Ciao Mondo! : How Does One Avoid the Bends?

Today we went diving at Island. It rained pretty hard the night before, so the visibility wasn't great. The island was beautiful though, and the sun was shining. Today would be a three dive day at Simial: Monkey Pocket, Medetation Wall, and Smuggler's Cove.

We began our dive by going out into "the blue" to see whatever may come our way. We did see a huge marble ray which can grow up to 10ft long and 6 ft wide. They are currently on the "vulnerable" species list.

You can get a better idea of the scale of this marble ray from the video.

The orangy thing...another weird frog fish? I don't know!

I actually have no idea what this was supposed to be a picture of...the green blob is something maybe?

Pretty blue nudibranch.

Tiny frog fish

Look closely and you can see the crocodile fish. His head is facing top left.

Not sure what kind of shell this is, but thought it was pretty.

Locals doing their thing with some sugar cane.

We took a break, and had lunch after the first dive. After about an hour, we headed back in the water. I had been renting the same equipment for the 8 previous dives I had done over the past few days. When I entered the water...something wasn't right. There were bubbles coming out of the inflator. I showed it to my divemaster...he fiddled with it a bit and said it was fine. Famous last words.

About 10 minutes into the dive at 12 meters down (thankfully) my bcd started to spontaneously fill with air. It happened so fast, I could even react except to grunt to my dive buddy. She looked up at me and her eyes widened at I began to float up. The visibility was really bad due to heavy rains the night before, so no one else saw me go up.

I rocketed to the surface. Thankfully I remembered to yell.."Aaaaaaaaaaah" as I went up so that my lungs wouldn't explode. I surfaced safely (and was happy there were no boats above my head). I tried to signal our boat captain to come and get me but he didn't see me. Some random Malaysian guy in his fishing boat did see me and yelled to our captain.

Just then, my divemaster popped up next to me. He kissed me he was so happy to see I was ok. I was just going to go back on the boat and sit that dive out, but he convinced me to just change out my bcd and go back down. Why not? I figured just sitting on the boat was just going to give me anxiety about ever diving again anyway.

The whole incident took about 8 minutes I guess. My dive buddy, Emily, was shocked to see me come back down and gave me a salute. Wow. For my non-diver friends...the danger of what happened to me (besides boats!) is that gas bubbles build up in your body the longer and deeper you are in the water. Surfacing too quickly can cause the bends which can actually kill you.