SAFETY continued
One shared story that got my full attention involved a friend I worked with in a dive center in the 1970s. He later owned his own dive shop in the Marshall Islands. Late one night after a long diving day, he was filling tanks. He thought that four tanks on whips needed about 15 more minutes to get filled and that his compressor had about 15 more minutes worth of gas before it shut off. The next morning when he arose, the tanks were filled and nothing about the compressor garnered his attention. He rented the tanks. A few hours later four divers were in the hospital with CO poisoning. They were lucky to be alive. So, what happened? The unattended compressor threw a rod and overheated but continued to fill the tanks. The over- heated oil released CO that entered the tanks. By morning, the compressor had cooled down, and my friend was completely unaware of what happened until later when he went to fill ad- ditional tanks. Eventually, he unraveled the chain of events. You can easily blame my friend for going to bed and assuming everything would be okay. You can blame him for assuming everything was perfectly normal in the morning when the tanks were full and the compressor had cooled
down. But, if the divers had a CO analyzer like those that are readily available today, they could have checked their own tanks and prevented their life-threatening incident. That is the takeaway message I hope to impart. This brings me back to my story: I was on a liveaboard for back-to-back week-long trips. On the first dive of the second week, I was diving in a 3-person buddy team. Only minutes into our dive, I felt strange. No doubt, conditions were bleak, but I was only 22 feet deep. I settled onto the sea floor and held still because I was having difficulty catching my breath. After stopping, I felt better and the difficulty in catching my breath dissipated. Then a small shark swam in front of me. I swam slowly toward the shark, but as soon as I started to move, I had trouble catching my breath. I was breathing hard but felt like I wasn’t getting any oxygen. It felt similar to breathing when hiking hard at altitude and like when I breathed a rebreather until my scrubber crashed so I could learn what that was like. Stop moving and all was good. I started swimming, even slowly and with very little effort, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I signaled my buddies that I needed to call my dive.
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