Rescue Yourself
by John Francis
When you face unexpected problems underwater, no one is in a better position to solve
them than you are.
Photograph by Stephen Frink
Good divers, even you, have bad days. Maybe you're swimming alongside the wreck when
you suddenly feel a tug on your BC and you stop moving. You're caught on something you
can't see and can't reach--like fishing line. Or maybe you're five minutes into the dive and
down to 95 feet when your reg starts breathing really hard because, it turns out later, you
have mounted your reg on an almost empty tank.
The bad days are rare, thank goodness, and in the training video they always have a happy
ending thanks to your buddy, who reaches behind your back and disengages the fishing
line or offers you his octopus. Then you exchange OK signs and resume your dives or
ascend calmly to the surface, smiling all the way. But in real life, too often all you see of your
buddy is his fins disappearing ahead of you in the murk. You're left to deal with this
problem alone. Would you know what to do to rescue yourself? And could you do it, under
stress, without help, and not screw up? Not sure?
There are five tools you'll need to rescue yourself in case a dive turns ugly and a buddy can't
help: training, experience, physical fitness, equipment and attitude. Acquire them, and the
payoff is going to be not only more safety underwater but more enjoyment. As PADI rescue
instructor Ned Branch once put it to me, "The more confident you are, the more relaxed you
are. The more relaxed you are the more fun you have."
Train for Self-Rescue
There are few secret tricks. You've already been taught the skills you'd need to rescue
yourself in almost any situation. But did you retain everything you were taught? No one
does. Have you ever had to take your scuba unit off underwater since your open-water
certification classes? Me neither. For sharpening old tools--your diving skills--and acquiring
new ones, there's no substitute for the discipline of formal instruction and drill in the hands
of a good teacher. Continuing education is required of doctors because lives depend on
their skills. Lives, or at any rate one life, may depend on your diving skills.
Almost any advanced scuba course will make you more competent by adding new skills
and reviewing old ones. Technical diving courses teach self-reliance in the context of buddy
or "team" diving. On these more challenging dives, every member of a dive team has to add
to the team's abilities, not subtract from it. Everyone needs to be able to do as much as
possible to rescue himself, and not be a drag on his teammates. Courses in solo diving
are sometimes taught, and these can be valuable whether or not you ever actually dive
solo. The whole course, essentially, is about how to be able to depend on yourself in a
crisis. The divemaster and instructor track is also a good one for developing self-reliance.
Because an instructor can't realistically expect rescue help from a student, he's taught to
take care of himself.
But for most of us, the single best course for developing self-rescue ability might be the
course in how to rescue someone else. That might sound strange, but that was Branch's
experience when he took the course he now teaches. "It did more to increase my
confidence level and my personal skills level than virtually any other course since I got
certified," he told me when I took his course. One reason is that rehearsing emergencies
makes them more real--helps you visualize what they will be like and what will need to be
done.
If you don't have the time and money for a full-length course or access to one, next-best is a
brief refresher course in basic dive skills. It pulls those dusty files out of your mental filing
cabinet and spreads them out on your desktop again. Even if you learn nothing new, you
gain confidence from reminding yourself how much you already know.
Practice Self-Rescue
We all know that we should practice diving skills on a regular basis, but few of us actually
do it. Try turning Mom's rule on its head and doing your chores after you play, not before.
During your safety stop at 15 feet, you've got time and air to burn. Why not practice a skill
like replacing and clearing your mask? Or going to your alternate air source? Once on the
surface there's no need to hurry to the ladder and good physiological reasons to pause for
another "safety stop" at zero feet of depth. Why not use this time on a drill like air sharing or
the scuba unit doff-and-don? By practicing at the end of the dive, you waste no dive time,
and with little or no water over your head, the risk is minimal.
I'd call air sharing a self-rescue skill, by the way. Although it's your buddy's octo, you're the
one who needs to initiate the exchange, keep your head and make it work. I wouldn't
practice that one as a last-minute impulse, though, or with a buddy I'd just met. You want to
go over what you're going to do with your buddy in advance so you do the skill correctly.
Otherwise, you're just practicing mistakes. And you want to trust your buddy to stay calm
and not turn a rehearsal into a real performance. Better let the divemaster know what you're
up to also, so he doesn't go into full rescue mode when he sees you lunging for an octo.
One of the most important self-rescue skills can be easily practiced at the surface: ditching
weights. Unbuckling a weight belt or pulling the weight releases doesn't sound like much
of a skill, but it's amazing how often dead divers are recovered with weights still in place. In
most cases, the divers know how to release their weights but never actually do it in the
water and probably don't even think of it in their panic. So before you climb the ladder,
imagine yourself in trouble and ditch your weights. (Put them on the swim step instead of
dropping them.) It may sound unnecessary, but you're creating the "muscle memory" that
will take over for you in an emergency. Deploying a safety sausage is another of those
skills that seem simple until you need to do them, and it too can be practiced near the
swim step.
Buoyancy control is a basic dive skill that is actually critical to self-rescue. Many dive
accidents happen because a diver loses control of his buoyancy. If an emergency does
occur, one of your first tasks is to get neutral so you don't add to your other problems an
uncontrolled ascent. Perfect buoyancy control starts with correct--usually,
minimum--weighting, and you can best experiment with reducing your weights by handing
a pound or so to your buddy at the safety stop or placing it on the swim step.
The buoyant emergency ascent is obviously an important skill if you ever lose your air
supply. It's what would make it possible to escape drowning by ascending much faster
than the regulation 30 feet per minute. Done correctly--exhaling all the way up--you'll avoid
suffering an embolism too. However, any fast ascent is more dangerous, even if you do
everything right. For that reason, most instructors tell students how to make a buoyant
emergency ascent but don't want them to actually practice it. That's probably good advice.
Gear Up for Self-Rescue
Equipment alone does not make you competent, but some pieces of gear are critical if you
are going to be able to rescue yourself. First is an alternate air source. An octopus is
standard equipment today, but since a complete shutdown of the second stage is
incredibly rare, your octopus is really intended to help your buddy, not you. And that may be
no help at all because if one diver has used up all his air, chances are good that both have.
More valuable is your own completely redundant air system, like a pony bottle or a Spare
Air. The latter carries enough air to make a prompt ascent from fairly deep, and it packs
easily for travel. A proper pony bottle of 20 cubic feet or so gives more margin for error,
more time to deal with a complicated problem. You decide which you want, but either is a
lot better than nothing. You also need cutting tools--several of them--for dealing with
entanglements, and surface signaling devices in case you surface out of sight of the dive
boat. Mount knives so that at least one can be reached with either hand. Today, many divers
prefer a pair of shears to a second knife, as it will cut fishing line and nets one-handed. On
the surface, you should be able to make both a conspicuous visual signal and a loud noise.
And, obviously, all your gear needs to be maintained and overhauled on schedule if you're
going to be able to depend on it when you need it most.
Think Self-Rescue
Attitude adjustment may be the most important part of becoming competent to rescue
yourself. There are three elements: planning for trouble, situational awareness for early
detection of trouble, and solution thinking--dealing with trouble rationally instead of sinking
into the "ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod" spiral.
Planning the dive should always include playing the game of "What if?" What if I become
entangled, what if I run low on air, what if I get lost? It's a rehearsal of those emergency
techniques you've learned and practiced that brings the correct response to the front of your
mind before the need arises.
During the dive you need to be aware of what's happening and of how you're feeling. We're
all taught to check our air pressure and depth frequently while we dive, but you also need to
be aware of where you're going, where the boat is and what the current is like. Is all your
gear still in place--your weight belt isn't loose, for example? And you should ask yourself
how you're feeling. Are you getting tired? Cold? Nervous? All this helps you anticipate
problems before they snowball into emergencies.
The key to solution thinking is captured in the well-known mantra "stop, breathe, think, then
act." That's good advice, because it helps control panic. In a crisis, your real enemy is not
so much the immediate threat as your panicky response to it. If you're suddenly caught in
kelp or fishing line, for example, it's natural to feel a rush of adrenaline. But your first task is
to get control of your emotions. Otherwise, anxiety can quickly grow into fear and then panic,
and when panic comes in the door, reason and your ability to solve problems go out the
window. Panic knows only two responses, fight and flight. Neither is much use underwater.
So before you do anything else, stop all movement to reduce your sensory inputs. Take a
slow, deep breath and exhale fully. As long as you can breathe, you're not in immediate
danger.
What if you can't breathe, what if, against all odds, your regulator suddenly cuts off your air
supply? Even in the case of an interruption to your air supply, you may have a minute or
more of air in your lungs. When every second counts, that's all the more reason to to get
yourself under control so you can use them wisely. Those few emergencies requiring
immediate action are the times when it pays to have rehearsed what to do and visualized it
just before your dive. Whether the best course of action is to reach for your pony bottle,
swim to your buddy or dump your weights and make an emergency ascent, it's essential to
have the plan at your fingertips. If you have to rummage through file drawers for it while
alarm bells are going off, you may not find it in time.
Common sense is part of the formula too. If your weight belt has come undone and is
slithering off your waist, grab it now--don't wait to take that calming breath first. But most of
the time, taking a few moments to calm down is not only time well spent, it is the essential
first step.
The next is to prioritize. One problem often generates others, and even single problems
must be solved in steps. Your first priority is to secure your air supply. Even if your air supply
is not immediately threatened, check how much air you have left so that this does not
become a problem too. Next, if your mask has been bumped in the excitement and is
beginning to leak, deal with it now. Then, make sure your buoyancy is under control. In
most cases you'll want to get neutral, though if you're on the bottom you may be more
stable if you make yourself negative.
Now you can begin dealing with the problem itself. Plan how to solve it, then act out each
step in the plan carefully and, if conditions permit, slowly. In most cases, the solution to the
problem is no different when you are alone than when you have a buddy at your side. The
buddy's role is to help if needed, not take the lead, and becoming better able to rescue
yourself is nothing more than becoming a more competent diver.
A craftsman can be judged by his tools. The best of them frequently acquire new tools and
keep all of them clean and sharp. Your self-rescue tools are not only your knife and pony
bottle but your dive skills, your experience, your health and your mind. Keep all your tools
clean and sharp and, like the master craftsman, you'll have the confidence to tackle any
problem--alone if need be.
by John Francis
When you face unexpected problems underwater, no one is in a better position to solve
them than you are.
Photograph by Stephen Frink
Good divers, even you, have bad days. Maybe you're swimming alongside the wreck when
you suddenly feel a tug on your BC and you stop moving. You're caught on something you
can't see and can't reach--like fishing line. Or maybe you're five minutes into the dive and
down to 95 feet when your reg starts breathing really hard because, it turns out later, you
have mounted your reg on an almost empty tank.
The bad days are rare, thank goodness, and in the training video they always have a happy
ending thanks to your buddy, who reaches behind your back and disengages the fishing
line or offers you his octopus. Then you exchange OK signs and resume your dives or
ascend calmly to the surface, smiling all the way. But in real life, too often all you see of your
buddy is his fins disappearing ahead of you in the murk. You're left to deal with this
problem alone. Would you know what to do to rescue yourself? And could you do it, under
stress, without help, and not screw up? Not sure?
There are five tools you'll need to rescue yourself in case a dive turns ugly and a buddy can't
help: training, experience, physical fitness, equipment and attitude. Acquire them, and the
payoff is going to be not only more safety underwater but more enjoyment. As PADI rescue
instructor Ned Branch once put it to me, "The more confident you are, the more relaxed you
are. The more relaxed you are the more fun you have."
Train for Self-Rescue
There are few secret tricks. You've already been taught the skills you'd need to rescue
yourself in almost any situation. But did you retain everything you were taught? No one
does. Have you ever had to take your scuba unit off underwater since your open-water
certification classes? Me neither. For sharpening old tools--your diving skills--and acquiring
new ones, there's no substitute for the discipline of formal instruction and drill in the hands
of a good teacher. Continuing education is required of doctors because lives depend on
their skills. Lives, or at any rate one life, may depend on your diving skills.
Almost any advanced scuba course will make you more competent by adding new skills
and reviewing old ones. Technical diving courses teach self-reliance in the context of buddy
or "team" diving. On these more challenging dives, every member of a dive team has to add
to the team's abilities, not subtract from it. Everyone needs to be able to do as much as
possible to rescue himself, and not be a drag on his teammates. Courses in solo diving
are sometimes taught, and these can be valuable whether or not you ever actually dive
solo. The whole course, essentially, is about how to be able to depend on yourself in a
crisis. The divemaster and instructor track is also a good one for developing self-reliance.
Because an instructor can't realistically expect rescue help from a student, he's taught to
take care of himself.
But for most of us, the single best course for developing self-rescue ability might be the
course in how to rescue someone else. That might sound strange, but that was Branch's
experience when he took the course he now teaches. "It did more to increase my
confidence level and my personal skills level than virtually any other course since I got
certified," he told me when I took his course. One reason is that rehearsing emergencies
makes them more real--helps you visualize what they will be like and what will need to be
done.
If you don't have the time and money for a full-length course or access to one, next-best is a
brief refresher course in basic dive skills. It pulls those dusty files out of your mental filing
cabinet and spreads them out on your desktop again. Even if you learn nothing new, you
gain confidence from reminding yourself how much you already know.
Practice Self-Rescue
We all know that we should practice diving skills on a regular basis, but few of us actually
do it. Try turning Mom's rule on its head and doing your chores after you play, not before.
During your safety stop at 15 feet, you've got time and air to burn. Why not practice a skill
like replacing and clearing your mask? Or going to your alternate air source? Once on the
surface there's no need to hurry to the ladder and good physiological reasons to pause for
another "safety stop" at zero feet of depth. Why not use this time on a drill like air sharing or
the scuba unit doff-and-don? By practicing at the end of the dive, you waste no dive time,
and with little or no water over your head, the risk is minimal.
I'd call air sharing a self-rescue skill, by the way. Although it's your buddy's octo, you're the
one who needs to initiate the exchange, keep your head and make it work. I wouldn't
practice that one as a last-minute impulse, though, or with a buddy I'd just met. You want to
go over what you're going to do with your buddy in advance so you do the skill correctly.
Otherwise, you're just practicing mistakes. And you want to trust your buddy to stay calm
and not turn a rehearsal into a real performance. Better let the divemaster know what you're
up to also, so he doesn't go into full rescue mode when he sees you lunging for an octo.
One of the most important self-rescue skills can be easily practiced at the surface: ditching
weights. Unbuckling a weight belt or pulling the weight releases doesn't sound like much
of a skill, but it's amazing how often dead divers are recovered with weights still in place. In
most cases, the divers know how to release their weights but never actually do it in the
water and probably don't even think of it in their panic. So before you climb the ladder,
imagine yourself in trouble and ditch your weights. (Put them on the swim step instead of
dropping them.) It may sound unnecessary, but you're creating the "muscle memory" that
will take over for you in an emergency. Deploying a safety sausage is another of those
skills that seem simple until you need to do them, and it too can be practiced near the
swim step.
Buoyancy control is a basic dive skill that is actually critical to self-rescue. Many dive
accidents happen because a diver loses control of his buoyancy. If an emergency does
occur, one of your first tasks is to get neutral so you don't add to your other problems an
uncontrolled ascent. Perfect buoyancy control starts with correct--usually,
minimum--weighting, and you can best experiment with reducing your weights by handing
a pound or so to your buddy at the safety stop or placing it on the swim step.
The buoyant emergency ascent is obviously an important skill if you ever lose your air
supply. It's what would make it possible to escape drowning by ascending much faster
than the regulation 30 feet per minute. Done correctly--exhaling all the way up--you'll avoid
suffering an embolism too. However, any fast ascent is more dangerous, even if you do
everything right. For that reason, most instructors tell students how to make a buoyant
emergency ascent but don't want them to actually practice it. That's probably good advice.
Gear Up for Self-Rescue
Equipment alone does not make you competent, but some pieces of gear are critical if you
are going to be able to rescue yourself. First is an alternate air source. An octopus is
standard equipment today, but since a complete shutdown of the second stage is
incredibly rare, your octopus is really intended to help your buddy, not you. And that may be
no help at all because if one diver has used up all his air, chances are good that both have.
More valuable is your own completely redundant air system, like a pony bottle or a Spare
Air. The latter carries enough air to make a prompt ascent from fairly deep, and it packs
easily for travel. A proper pony bottle of 20 cubic feet or so gives more margin for error,
more time to deal with a complicated problem. You decide which you want, but either is a
lot better than nothing. You also need cutting tools--several of them--for dealing with
entanglements, and surface signaling devices in case you surface out of sight of the dive
boat. Mount knives so that at least one can be reached with either hand. Today, many divers
prefer a pair of shears to a second knife, as it will cut fishing line and nets one-handed. On
the surface, you should be able to make both a conspicuous visual signal and a loud noise.
And, obviously, all your gear needs to be maintained and overhauled on schedule if you're
going to be able to depend on it when you need it most.
Think Self-Rescue
Attitude adjustment may be the most important part of becoming competent to rescue
yourself. There are three elements: planning for trouble, situational awareness for early
detection of trouble, and solution thinking--dealing with trouble rationally instead of sinking
into the "ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod" spiral.
Planning the dive should always include playing the game of "What if?" What if I become
entangled, what if I run low on air, what if I get lost? It's a rehearsal of those emergency
techniques you've learned and practiced that brings the correct response to the front of your
mind before the need arises.
During the dive you need to be aware of what's happening and of how you're feeling. We're
all taught to check our air pressure and depth frequently while we dive, but you also need to
be aware of where you're going, where the boat is and what the current is like. Is all your
gear still in place--your weight belt isn't loose, for example? And you should ask yourself
how you're feeling. Are you getting tired? Cold? Nervous? All this helps you anticipate
problems before they snowball into emergencies.
The key to solution thinking is captured in the well-known mantra "stop, breathe, think, then
act." That's good advice, because it helps control panic. In a crisis, your real enemy is not
so much the immediate threat as your panicky response to it. If you're suddenly caught in
kelp or fishing line, for example, it's natural to feel a rush of adrenaline. But your first task is
to get control of your emotions. Otherwise, anxiety can quickly grow into fear and then panic,
and when panic comes in the door, reason and your ability to solve problems go out the
window. Panic knows only two responses, fight and flight. Neither is much use underwater.
So before you do anything else, stop all movement to reduce your sensory inputs. Take a
slow, deep breath and exhale fully. As long as you can breathe, you're not in immediate
danger.
What if you can't breathe, what if, against all odds, your regulator suddenly cuts off your air
supply? Even in the case of an interruption to your air supply, you may have a minute or
more of air in your lungs. When every second counts, that's all the more reason to to get
yourself under control so you can use them wisely. Those few emergencies requiring
immediate action are the times when it pays to have rehearsed what to do and visualized it
just before your dive. Whether the best course of action is to reach for your pony bottle,
swim to your buddy or dump your weights and make an emergency ascent, it's essential to
have the plan at your fingertips. If you have to rummage through file drawers for it while
alarm bells are going off, you may not find it in time.
Common sense is part of the formula too. If your weight belt has come undone and is
slithering off your waist, grab it now--don't wait to take that calming breath first. But most of
the time, taking a few moments to calm down is not only time well spent, it is the essential
first step.
The next is to prioritize. One problem often generates others, and even single problems
must be solved in steps. Your first priority is to secure your air supply. Even if your air supply
is not immediately threatened, check how much air you have left so that this does not
become a problem too. Next, if your mask has been bumped in the excitement and is
beginning to leak, deal with it now. Then, make sure your buoyancy is under control. In
most cases you'll want to get neutral, though if you're on the bottom you may be more
stable if you make yourself negative.
Now you can begin dealing with the problem itself. Plan how to solve it, then act out each
step in the plan carefully and, if conditions permit, slowly. In most cases, the solution to the
problem is no different when you are alone than when you have a buddy at your side. The
buddy's role is to help if needed, not take the lead, and becoming better able to rescue
yourself is nothing more than becoming a more competent diver.
A craftsman can be judged by his tools. The best of them frequently acquire new tools and
keep all of them clean and sharp. Your self-rescue tools are not only your knife and pony
bottle but your dive skills, your experience, your health and your mind. Keep all your tools
clean and sharp and, like the master craftsman, you'll have the confidence to tackle any
problem--alone if need be.
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