Solve Each Problem as It Arises
Copyright © Steve Lloyd 2006

I was winding up a research project with a couple of friends from out of state. Our final planned dive at the primary site had been blown out, but conditions were much calmer at nearby Point Pogibshi, which marks the southern end of an imaginary line that connects with Anchor Point to the north, delineating Kachemak Bay from Cook Inlet, Alaska. Days earlier I had planned to augment our expedition stores of cold cuts and pasta with fresh Alaskan rockfish, and I’d brought a new Hawaiian sling I was anxious to try out, but the only fish we’d seen so far were kelp greenlings. The charter boats out of Homer sometimes drift Point Pogibshi for rockfish on their way back from the offshore halibut grounds, but today there were only a few local guys hiding from the washing machine conditions offshore.

My dive plan was to live-boat a free descent against the point in about 65 fsw, descending into the boulder piles around 80-110 fsw where I hoped to find a big black bass too smart to be fooled by the jigs and baits regularly dropped from topside. With a new 10-watt HID canister light to illuminate the caverns and crevices where the rockfish hide out, and a new spear with three razor-sharp points, I felt confident there would be fish for dinner on our boat that night. Planned bottom time would be 20-30 minutes in order to keep well inside no-decompression limits; I had no interest in a long, drifting deco in cold water.

For days I’d been alternating dives between an LP steel 100 on open circuit, and a Megalodon CCR with air diluent, depending on the dive profile and activity. I’ve just passed 30 hours on the Meg and still have to devote fully 50% of my attention each dive to flying the rebreather. As noisy and limiting as it is, diving OC still allows me to concentrate more fully on the agenda during a working dive, although I expect to shift all my dives to the Meg as my experience and confidence with it grows.

On this dive I’d have a free descent (not my favorite), underwater hunting, a drifting ascent and safety stop in a potentially strong current, and finally a live-boat pickup in an area with fairly heavy boat traffic, every vessel operated by locals distinctly unused to seeing divers in this remote stretch of coastal water. On previous dives I’d carried both an orange OMS sausage and a yellow Carter 100-lb. lift bag as SMBs—both inflate easily off a second stage and are highly visible on the surface. I usually carry the OMS sausage bungeed under the backplate on my Meg; the Carter bag has a sturdy cord to wrap it tightly closed, and a gate snap to attach it to a D-ring on my harness. Because I was diving OC this dive using a jacket-style BC, I wanted to carry a bag that would not accidentally unfurl during the dive but would still be easy to deploy when it came time to begin my ascent. I chose the 100-lb. Carter bag, which I carried snapped to one of the plastic shoulder strap rings on the BC. Next to it I clipped a borrowed cave-style reel wrapped with sturdy braided nylon line.

The jump and descent went fine, and I arrived at 75 fsw less than 3 minutes in. The vis was better than I expected, about 30 feet with fair ambient light, but the current was also stronger than I’d thought it would be—about two knots, and running parallel with the shoreline. I paused, hovering just above the colorful corals that festoon the rugged, rocky bottom, and checked my gas. Air at 2800 psi in a 2640 tank; Vytec computer still in gauge mode from my last rebreather dive the day before. I wouldn’t come close to a required deco stop on this dive, and if I got into fish and stayed a bit long, I intuitively know how deep and how long to stop on my way up from a relatively tame dive like this one.

My canister light was new this trip, and over the past few dives I’d been unpleasantly surprised to find that the switch is temperamental. The first time it happened, the light blinked out shortly after I’d turned it on, and I figured I’d screwed up and not charged the battery all the way. I gave it a full charge, and on the next dive the thing wouldn’t fire at all, even though I’d tested it repeatedly at the surface. Finally, I discovered that rotating the switch almost all the way “on” (but not completely) would make an electrical contact that seemed likely to last the duration of a dive.

I could see well enough with ambient light to make out fair-sized greenlings darting among the kelp leaves, but I was after bigger and tastier prey. I unclipped my light and was not terribly surprised to find that it would not come on. Finning against the current and bracing myself with the tip of my spear, I messed with the switch for a minute or so, trying to find the sweet spot that would produce a contact. No luck. I had slipped a 3-cell LED in my drysuit pocket for backup, but with plenty of daylight to see by, I decided to begin my descent into deeper water without a light, knowing I could shine the LED under rocks when I reached the fresh fish market I expected to find momentarily.

The water temp was 48 degrees Fahrenheit, and I put a few puffs of air into my suit to relieve the squeeze and improve insulation. I’m a big guy—6’3” and 200 lbs.—and have always needed a fair bit of weight to get down, stay down, and stay warm on dives that sometimes involve water temps as low as 37 degrees. I wear 24 lbs. with my Meg, but need 42 lbs. on a single steel 100. On this dive I wore two 2-lb. ankle weights and carried the rest in soft weight on a belt.

I vectored across the slope and the current, working my way toward the edge of the rocky plateau where I’d dropped. In the 65-75 fsw range I saw only greenling, an Irish lord, and one small (and very nervous) black bass, which darted away before I could decide how big his filets would be. The coral and invertebrate life was abundant and colorful, a testimony to the cold, nutrient-rich waters of lower Cook Inlet. As I peered into the murk for signs of a ledge that would indicate deeper water, I noticed that my buoyancy didn’t feel right. I seemed a little light, but I’d done a dive two days earlier in the same exact rig and had been perfectly weighted throughout the dive. I dumped what little gas remained in my BC, then lifted my left arm to exhaust any excess gas that might have gotten trapped in my suit while my attention was focused on the light problem. Only a burp of air came out of my dump valve, but I still felt light and made a mental note to watch my trim.

Twenty minutes into the dive, and still nothing but a flat, hard bottom with occasional sand channels and scattered large boulders—no sign of the deeper water that our depth sounder indicated should lie just off the point where I’d descended. Apparently I should have sounded the 100-foot curve and descended right on it, instead of trying to navigate there underwater. I’d found no fish, and I knew the current was carrying me further away from the boat the waited above, my buddies watching for my ascent marker. I decided to turn the dive.

I can blow a bag in mid-water, but I prefer to get negative and send it up from the bottom where I can make absolutely sure to keep hands, SPGs, regs, and everything else out of the way. To brace myself against the current, I chose the downstream side of a 10-foot-high boulder to hunker down and deploy the lift bag. As I unclipped the reel and the bag, I continued to feel light and became increasingly uneasy about beginning an ascent without being in full control of my buoyancy. I raised my left shoulder high and craned my head to see whether the action produced any bubbles; it did not. Strangely, I felt (or imagined I could feel) air pocketed in the left shoulder and upper arm of my drysuit. I reached over and hit the manual dump button—nothing. Although I never mess with it, and always leave the valve a quarter-turn from open, I stretched my right hand to check that the valve was all the way open; it was.

No crisis yet, but I felt sure that something was wrong and nothing I’d done to correct it was working. I wasn’t holding onto the rock or anything, but I could tell I was too light to begin a free ascent with no line to hold onto. I checked my pressure and my time; both were fine, although the run time was a bit past when I’d told my topside crew to expect to see my bag. I rested on my knees in a prayerful posture against the rock, working the air in my suit out of my legs and arms. When I could feel my neck seal puffing up like a goiter, I reached up and grasped the latex seal trough my neoprene hood, burping air out past my face while introducing just a splash of chilling water. My buoyancy immediately felt better, and I turned my attention again toward the reel and bag.

I’ve sent up a lot of bags, some attached only to lines and others affixed to a wide variety of objects that belonged out of the water, not under it. I loosened the thumb screw to allow the reel to spool freely, then unrolled the Carter bag and clipped its snap into the loop of line on the cave reel. Taking a deep breath on my reg, I exhaled into the bag to inflate it enough that I could check the line, reel, hoses, etc. for the lift. All clear. Another breath, then a quick purge with the mouthpiece under the partially inflated bag. I held the yellow pillow by its straining tether until it caught enough air that it would inflate completely as it traveled from my three atmospheres to the one waiting at the surface.

When the line stopped playing out, I checked to make sure the Hawaiian sling and the (sadly) empty stringer clipped to my right strap were clear of the bottom, then gave a slight kick and turned down-current for the ride to the surface. I always enjoy the transition from bucking a current to riding it, savoring the feeling of joining the timeless rush of the ocean’s current. Looking up, I could see the bag had already taken off downstream and I began to reel in slightly to position myself under the bag bobbing 75 feet overhead so I could begin my ascent. I took up some line and drifted with the current just high enough over the rocks to keep from catching the tip of my spear, reeling and watching the line that disappeared into the greenish light above me.

Something wasn’t right. What should have been just a few turns on the reel did not produce the near-vertical line I expected; if anything, the stout nylon cave line was streaming down-current at an even sharper angle than before. Either the bag hadn’t inflated, or it had somehow separated from the reel and was now on its way sloppily down-current, my buddies chasing an empty yellow promise while I would be forced to surface in boat traffic, potentially far away and unseen.

My stomach gave a little flip, and I knew that my dive was at a crossroads. Whether I would be able to chalk this up as a minor inconvenience, or whether my problems would escalate into a potentially dangerous incident would depend on the decisions I made in the next few minutes.

As I drifted and reeled and watched, I could see the line was now almost parallel to the bottom. It was dropping much faster than I could reel, and I still couldn’t make out a bag at the end of the line. To keep the line from tangling on the rough boulders, ripping the reel from my grasp as the current rocketed me past, I started bringing it in hand-over-hand, loosely gathering it in the hand grasping the handle of the reel.

By the time a yellow shape came drifting into view like Charlie Brown’s reluctant kite, the mass of white line in my right hand had grown into an alarming tangle. Another few pulls, and the bag came close enough that I was finally able to tell what had happened. Despite what I thought was a careful check, the nylon line had tangled a full turn around the black “rip cord” hanging from the bleed valve inside the lift bag. With the line slack at the bottom, the bag initially had inflated just fine and headed up. But as soon as the drag from the reel tightened its grip on the release cord, the bag deflated and sank.

In order to fully assess the situation, I hit the bottom and hunkered down in a little gully, giving myself some relief from the current which seemed to have picked up during the dive as the tide swung more fully from slack water. Depth about 65 fsw, RT 25, gas 1500 psi. Well inside the NDL, but concerned about the current and not looking forward to a free ascent, especially when I’ve been fighting a puzzling buoyancy problem. And no—in case you’re wondering—I am not carrying a redundant bag or reel, given the nature of the site and the dive plan.

After considering my options, I decide to take the time to sort out the line and re-deploy the Carter bag. For the record, let me say that if I’d been deeper and racking up deco, or if my gas supply had been of any concern, I would have ascended immediately. But the risks of surfacing without a marker, and possibly coming up far from the boat with no way to signal, trumped the moderate risk of staying at depth a bit longer, trying to sort out maybe 50 or 60 feet of line in a ripping current.

Untangling and rewinding the line took just over 8 minutes. Another half-minute to shake out the bag and send it up again. This time, the line ran tautly to the surface and stayed there, signaling that my location would be marked for the boat and that I’d have a visual reference with which to make my ascent.

At 33:30 RT, I kicked off the bottom to begin my ascent. Sixty-eight feet. The current immediately sent the rocks and kelp of the bottom spinning off behind me. I caught a glimpse of my fishing spear dangling from its tether, and made a mental note to keep well clear of its sharp tip.

Exhale, vent, take up slack on the reel. Look up. There’s a dip in the line, and I reel faster. Is the bag dropping again? Is there a hole in it that I didn’t notice before? My stomach flips a little, and in an instant I decide that no matter what, I’m not dropping back to the bottom, invisible now in the greenish murk below me.

I steal a quick glance at the Vytec strapped to my left forearm. Depth 54 feet. The dip in the line grows more exaggerated; I’m ascending faster than I can reel. I raise my left arm to vent my suit, but I know in that second that it’s too late. I tuck my head and begin a turn that will allow me to kick down, hopefully compressing the rapidly expanding gas in my suit enough that I can regain control and make a slow ascent. As I make my first kick down, I can feel the trapped air racing for the surface—and into my legs and feet. No! I flare, flattening my body in the water column like a skydiver. Forty feet. Faster. I blow through my reg, hard. A rush of gas; I am incredulous that my lungs could contain such a torrent. The air keeps coming.

Like the accident victim who sees each of the million tiny shards of safety glass just before the guardrail punches through the windshield, a detached part of my brain notes a detail I never could have imagined—The water is racing past my mask so fast that it is cavitating, creating a strangely serene bubble in front of my eyes that reminds me of the glass viewing port on my washing machine at home. It keeps growing. I keep going, blowing, waiting.

Past the gurgling bubble that fills my vision, it is getting lighter. Four or five times in those few seconds, I expect my head to clear the water, but still the ride continues.

Contingencies, trying to consider the sequence even before I’m up. Missed all of my deco; blew any chance for a safety stop. Sure, 77 for 35 doesn’t call for any stops and I give a quick “thanks” to the sea gods for not letting me screw up this bad on a deeper, longer dive. But I have never, ever come up this fast and have never seen anybody else do it. Arterial gas embolism? Lung expansion injury? DCS, just from the sheer explosive rise from three atmospheres of pressure to one? Shit! What a way to end this trip, and even worse, what a stupid way to get hurt when I’ve safely executed far deeper, more technical dives in more challenging conditions.

I’m up. My head breaks the surface. I’m conscious. I’m really scared, but I’m not panicked. The boat is… right there! My buddy is lowering the ladder. He gives me the bent-arm OK signal, the look on his face making it clear there’s a question attached. I raise my right arm and rock my hand in a “so-so” motion. He instantly responds. The engines are in neutral, ladder down. I hand up the bag and reel, tangled again. Next comes the spear and stringer. Then me.

“Uncontrolled ascent from 70 feet,” I tell him. “I wasn’t in deco, but I missed my safety stops. I have NEVER come up that fast! Get the O2 kit!”

In less than a minute I’m out of my gear and lying prone on the deck. My buddy responds with textbook efficiency, getting me on oxygen and calling out times and steps to our friend driving the boat. I feel fine. I’m embarrassed, a little worried that some deadly symptom will manifest any second, but deep down I’m pretty sure that this time I beat the devil.

In gauge mode, my Vytec samples every 30 seconds. As I write this, I’m looking at my downloaded profile, complete with a line graph charting the entire course of my dive. At the beginning is a steep, even drop—a wreck diver’s descent, where the clock starts the instant you break surface tension. The middle part is a series of jagged spikes—up 10 feet, down 5 feet, looking for the deep water and the big rockfish I’m sure hide there, waiting for me.

The right side of the graph is the scary part. The ascent is so fast that the pixels are stacked vertically on the screen, with no hint of a slant. At 34:30 it reads 54 feet. At 35:00 it’s at zero.

If I had been in deco, at 50-something feet I’d have just been approaching my deep stops. To come up that fast and miss the 30-, 20- and 10-foot stops, I’d almost certainly have had just a few minutes on the surface before the onset of DCS symptoms. The boat was very close, but given the current and the fact I’d overstayed while I sorted out my bag problem, we could have been separated by hundreds of yards. We were well equipped with both a DAN oxygen kit and 100% O2 in deco bottles, but we could just as well have had only air on the boat. We were within both radio and cell range of emergency help if we had needed to make the call, but given the vast reaches of Alaska’s coastline, we could just as easily have been totally out of touch.

When I examined my drysuit exhaust valve later, I found that it was at least halfway closed. Neither of my buddies had messed with it, and my own check underwater had made me think it was fully open. I have no idea why it didn’t exhaust when I hit the manual dump button. It’s possible that I wasn’t depressing the button far enough, or that the trapped air had already shifted into another part of the suit. It’s possible too that the valve is bad—you can bet it’ll be serviced before I dive the suit again.

My old friend the Carter 100-lb. lift bag will never again be pressed into service as an SMB. The string-controlled dump valve works great for its intended purpose, but it is too easily wrapped up by an ascent line when deployed as a surface bag.

I had no physical symptoms following the dive. After about ten minutes lying on deck, my fingers and hands started tingling and for an instant I thought I knew what was coming. Turns out that by awkwardly propping myself up on a pile of gear, I was cutting off circulation to my arms and was suffering from nothing more menacing than good old-fashioned pins and needles.

I am the first to admit that I made some mistakes on this dive. Besides the equipment deficiencies noted above, I made assumptions about a remote and unknown dive site that proved to be erroneous, and exacerbated the series of problems I faced in the last part of the dive.

In retrospect, I believe I made the right decision to sort out the bag and reel problem before ascending. Having the bag on the surface, even for that minute or two before I appeared next to it, allowed the boat to approach and make ready to take me aboard. Perhaps I should have thumbed the dive when my buoyancy problem first presented itself, but I have hundreds of dives with that suit and basic BC-and-cylinder combination, and felt sure I’d adequately resolved my problem when I exhausted air through my neck seal.

In the end, I feel good about how things turned out; thankful that I wasn’t injured, glad that my buddies both jumped immediately into action and did all the right things. I’ll forever take the lessons of this dive to heart.

Be safe.