Luckily, I only have a couple of borderline stupid decisions and one simply hairy situation among my diving experiences and the other two I've contributed here already.
This happened quite a few years ago. I had some experience at the time, maybe 200 dives or so, but I had a liberal computer and had never gone into deco (by choice of course). I knew what the screen should look like when it was in deco mode but I'd never caused it to go into deco mode.
I was on a boat dive along a wall with a more or less unlimited bottom. There was a ton of life growing on the wall even as you got deeper and deeper. I had a very experienced buddy with me as well who I was not worried about at all.
I had a large HP 119 as well as a 30 cu ft bailout with me as did my friend (or at least I thought so). We got down to around 130 fsw (this was our second dive of the day) and it took no time to get there. I realized that my computer had never been in deco mode and I hadn't been much below 130 fsw so I thought this is the perfect place and perfect buddy to get a little deeper with and check out how my computer functions in deco mode as well.
OK, this may not be the soundest logic but at least there was some logic to it. I also realized that if I was going to do this it would have been better to do it on the first dive but the first dive site wasn't as good as this one.
The bottom line is that when I noticed that I was only 1 minute away from deco I quit looking at that info and focused simply on depth (narcosis and inexperience). When we got to 160 fsw I decided OK deep enough and we started to go back up the wall. At this point I did look at the "numbers" and it said 15 minutes and I though what a piece of crap computer...I know I don't have 15 minutes before I hit the NDL but I continued to go up anyway since I knew it was the right thing to do.
By the time I got to 100 fsw and was thinking more clearly the "number" was 30 minutes but at this point I realized that it wasn't NDL info but a deco obligation!
It seemed excessive but I knew that when you have a liberal computer they are generally going to be the opposite if you do get into deco especially on the second dive.
Oh well, if you do the dive you have to do the time so we went on up eventually to 20 fsw and just stared at crabs fighting with each other but 30 minutes is a long time.
When it finally counted down 3,2,1 I was on a high to be shortly followed by a pounding low when the ceiling changed from 20fsw to 10fsw and it now showed that I had another 30 minutes to do at 10 fsw! These numbers aren't exact by the way.
I hadn't realized that the ceiling for all this time was showing 20 fsw so of course the next ceiling wouldn't be the surface but rather 10 fsw and it too would be a long (should be even longer) stop.
At this point, what can you do! After a few minutes my buddy was showing me that his air was going a little low. Great my "experienced' dive buddy hadn't managed his air. I offered to share but he said no...not yet...at a certain point he had no choice of course and I gave him my reg. I had now realized that he didn't in fact bring his bailout bottle on this dive and he wasn't diving his HP 119 but rather a LP 95 or 104 or something like that.
OK, I'll use my bailout and he can have my reg. When we had about 15 more minutes to go he signaled to go up. I still had enough air to finish my obligation but we had spent 45 minutes already on deco and I figured we would probably be OK and I wasn't going to leave my buddy at this point. We did the dive together and if one of us got bent (or both) we would be there to help each other. I also realized how stupid this whole thing was. Not farm animal stupid since I did think it out somewhat and we did more or less pull it off but stupid nevertheless.
When we got to the surface he told me he wasn't totally out of air but that his computer cleared him. Mine didn't but I wasn't going to go back under at this point and we had both done the same two dives anyway.
The boat picked us up. I drank a ton of water and avoided any hard exercise and just hoped that we had done enough deco.
We had and there was no problem but this does show how narcosis can cause you to lose focus and track of time, affect your decison making process and just how making plans on the fly aren't nearly as good as on the boat when I would have noticed the size of his tank and that he had no bailout bottle.
Not that having a bailout bottle should be taken into account as far as a gas plan but in this case I didn't need mine as part of my gas plan but it did make up for other bad decisions.
This story and one I posted a few years ago regarding diving with a new untrimmed neck seal are the only really poor decisions I can think of that I've made in diving. Hopefully, they were the last but I would never count on that!
If anyone else has any please share, I think these stories are always helpful to keep us on our toes.
Edited by gcbryan, 10 September 2009 - 05:10 AM.