Situational awareness

[LCF]

I suspect that, for most people, this story will seem rather tame, but it scared the daylights out of me, and changed my diving behavior permanently.

Several years ago, we arranged to do a guided dive at Dos Pisos. My Cave 1 instructor was to be our guide, and there were four of us going along. The dive plan was pretty simple, just to swim the mainline in the direction of the next Cenote, although we were going to do a brief side trip to see a particularly pretty passage along the way. We were single-staging. The cave is very shallow, but the dive we planned was going to be fairly long, and we wanted extra gas. Rather than break into individual teams, we were diving as a group of five, which was mistake number one.

We did the early part of the dive, the side passage (which was gorgeous), and dropped stages. We had been briefed that we would continue in fairly open tunnel, and then a little ways before the next Cenote, the cave would get twisty. The guide was in front, and I was second. My usual buddy was behind me, and my husband and his buddy were in the back. By the time we got to where the cave began to bend, I was tired . . . I'd been watching my gauge, and we had been underwater 90 minutes. I was thinking about the 90 minute swim back and contemplating turning the dive, but I knew the twisty sections was close to the other Cenote, and I didn't want to shorten the dive for everybody else (mistake numbers two and three -- number two being not turning the dive when I realized I was tired).

We entered the twisty section, which consists of a bunch of short switchbacks. This meant that there were times when I could not see the light of the diver behind me. But after a couple of minutes, I got a rather hectic "attention" signal from behind, and Kirk swam up to me and the guide and thumbed the dive. We started back . . . and it was over five minutes before we joined up with the other two. Clearly, I had been swimming for some time, not having noticed that the light behind me had disappeared.

On debrief, it turned out that Peter had checked his gauge when the cave got smaller, and decided he was close enough to turn pressure that he didn't want to go into an area where reversing might be challenging. He had thumbed the dive to Ben, who was in front of him, who had passed the signal to Kirk. All the time they were doing this, I was blithely swimming away from them.

It doesn't sound much like an "oh, drat" moment, but I was horrified at how badly my situational awareness had been impacted by the fatigue and the hypnotic quality of swimming for an hour and a half. I have never done a dive with more than three team members since, and I have turned many if I felt my SA was flagging.