Diving Safely as of Lately The following weekend after our 63lb ulua incident. I was determined to find some pelagic fish. The weather was holding great all week long and Sunday surprisingly was looking great! So I got a team of divers lined up and my buddy Jonathan Lata and I decided to take out both of our dingys and have some Sunday Fun! The team developed through the week and ended up being Jonathan Lata, Kaipo Stevens Soledade, Tiago Candelot, and Matt Geotter (+myself) =5 divers. We decided to head south and jon and I got to open up our boats and race each other to the spot. I got there first surprisingly and dropped our set up. Everything was looking perfect and lining up great. Matt hit the water first with his GoPro filming. I hit the water second and we both started loading our guns. Not more than a second goes by from me hitting the water and theres six onos on us. Matts still loading his gun. One comes within shooting range for me but I still have one more band to load..Matt finishes loading his and has one almost in range. He takes a dive just below the surface and something goes wrong. The onos scatter and are gone as quickly as they appeared with no shots fired. I guess thats why they call it hunting not catching. A little bummed but excited on the site of seeing them, Jon is finally ready and swims over to me. Jon is one of the best free divers in the world as well as a really safe and successful spear fisherman. It is a real privilege to be able to get in the water with this guy and watch what he can do. Not only that but he is by far one of the safest diver to dive with and if something were to go wrong which does this day, is able to take control of the situation. Because Jon is such a good diver my confidence on pushing my limits goes way up because I know he is going to be within arms length of me the entire dive, which is crucial. Every time minute we are in the water we are counting our breath ups and minutes of bottom time(which without a dive watch is almost impossible). At the end of each dive once we are 10ft from the surface we give each other the okay signal to know that the other person is going to be okay, once they hit the surface. If you arent familiar shallow water black out happens the most after the person reaches the surface not before hand, so the hand signal is key to catching this as well as a few other signs. Jon, Tiago and I were doing drops well over 100 all day and when youre going that deep your pushing your body. We like to have at least 8:00 minutes of rest and recovery in between drops. This works out great with three guys because each of us have a bottom time over 2 minutes. If something happens you have a guy ready to go down and meet that person to either take the gun to retrieve the fish or help them to the surface if need be with another on the surface for back up. This was going to be a deep dive my watch was already reading 106 with 2:35sec dive time. My recovery was hitting 12:24seconds. Tiago had just come up with the okay signal and had signed that there were uku below us. I hit the bottom and a light plume of sediment engulfed me, the bottom was reading 124 and my time was 2:40..I knew I had roughly 15 seconds to stay on the bottom before I needed to head up. A wall of Kala engulfed me with over 100 fish all over 20lbs, it was a beautiful site to see considering I had just found the most remote satellite reef on this sandy section of ocean. The reef was aa lava teeth three of them sticking up 6 from the ocean floor with uku grass surrounding. All of sudden I spotted her, a beautiful 25lb uku. She was circling me the whole time and I hadnt noticed her because of the amount of life surrounding me. I lined up a shot right behind her gill plate, going for a stone shot up into her head. I let the arrow fly, she was hit and hit hard..she didnt fight right away and I headed for the surface, I was already back to 100 and I still had around 30 seconds left to make it up. My body was starting to feel the pains of being hypoxic. My limbs were getting tingles and jingles, then my diaphragm began to do breath compressions, I was nearing the end of my C02 limits. The lactic acid had built up in my body as well, it felt like I had just sprinted a 5 minute mile. I kept calm, knowing I had my dive partners to take the gun if needed, I signaled to Tiago to head down, he was already with me, I passed the gun off. At this point it was 40 I was buoyant again, I let my air carry me to the surface with very slow and steady kicks conserving my energy. I knew this would be my last dive for today. I had pushed my body to its limit. I reached 20 and the lactic acid had increased, so did the compressions in my chest, I could feel my hypoxic lips and they were probably blue. Then it started to hit me 15 below the surface, I knew I was there and I wasnt going to black out but my body was done. I started losing motor control but Jon was already on me. I gave him the okay signal and my arms began the somba (a uncontrollable muscle spasm). I made it to the surface and took my hook breaths, while Jon held my arm holding me up so I could conserve my energy. I recovered without a blackout and remember every minute of it. It was a close call and without my dive partners I wouldnt have been diving that deep or have pushed myself to my limits. The uku had disengaged the flopper and had fallen off when I had handed my gun to Tiago, and honestly I didnt care. We already had a bag of fish on the boat and a fun day shared with good friends.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 18:17:47 +0000