Don't Hide Your Diving Mistakes

We all make mistakes, but admitting to a mistake is seen by some - maybe men more so than women - as a weakness, especially when there's a diving accident.

In the early 1980s, my dive club was out in the English Channel diving a deep-water reef, and the skipper of our vessel dropped a weighted line with a buoy to mark the site. The first divers in the water pulled themselves down the line, inadvertently dislodging it from the top of the reef. The weight dropped to the bottom at 165 feet, dragging the buoy with it. Most divers aborted the dive, ascended, and were recovered to the boat. But one inexperienced diver continued to pull herself down the line as it descended.

Nobody in the boat was willing or prepared to go down and fetch the missing diver. Since I had yet to enter the water, it fell to me to go down and find her. And, thankfully, I did.

A new diver, she was at the bottom with no depth gauge (a major mistake) and unaware, wondering where everyone was. I brought her up carefully through the gloom at 45 feet per minute, but when we got in sight of daylight illuminating the surface, she panicked, broke free from my arms, and hurtled to the surface.

Fearing she might be bent, I suggested we return to port, but the other club divers preferred to deny the incident had ever happened. I was shocked. They told the skipper of the boat to ignore me. The woman diver got away without any detectable harm, and the club members denied my account, despite allowing an inexperienced diver to dive without a depth gauge and leaving her to her own devices when she plunged down with the descending shotline.

Over the many years I was the technical editor of the UK's Diver Magazine. I wrote about my experiences, and sometimes the experiences were not good. At times, I was pilloried in the embryonic Internet forums of the day. Some people saw my accounts of crass stupidity as something that should not be admitted to. I differed. I saw them as lessons to be learned.

Some incidents stand out more than others. For example, while diving in Indonesia near Komodo, divers from our liveaboard spotted a shark trapped in a net. Leaving the liveaboard at anchor, the captain, the vessel's mate, and I determined we'd to go back to free the shark while the passenger divers went to the next dive site. So, three very experienced divers were dropped off, and the inflatable pick-up boat continued on to take the other divers elsewhere. It was a big mistake not to have the surface support of a boat waiting above us.

I had a new BC with integrated weight pouches held in place by Velcro. We now know Velcro does not keep the pouches in place (it goes curly in hot sunshine and seawater), but it was the early days for integrated weights. I duck-dived down and saw my weights descending below me, so I returned to the surface - only to see the liveaboard rapidly motoring away. It was a mistake not to have anyone in a dinghy giving us surface cover and my mistake to not ensure my weights were sufficiently secure.

The current was ripping, so I swam down to try to find my weight pouches. I couldn't. I continued down to 100 feet, where the other two were by now busy cutting the net off the shark.

Soon, it was time to ascend, and to control my ascent rate, I used my reef hook as an anchor, digging it into various points of the substrate of the reef, until I reached the reef top at 20 feet, where I stayed until I could hear the inflatable return for us. I couldn't risk a fast ascent and then be swept away on the current out into the Philippine Sea.

When, after a long wait, I finally bobbed to the surface and climbed into the inflatable. I found that the skipper, who was busy at work with the net, had not watched his pressure gauge and had run out of air at the bottom. And the ship's mate had gone missing because he was so narked working hard at that depth in a strong current that he'd swum off in the wrong direction and surfaced two hundred yards away. Three experienced divers had each got it wrong in their own way. Back on the boat, the skipper needed oxygen therapy, which he took in private. He didn't want the passengers to know he'd got it wrong.

An early adopter of closed-circuit rebreathers, I made several mistakes that, as it turned out, led to improvement of the equipment.

I dived at Cocos Island using the wrong oxygen setpoint. (You cannot achieve a ppO2 of more than 1 bar at the surface, so you typically set up the equipment at 0.7 bar and switch to a higher setpoint (1.3 bar) once you are around 20 feet deep.)

In the early days, this had to be done manually, and, distracted trying to photograph a passing whale shark, I hadn't noticed I hadn't pressed the switching button hard enough - a possibly fatal mistake.

Instead of benefitting from an increased level of oxygen, I had, in fact, made the whole dive with an increased level of nitrogen!

Discovering my error when it was time to switch back, I climbed into the pick-up boat, careful to breathe 100 percent O2 from the rebreather. I needed to recompress myself at 20 feet for an hour while breathing 100 percent oxygen, and in doing so, came to no harm. Nowadays, rebreathers have automatic setpoint switching, probably because of the media coverage I gave my mistake.

Similarly, assembling a prototype CCR unit in the dark before an early morning dive in the Sea of Cortez, I mistakenly inserted the scrubber bucket upside-down, effectively bypassing it and thereby giving myself a CO2 hit. I'm grateful to a youthful Luke Inman for pulling me back on the boat. They later re-designed the product to stop that from happening.

I saw myself as something like a crash-test dummy. Some might say only a numpty would make some of the mistakes I made, but I represented the numpties that might buy these products later.

I got away with it. A vital part of my diving journalist job was imparting this critical information to my readers. I made mistakes. I was not infallible - nor was anyone else.

So, despite my critics presuming I was an idiot who should not be diving, I continued to tell all. Often, people won't learn from the follies of others, but it's essential that we share our mistakes to instruct others. Don't be ashamed to reveal your humanity. You will help to save the lives of others.

Let us know the mistakes you've gotten away with while diving. Write to BenDDavison@undercurrent.org including your town and state.

-John Bantin