[ricki]

Diving tales ... watch out now!

Man, there are SO MANY great diving tales from the Bahamas. Hard to know where to start. So, how about I just toss this out to you and hold some of my stuff in reserve. I've been hearing great stories for decades, still more before I even came along. So, what happened ...
Like · · Unfollow Post · Share · February 14, 2009 at 5:48pm

From the wayback machine, took the family boat over to Bimini for some diving at 16 with my dad and a now marine biologist friend I hope to get on here.. Sunday came, time to go home but being a typical March, the Straits were blown out and pretty massive with waves. Had to fly home to get back to High School. Flew back the next weekend bringing a then marine geologist friend along. Left two steel 72 cft. tanks onboard but the valve leaked on one of them, dropping it down to about 1500 psi from 2500 psi. That left about 60% of the normal compressed volume. We decided to head south and hit the drop off off Gun Cay. It comes up pretty shallow there, about 105 ft. and there are all those neat sharks to checkout, sometimes. Told the marine geo guy as he had the only depth gage (sigh, was young and dumb) didn't want to go deeper than 150 ft. on the bounce dive. Viz was incredible, well over 100 ft. Finned down and over the rampart of the wall. Thought I saw a recess a bit further down, could have been a cave. Had never seen a cave in the Bimini wall before, so headed down for a quick look. We went down, noticed I was running real low on air, at least I had a pressure gage. Not everyone was using those yet at the time but J valves, ha! Ascended, pretty much breathing off Boyles Law for the later part of the ascent. Whoops. No gas for a deco stop either, real dumb. My friend told me after, you know we went to 250 ft., oh boy, screwed up. Ended up having a low grade Type I DCS hit in my right cheek, butt cheek. Didn't bother to recompress, way back in Florida anyway. Symptoms abated after a day, wasn't that painful and real lucky to have no lasting barotrauma or effects in the joints of my long bones. If you can't be smart, be lucky. No excuse for such lousy judgment today, particularly given the advancement in gear, procedures and mixes.