob already mentioned it in his post but asked me to summarize the event both he and his buddy experienced.  Kudos to Rob for buddy diving and being right there when his buddy needed him most.

Here is the story in shorthand:

While diving at an undisclosed location in Carmel, Rob found some nice structure where he thought he may find some verms, find verms he did lol.  They were over around 50' of water or so when his buddy punched a 50' dive.  As the diver ascended they experienced a cramp as they were coming up.  Panic set in and they started to kick as hard as they could to make it to the surface which is pretty much the last thing they remember.  As his buddy cleared the surface, Rob was directly behind his buddy.  Rob watched as they cleared the surface but didn't hear his buddy taking any breaths and then saw his buddy start to sink underwater.  Rob grabbed his buddy immediately and put his buddy onto his back, protecting his buddies airway.  His buddy came back to as Rob took off their mask and waited till they were okay.  As usual his buddy asked what was going on and why he couldn't move because Rob was holding them.  Rob's buddy slowly realized they blacked out and they both called it a day.  Rob called me right after they took the picture of the beautiful verm lol and asked if they needed any immediate medical attention etc and told me about the incident.  I called my buddy, deep diver (225') and fellow Fii Instructor, Dan Koval, who also trained Rob in level 1 and confirmed that as long as no water was aspirated they had done proper safety protocol and were simply done diving for the day. A headache and extreme tiredness would follow since a blackout is a body's safety mechanism.

I spoke with the diver who blacked out as well.  The diver is not on the forum and didn't want to be named but wanted the story shared. The story from their end is not much different than most of ours that travel to dive. Late night bedtime, dehydrated, tired, not feeling quite right but still trying to warm up and push through, cramping and overall general fatigue from work.

The diver stated they had slept around 5 hours the night previously and they hadn't drank enough water the night before or day of.  First few dives were pretty rough and the diver felt like a :50 bottom time was pretty rough when they could previously do 1:10 to 1:20 easily during warm-up dives. They kept on working through it even though they felt dehydrated and told me they should had gone back to the kayak and drank some water.

As stated above, Rob found some nice structure and they started doing some deeper drops over some structure looking for verms.  On the diver's turn, they punched 50' and felt a little uncomfortable. On the ascent the diver's leg started to cramp and panic set in.  Instead of relaxing they decided to kick really hard and try to make it to the surface immediately.  Looking up around 15' from the top is the last thing they remember before waking up in Rob's loving arms.

A little scary for the diver but the signs were there they just chose to override them and push through them. There are a lot of things that happen to our body during diving; some extremely complex things involving our blood, oxygen, co2, nitrogen, plasma etc. Biggest thing to take away is to make sure you do not push past warning signs, to know what those signs are and to dive with a buddy.

If you have any questions send me a pm or post up and I'll do my best to answer.

Matt

Thanks Matt for the write up.
Way to save your buddy's life Rob!
Isn"t this "Shallow Water Black Out" even though it happened on the surface?
That's one thing I always do is bring lots of water for before, during and after diving.

Thanks Matt for the write up.
Way to save your buddy's life Rob!
Isn"t this "Shallow Water Black Out" even though it happened on the surface?
That's one thing I always do is bring lots of water for before, during and after diving.

Hey Antonio,

After truly understanding what a blackout is, we just call them blackouts.  There is such a thing as a deep water blackout but only .9% of all blackouts happen from 15' to 80' which is why most call blackouts "Shallow Water Blackouts"

Matt

Great write up especially on the black out. I was diving in SoCal about 6 weeks ago and we were out in 1200 ft. One of the four of us had taken a free dive class and as we were looking for paddies the subject of black outs came up. The guy who had taken the class asked if any of us actually practice the "one up, one down" safe way of diving. We all admitted that usually we only have a vague idea where our buddy is and don't actually see him/her going down or coming up except sometimes by accident. This report is a good reminder that we all could dive more safely and be more aware of our buddies. Thanks!