What is the worse thing?

[aainslie]

I wrote mine up a while ago on another website, of my first dive into a site where I now have about 20 dives:

This isn't the cave where someone died of an oxtox. (Details hidden)... but there's a catch - the "crack" that leads down is really really REALLY narrow between about 140 ft and about 180 ft. I headed down dressed like I was going to be away for a month - rebreather, 2x85's sidemounted, a 40 of 50% and an 80 of O2. I dropped the O2 really quickly, but I was already silting the hell out of the cave. There's a ton of dead vegetation in the crack, and it's easy to dislodge huge mounds of the stuff. Turns out I have a talent for cleaning out debris filled passages - I could barely see my HUD, which is located less than 2 inches from my mask! I was worried about decoing in this vis but headed down anyway.

At about 100 ft it opened into a smallish room, with the crack still going down from 140 ft, even tighter than above. I dropped in feet first, facing along the crack with my sidemount tanks pressed up against the sides. I couldn't move - so I squeezed the tanks inwards so that they were in line with my body, and dumped all the air out of my BC. A wiser person would have gone down 10 feet and then tried returning - not me, I scratched and scraped my way down until I hit the bottom. At 180 ft it opened up to a huge room with a debris cone in the middle. Vis was about 30 feet or so. There was one lonely line - so I followed it. Fifty feet... and it ended. I tied in, wondering if I was missing something - why did this line end in wide open space after 50 stupid feet???

I ran about 80 feet further (I'm guessing, I didn't survey) before hitting massive flow. I mean massive. It was a huge passage, at least 20-30 feet across and 10-15 feet high, with water just screaming through it - I swear I could hear it vibrating the walls, like a low rumble. I swam hard, panting and puffing, for about 100 feet up the passage... and suddenly the flow stopped. By now I had been going for 20 minutes, and I already had nearly an hour of deco. i think that what had happened was, I had accidentally swum off the main passage into a side passage. I was a little narked, a lot winded and very freaked out by then, but that was my best guess. I didn't want to risk going back and relocating the main passage so I tied off and headed out. Which is when things began to get interesting. I got vertical again and headed up the passage. At 160 ft I got stuck - and I mean STUCK! I was squeezing my tanks in to the middle and clawing like a wild thing but nothing was working. This is when rebreathers help so much (although of course the whole reason I was stuck was becuase I had so much crap on...) - I calmed down and realized that although deco was racking up, I was in no immediate danger. I dumped the air in my BC and headed down again. At the bottom, I tried getting my cylinders as much in line as possible and headed up again. No dice - stuck again at 160. By now I was getting seriously panicked. It's amazing how quickly those monkeys start chattering at a time like this. I sank back down, and on the way down finally had an idea. I released the right hand tank, and left it hanging by the clip on my second stage. I then took the left hand tank, and slung it across my body so that the top was bungied to the left, but the bottom was connected to my right hand D ring. Finally, I went open circuit because I realized that the way up required me to actually go past vertical by about 10 degrees, and going open circuit allowed me to move by head back more to see. Finally things started working, and I gently worked my way to 140 feet when I shot out the crack and had to hit the brakes... err, BC vent.

I just sat there in the dark, letting my breathing calm down. My first stop was at about 120 so it seemed a reasonable place to start relaxing, with deco decreasing instead of increasing. I stripped down again and moved my tanks back to their original positions, then continued the ascent. it was pretty uneventful from there, although I did get pissed off when once more my fancy iPod deco toy refused to fire up. 80 minutes of deco and nothing to do! It was almost meditative when it wasn't mind numbingly boring - the gloom wasn't as bad as on the way down but I definitely couldn't see much. Boy, was it nice when finally a bit of green murky light worked its way down to me at 30 feet. I exited the second one of my 3 computers cleared me - I was done with this deco thing. Total time 130 minutes. Amazingly my scrubber, which I'd now done 3 dives and a total of 4 + hours on, still claimed that I had plenty of scrubber left.

[Sharky1948]

Worst problem to date....living in Connecticut.

[AB8CD]

Hard to call my experiences "worst things" because they were part of the adventure and continued learning experience... and they are pretty minor compared to the other stories posted.

I previously posted a narrative of ending a dive at Jailhouse which has a somewhat narrow winding low vis entry/exit. This was compounded by a group of three coming in dragging O2 and a camera in the silt taking vis down to nothing. Then when I came to the point where the line is tied to a stick in the bottom... it just ended. In the zero viz and tight quarters I didn't realize the line was free floating. I was in touch contact with my dive buddy who knew the cave well and I brought her hand up to the stick. I felt her searching for the line as well but she caught it and pulled in the slack as I moved up the line finger by finger.

I was involved in another dive that included someone lifting rocks off me from a collapse... but I am still sworn to secrecy on that incident.

[LCF]

My worst experiences have been in classes, but one of them was not an artificial situation.

We were diving as a team of three in Ginnie. We had jumped into the Bone Room passage. The brief was to continue until the line curved left, and then jump back onto the mainline and turn right and continue if gas permitted.

I was leading, and I was really unhappy with the line being up on the ceiling. I was spending a lot of time watching it, and not a lot of time looking at the cave. We got to the left curve, and I looked ahead of me, and the line T'd into the mainline. I was puzzled, because it wasn't supposed to be a T. But there it was. I stopped for a bit and looked at it. I knew something was wrong and I didn't feel good about continuing. I hoped that one of my teammates behind me would signal we needed to turn (as I was getting sort of close, and figured somebody else would get there first, and now was a good time). Nobody said anything, and since we were supposed to continue, I swam forward, marked the intersection, and turned right.

At that point my instructor signaled me to turn around, and I did, and saw the spool tied into the end of the line on what had been the left-hand wall. The minute I saw it, I broke out in a cold sweat, because I knew what it meant. I had completely missed the fact that this was a TEMPORARY line, belonging to someone else -- which meant, of course, that had we crossed it and swum on, we could easily have come back to find it gone.

Where we were, it wasn't really an issue, because the mainline was a shorter exit than the way we had come in, and we had swum it and knew its topography. But in another circumstance, that mistake could have killed all three of us, and I knew it.

What was even more frightening was to debrief the dive, and discover that I had not seen the spool, but my buddies HAD . . . and nobody said anything. So much for the theory that multiple brains will avoid a mistake!

I will never, ever, ever dive that deep in flow without helium in my mix. Stupid is deadly in caves.

[mag3]

My worst experiences have been in classes, but one of them was not an artificial situation.

We were diving as a team of three in Ginnie. We had jumped into the Bone Room passage. The brief was to continue until the line curved left, and then jump back onto the mainline and turn right and continue if gas permitted.

I was leading, and I was really unhappy with the line being up on the ceiling. I was spending a lot of time watching it, and not a lot of time looking at the cave. We got to the left curve, and I looked ahead of me, and the line T'd into the mainline. I was puzzled, because it wasn't supposed to be a T. But there it was. I stopped for a bit and looked at it. I knew something was wrong and I didn't feel good about continuing. I hoped that one of my teammates behind me would signal we needed to turn (as I was getting sort of close, and figured somebody else would get there first, and now was a good time). Nobody said anything, and since we were supposed to continue, I swam forward, marked the intersection, and turned right.

At that point my instructor signaled me to turn around, and I did, and saw the spool tied into the end of the line on what had been the left-hand wall. The minute I saw it, I broke out in a cold sweat, because I knew what it meant. I had completely missed the fact that this was a TEMPORARY line, belonging to someone else -- which meant, of course, that had we crossed it and swum on, we could easily have come back to find it gone.

Where we were, it wasn't really an issue, because the mainline was a shorter exit than the way we had come in, and we had swum it and knew its topography. But in another circumstance, that mistake could have killed all three of us, and I knew it.

What was even more frightening was to debrief the dive, and discover that I had not seen the spool, but my buddies HAD . . . and nobody said anything. So much for the theory that multiple brains will avoid a mistake!

I will never, ever, ever dive that deep in flow without helium in my mix. Stupid is deadly in caves.

Apologies in advance for making you "re-live" this but, still being in training, I'm just trying to understand. I want to learn from this. I assume you were following the "bone line" (from the junction room) all the way around and into the bone room itself, and then up to where you need to jump on to the gold line (at the maple leaf)? But the bone line was "already jumped" onto the gold line (creating the T)?

I appreciate your willingness to relate this story. You helped me learn something.

[LCF]

Yes, someone had jumped from the mainline onto the bone line, so their spool was tied off onto the very end of the bone line, where it sits on what, for us, was the left-hand wall as we approached the main line.

I saw it as a T, and David rather brusquely reminded me afterwards that we had discussed the fact that T's are rare in Florida (where they are common in Mexico, where I had done most of my diving before that). So finding a T should have been a red flag, and in fact, it was.

Had I not been in a class, I truly believe I would have turned the dive at that point, because I didn't like what I was looking at. It was only because we had instructions that I went forward. But that's part of the perceptual narrowing of narcosis for me; I was focused on what I'd been told to do, rather than looking at the whole situation and evaluating it independently.

It was a fabulous lesson, and it wasn't even one that David set up. I did this one to myself, and I think those are the best lessons, because they scare the stuffing out of you. I have been very, very careful to trace lines since then, and I also turn dives when I'm not 100% happy with where we are and where we are going. I may jump the gun from time to time, but I'd rather go home early than ever have that sick at heart feeling again.

[mag3]

Yes, someone had jumped from the mainline onto the bone line, so their spool was tied off onto the very end of the bone line, where it sits on what, for us, was the left-hand wall as we approached the main line.

I saw it as a T, and David rather brusquely reminded me afterwards that we had discussed the fact that T's are rare in Florida (where they are common in Mexico, where I had done most of my diving before that). So finding a T should have been a red flag, and in fact, it was.

Had I not been in a class, I truly believe I would have turned the dive at that point, because I didn't like what I was looking at. It was only because we had instructions that I went forward. But that's part of the perceptual narrowing of narcosis for me; I was focused on what I'd been told to do, rather than looking at the whole situation and evaluating it independently.

It was a fabulous lesson, and it wasn't even one that David set up. I did this one to myself, and I think those are the best lessons, because they scare the stuffing out of you. I have been very, very careful to trace lines since then, and I also turn dives when I'm not 100% happy with where we are and where we are going. I may jump the gun from time to time, but I'd rather go home early than ever have that sick at heart feeling again.

Fabulous lesson indeed! Yeah, that "situational awareness" thing... Thanks so much. Hopefully, you'll have helped me and others learn it before we "live" it.

[FW]

Most of my worst dives are in the IRAP, except the worst one.

First cave dive, total siltout, no line (before training even exixted)

Offline in total siltout, (first ever real use of the lost line drill)

Line going up into a narrow crack (origin of the term "Line Trap")

Buddy getting line wrapped around valve in siltout, and water so cold I couldn't feel the line..

But the absolute worst was having a buddy die for no apparent reason

Titles from IRAP page (last page)
Lost line
Entangled
Line Trap
My First (and almost last) Cave Dive

[lamont]

I'm still at the stage where I turn tail and run when percolation knocks down a little bit of snowflakes, and I've never been casual about the rules, so I'm more in the "every time I surface/living so far from caves" camp.

Although Day 3 of Cave 2 was really, really frustrating.