Sunday, December 21, 2008

     Ok here is the story.  Adam Allred, his brother Paul and I went scuba diving at a place called The Toilet Bowl.  After climbing over these cool jagged lava rocks we dropped into the water and made our decent down to about 130 feet where we saw all kinds of cool underwater life; like poisonous sea snakes.  When I checked my air I had about 1000 psi left and when I checked again a few moments later it was about 200 psi.  
     At the depths that we were diving, your suppose to start your ascent at about 500 psi.  Immediately I motioned to paul to surface with me.  On the way up each breath began to be harder and harder to breath until I felt like I was sucking on a vacuum.  At that point I jumped on to Paul's spare regulator.  That provided me with air for a little bit till it started malfunctioning and not giving me the air I needed.  
     By this time Adam had caught up to Paul and I to let us know that we were surfacing at a dangerously fast pace and to slow down.  I didn't care about ascending at a dangerously fast pace, I needed air and would rather deal with the damaging effects of decompression sickness and the bends than drown in the ocean off the coast of Okinawa, so i grabbed Adams spare regulator which surprisingly was malfunctioning as well.  Being about 50 ft still below the surface my already unsafe ascent turned into a panicked race to the surface.
     Upon surfacing with snot all over my face from the experience, it was the best feeling to breath air again and know that I was alive.  Once on land we found a nearby picnic table to eat some lunch and try to recover from the nitrogen poisoning that we were all suffering from.  
     After about an hour of resting we walked about 50 yards to another beautiful dive spot called Horseshoe to begin our second dive of the day.  On our decent and during most of our second dive we could all clearly feel that we were still loopy from the nitrogen in our system from the old Toilet Bowl.  

3 comments:

Tony said...

That would freak me out . I'm glad to read that everything turned out okay in the end. Did you suffer any longer term effects than being loopy for the next dive? Why do you think you lost so much air pressure so quickly?

Burglar said...

I don't know why I lost my air so much faster than my diving buddies. I'm just glad I'm alive.

The Geddes Family said...

Way cool Picture Dude