Being uncomfortable underwater is the worst feeling you can have. Before we arrived to the dive site my equipment seemed perfect, I had a wetsuit, fins, a regulator, and the vest. The problems began before going into the ocean. As everyone started getting in, I got ready, I clipped my vest to my waist and I stood up. I walked a couple of steps and the weighs started hurting my back. I never mentioned the problem because inside the ocean they were not going to hurt.
I got to the ocean and as I went down my tank started moving form side to side, which allowed me to have less control of my body and my movements. As soon as I felt this error in my equipment I let my instructor know, and he easily fixed it underwater. Everything was perfect after that, until I noticed a huge problem in my regulator. I had already dived for about 25 minutes and the regulator still marked 200 bars, just as the beginning of the dive. |
Obviously, I knew that it wasn't normal, because, in other words it seemed as if I hadn't inhaled oxygen while diving. I mentioned this issue to my instructor and he couldn't fix it, so we started heading back towards the boat. We took about 15 minutes to get to the boat and with the help of the rescue diver, Stuart, my regulator got fixed, and it was actually marking 50 bars. That was a signal that I had to go up and end up the dive.
Even if nothing happened during the dive, because I didn't consumed all the oxygen from my tank it made me nervous because I had no idea how much time I could spend down in the water. It is very important to know how many bars of oxygen you have left, because once you have 50 bars you need to make a three minute safety stop and then go out of the water. It was a huge issue not knowing how much air I was consuming because even if my peers had 100 bars left it didn't mean that I had consumed the same amount of oxygen as them. This was a small error that impacted my diving, due to the fact that I was nervous about something such as not being able to breath, leading to enjoy the dive less. If this ever happens you need to make sure to dive for the rest of the time beside your buddy in case of an emergency regarding scarcity of oxygen.
#MINI INTERNSHIP december 29 - january 3