Drysuit vs Wetsuit Diving in BC

Many people think that scuba diving in BC is a summertime sport, when in fact it’s a four-season sport, with a fascinating variety and cycle of life across the seasons.  Drysuits make it possible to dive comfortably all-year round.

A drysuit is a technical piece of equipment that a diver must operate and manage actively, unlike a wetsuit, which is worn passively for exposure protection.  Drysuits have advantages over wetsuits, but they introduce additional risks. A drysuit diver must develop a higher situational awareness and new motor skills to operate their drysuit effectively & safely.

A drysuit is a sealed air-vessel, with the seals being at your neck and wrists.  The suit is connected to the regulator’s first stage and to the air cylinder by a low-pressure hose, just like the inflator hose on the BCD.  The inflator button is located in the middle of the chest. The drysuit also has an exhaust valve, usually located below the left shoulder. The inflator and exhaust valves are both deployed using your right hand. This is because you need your left hand to operate the BCD.

A drysuit diver must actively add air to, and exhaust air from their drysuit throughout a dive, much like they do with their BCD. However, a drysuit is not a substitute for the BCD and should not be used as the primary vessel for buoyancy control underwater. There are several reasons for this, the first one being that a drysuit is not designed or constructed to act as a primary buoyancy control device. It has multiple possible failure points that could result in a catastrophic flood. It exhausts air more slowly than a BCD. A too-large air bubble inside a drysuit can shift quickly and dramatically, throwing a diver off-balance and risking an inverted, out-of-control rapid ascent. And it’s impossible to exhaust air from a drysuit when the diver is in an upside-down position. Therefore the safest way to operate a drysuit is with a minimum amount of air inside it to offset a squeeze and allow the diver to feel comfortable, with free movement of their arms and legs.

At VSds, we train clients to dive in a shell-style drysuit, which itself provides no thermal protection. The diver wears layers of long underwear, fleece and socks. These undergarments plus the air in the suit provide the insulation.

The PADI Drysuit Specialty course will introduce you to drysuits in general, and train you to operate a drysuit while adapting your buoyancy control technique. It’s a one day, two-tank dive, with a brief course manual to read prior to dive day. If you want to rent a drysuit in the future as a certified diver, then you will need to present this C-card as proof of training.

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Prospective divers often wonder what the water temperature is around Vancouver, and whether they should train and be certified to dive in a drysuit. The simple answer is that the water’s always cold and that a drysuit will keep you warm much longer than a wetsuit can. So you should learn to dive in a drysuit and wear one all year round.

The water temperature at depth doesn’t fluctuate very much thoughout the year, with a minimum temperature of around 7-8C in February and the maximum around 13C in August. In the summertime, there’s a thermocline with a surface layer of warmer water reaching about 16C. But divers pass through the thermocline on descent, down into the deeper, colder water.

Wetsuit divers will usually only dive comfortably in the July-September time frame, when the water temperature is warmest and, most importantly, when they can warm up in the sun between dives. For the rest of the year, wetsuit divers can’t warm up between dives, so they get cold faster on the second dive.  This results in a higher risk profile and short second dives. Often the wetsuit diver cancels the second dive .

Meanwhile, drysuit divers must deal with the opposite problem. They can stay toasty inside the drysuit between dives when there’s snow on the beach in winter, but risk sweating and overheating when the air temperature is above 15C. They enter the water to cool off, and get chilled by the perspiration evaporating on their skin.

In the wintertime, I recommend that divers wear a base layer of warm, perspiration-wicking thermals, with two pairs of the thickest, warmest Arctic socks. I also recommend wearing a lower-back heat wrap that will keep your core warm all day. A double layer of fleece is worn over top of this base layer. 

In the summertime, a diver can wear shorts and a t-shirt, or a light base layer, under the fleece.

Serious divers will tend to use dry-glove systems rather than neoprene gloves. Hands will stay warmer, longer.

Drysuits are much more expensive to buy than wetsuits. A good quality drysuit, with accessories including a hood, boots and dry gloves will cost $2,000-3,000. Most dive shops will rent drysuits for around $50-75/day, marginally more costly than renting a wetsuit.

If you're a traveler, then you probably already carry some kind of  travel insurance. And if you intend to dive when traveling, then you should find out whether your insurance covers you for diving incidents, accidents and trip cancellation.

I strongly recommend that you check out Divers Alert Network. DAN not only offers dive travel insurance, it's a major source of medical information and dive accident statistics.

Click on the link to visit Divers Alert Network

Scuba diving is a gear sport. The investment required to fully equip yourself for diving in BC can easily reach $5,000.

Vancouver Scuba diving school is not a retail dive shop and we don't sell dive equipment. But we know that diving is an expensive sport and we're pleased to announce that VSds clients will now get a 20% discount off everyday retail prices on all their gear purchases at partner dive shops, when you're enrolled in any of our courses.

Typical retail price ranges for core diving equipment are as follows:

• Exposure protection: $2,500+ for drysuit, spare wrist and neck seals, zipper wax, booties, hood, dry gloves, fleece undergarment, base layers of long underwear, heavy arctic socks.
• Buoyancy Control Device (BCD): $400-700
• Regulator: $1,000-1,500+
• Critical accessories group: $1,000+ for compass, dive computer, knife tool, dive light and backup light, safety/signalling devices.
• Personal gear group: $300+ for mask, snorkel, fins, spare straps.
• Incidentals: $300+ for gear bags, bins, tool box and tools, spare parts, spare hoses, etc.

The money you can save as you equip yourself for diving can offset much, if not all, of your course fees when you sign up with Vancouver Scuba diving school.

During my 30+ years of diving, I've encountered risk-takers, risk-avoiders, thrill-seekers and the risk-oblivious. My goal here at VSds is to guide clients to become proficient risk managers. 

Risk can be defined as the probability (or uncertainty) that some undesirable event will occur, and the corresponding consequence(s) of that event. 

In my research for this blog, I've come across some useful concepts and statistics that will help to identify and quantify the variety of risks you'll face as a novice scuba diver. There are both knowable and unknowable (variable, random) risks on every dive.  A competent diver will be aware of the major and minor knowable risks, will plan and execute their dives accordingly, and will be mentally prepared with contingency plans to balance and manage known risks actively throughout a dive.  Unknowable, random risks cannot be reduced through advanced planning, and must be dealt with as they occur.

And other risks and risk preferences lurk within your own physiology and psychology.  As a diver, you will find yourself in situations where you need to make decisions that will affect your safety. Here are two simple risk preference questions to ponder...

1. It's near the end of a dive in which you had some minor equalizations issues on descent. You felt some pressure in your ears throughout the dive, but not enough to abort the dive. You arrived at your safety stop with less reserve air than planned, and your ears still feel a little plugged. While trying to clear your ears you drop your camera and it sinks to the bottom 5m/15feet below. Your buddy can't or won't go get it and you have one chance to retrieve it or lose it forever. What do you do?

2. You're at the deepest part of the dive with your assigned buddy, maximum planned depth, your tank half full, and it's time to make a 180 degree turn back toward the exit point. After turning, you notice there's current that's strong enough to slow your forward progress. You start to swim harder and your heart rate increases. Your buddy is swimming faster and is pulling ahead of you. You're consuming your air faster than planned. At this rate, your air supply will run out before reaching the exit point. You might have to surface early into a current. You're 2m/6feet above a flat, rocky bottom. What do you do?

There are two kinds of seriously undesirable consequences for you to be aware of and understand: the risk of sudden death and the risk of a serious injury causing long term disability. One risk is acute, while the other is chronic. Let’s examine some relevant concepts and statistics, then draw some conclusions.

Measuring the risk of dying today

Have you ever heard of a micromort? It’s a unit of measurement, and it measures the risk/probability of your death today as you go about living your life. Everyone alive today is facing a baseline risk of 1 micromort. In simple terms, there’s a one-in-a-million chance that any individual will die today. It’s a very low probability, but it’s not zero. And the risks you take start to increase when you walk through the door to live your life.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

Here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

The wiki entry is fairly short and the stats are not current, but it contains some fascinating and (in)credible insights, comparing the risk of sudden death that we all face every day when participating in various activities. So let's have some fun with numbers.

Here is a short list of some activities that add 1 micromort to the baseline risk,  or approximately doubling the risk of dying today if you decide not to spend it in bed:

walking 27km

riding your bicycle 16km

driving your car 370km

traveling 1600km by jet

going skiing

taking 2 tablets of the drug ecstacy. (that's a wtf statistic!)

Now let's look at some extreme sports :

riding a motorcycle 50km: add 5 micromorts

running a marathon: add 7 micromorts

hang gliding: add 8 micromorts per flight

skydiving: add 8-9 micromorts per jump

And finally (drum roll), if you go on a two-tank dive, add 5-10 micromorts per dive, or 10-20 total micromorts per day, depending on your skill level. Novice divers and inadequately-trained divers are at the high end, facing 20 times the baseline risk of death.

We each have our own unique set of risk preferences. We pick our poisons, so to speak, depending partly on what exhilarates us or taps into our fears. Scuba diving offers plenty of both. So if you want to take up diving, you need to inform yourself and decide in advance on what quality and level of training you will need to keep yourself safe... as well as exhilarated.

How much would you pay to avoid a 1-in-a-million risk of dying today?

Now that we've quantified the relative risk of death by scuba, the question is... How much would you be willing to pay to avoid a 10-in-a-million (10 micromort) chance of death?

The wiki article argues that, generally speaking, when someone makes an initial decision to spend some dollar amount of money on their safety, they are very unlikely to spend significantly more money at a later date to further enhance that level of safety. It’s as if people decide in advance how much risk they’re willing to take, and don’t really budge much from there. People get comfortable with their perception of risk. 

The implication for scuba diving is that a typical novice student who enrolls in a cheaply-priced group dive course, offering minimal safety training and skill development, is unlikely to invest later in higher levels of personal training and safety equipment. In other words, if someone is willing to spend a maximum of $500 on an entry-level group diving course, which subjects him or her to a 20 times increase in the baseline risk of death, then he or she will probably not be willing to spend another $1,000 later for fuller training and safety equipment to cut that risk in half.

This is certainly true in the world of diving.  Almost nobody comes back for more training after the Open Water course.  And it's not because they don't need any more training. Most divers remain marginally-skilled or choose to drop the sport entirely rather than invest in the additional training that would raise their skills, confidence, safety and quality of experience.

In short, your initial personal and financial investment in diver training is probably all you will ever make. And this initial investment in training will essentially lock you into a lower or higher risk category that you'll not significantly improve on in future years.

Now let’s consider the statistics on dive injuries and fatalities.

Introducing DAN

The authoritative source of data on dive injuries and fatalities in North America is Divers Alert Network, or DAN. https://www.diversalertnetwork.org. Their 2013, 2015, and 2017 reports were the sources for this blog entry. 

The data that DAN have collected are not complete. North American (US and Canadian) statistics are fairly extensive and detailed, while foreign and tropical dive incident statistics are more limited. Incidentally, in many parts of the world dive incident reports are deliberately suppressed from public knowledge, for reasons including the protection of local tourist industries. So we don’t often hear about diving accidents, even though they happen every day.

It’s reasonable to assume that the North American dive industry (dive shops, professional instructors/divemasters and tour operators) adhere to higher standards of safety than in many tropical countries, for a variety of reasons including litigation risk and the enforcement of standards by the industry’s leading training organization: PADI. But in 2nd and 3rd world countries, the safety risks that divers are exposed to are likely much higher. There’s no data to support that assertion, but personal experience tells me that this is true.

DAN stresses that their data should not be used to draw specific conclusions and inferences about the risks involved in diving or the frequency of accidents, but rather as a general indication of the types of injuries and fatalities that do get reported.

DAN’s dive injury and fatality statistics

Here are some notable statistics and factoids drawn from various sections of the DAN report.

DAN estimates that there are 3 million divers in the U.S., and that there are about 2 deaths per 100,000 divers per year, with 20 ER admissions per death and many more primary care visits. That's converts to 60 deaths, 600 ER admissions, and thousands of primary care visits every year for those 3 million divers.

In 2013, 68% of all reported dive incidents (fatal and non-fatal) involved a victim with less than 2 years experience from their date of certification.

Over a period of a few years, 12% of reported fatalities were student divers.

64% of all reported deaths were during a pleasure dive, and 8% were during a training dive.

59% of incidents were on the first dive of the day.

When depth of dive was known, 25% of fatalities were in water less than 10m deep and 28% of fatalities were in water 10-18m deep. This means that more than half of fatalities occurred on shallow dives within the limits of a basic Open Water certification.

81% of fatalities involved circumstances that began to go wrong either at the deepest part of the dive (49%), during the ascent phase (9%) or at the surface after the dive (23%). Incidentally, a high percentage of victims found dead on the bottom still had their lead weights in position.

In 2013, 78% of male fatalities and 90% of female fatalities were over the age of 40. (2015- 91% of males and 93% of females were over 40; and 75% of males and 71% of females were over 50). It’s not the wild kids getting themselves killed scuba diving. According to PADI, the average age of novice scuba divers is in the late 30’s.

The medical histories of most victims were not available, but of those that were, 12% had a history of high blood pressure and 5% heart disease.

Body Mass Index (BMI) data were available for about half of all fatalities in 2013. Of these, 47% were overweight (BMI 25-29.9) and 35% were obese (BMI 30-39.9). In 2014, 51% of victims were obese and in 2015, 37% were obese.

Panic, running out of gas to breathe, and rapid ascent were the three most common mechanisms leading to injury and death, each at about 30-31% of the total. I've had personal experience with client panic, out of air situations and barotrauma (ear injuries on descent or ascent). Yes, they're pretty common.

The main causes of death were cardiovascular disease, drowning and arterial gas embolism. Interestingly, decompression sickness (ie. the bends) ranked very low, the 6th most common cause of death.  DCS doesn’t often kill, but was involved in 39% of reported non-fatal injuries, the most common of all non-fatal injuries.

Ear injuries were in second place, at 17% of the total reported injuries. 

Of all deaths where underwater visibility conditions were reported, 22% were in low viz (<3m) and 48% were in moderate viz (3-15m) environments, or 70% of the total. Unfortunately, this statistic isn’t very useful because the range of moderate viz is too broad. Three meter viz is a very different risk environment compared to 15m viz. In local Howe Sound waters, viz for most of the year is 7m or less. During the summertime the viz is often zero down to the bottom, and dive shops send large groups into this soup every weekend.

Equipment problems were frequently associated with dive incidents, with 25% of all reported incidents happening in conjunction with equipment issues. The most common equipment problems were with regulator free-flow and BCD (buoyancy control device) malfunction. I've experienced both, as well as other equipment malfunctions and failures, such as blown hoses, drysuit floods, hypothermia, dropped fins, lost masks, dropped weight pockets, dead computer and dive light batteries,  inaccurate compasses, inaccurate tank pressure gauges and depth gauges, and so on.

The local ocean environment itself presents sudden, unexpected risks. There are no seriously threatening animals in BC waters (except maybe sea lions), but there are stinging lions mane jellyfish, curious biting seals, and defensive ling cod mothers protecting their eggs. 

I've done a lot of tropical diving too, where the risks from aggressive or dangerous animals are much higher than in BC. And tourist dive guides don't necessarily explain all the knowable and random risks in their pre-dive briefings. In many countries the diving industry is essentially self-regulated, or faces little to no litigation risk.

All of these problems and dangers require competent risk management strategies and responses for a diver to remain safe.

Analysis and conclusions

It seems clear from the data that individual fitness, dive training and skills, equipment maintenance and prevailing diving conditions can and do explain differences in diving outcomes between safe diving and injury or death.

If you're thinking about taking your first scuba course, the dollar amount of your initial investment in training and equipment will largely determine the amount of risk (in micromorts) that you’ll be taking on as a certified scuba diver for the rest of your diving days. Competent divers face half the risk that a problem will turn into a fatality, compared to weak-skilled divers. When dealing with problems, well-trained divers are much more likely to take appropriate actions. On the other hand, bad decisions often lead to more bad decisions and to dive accidents.

Expressed in hypothetical micromorts, an unskilled novice diver who’s paid a rock bottom $500 price - for a typical large-group Open Water course with minimal training time and minimal direct instructor interaction - is 20 times more likely to die when diving today than if they spent the day in bed. And they’re much more likely to suffer a serious injury that could result in a long term physical impairment.

Would you pay an extra $1,000 for private personal diver training to cut that life-long risk of sudden death or serious injury in half?  99.9% of risk-oblivious novices just say no. 

Shore diving in Howe Sound offers several dive site options. Some sites are suitable for casual divers and large groups, with nearby bathroom and change facilities, while some other sites are harder to reach and offer no nearby services or facilities. Most local dive operators will take clients primarily to Whytecliff Park and Porteau Cove, while others such as Vancouver Scuba diving school will also take qualified divers off the beaten path.

When planning our dives, we always refer to the tide tables to try and estimate when underwater conditions will be at their best. In Howe Sound, the best diving is generally around high tide.

We use a couple of data sources to determine the tides for any particular dive day:

Fisheries and Oceans Canada's website: http://www.waterlevels.gc.ca/eng/find/zone/10

Tides4fishing.com:  http://www.tides4fishing.com/ca/british-columbia/vancouver

Here is some basic information about tides: High and low tides, and spring and neap tides

As for currents in Howe Sound, it appears that there is no published source of information. I've been advised by a publisher of nautical maps used by sail boat operators that the basic assumption is for a maximum 1.0 knot current in Howe Sound. I have found in my experience that Howe Sound weather reports, especially wind forecasts, are a useful reference for surface currents and chop.

It's important to note that the area around Porteau Cove and northwards to Squamish is a microclimate, where conditions can be very different from the Southern end of Howe Sound closer to Lions Bay and Whytecliff Park. 

My buddy Eduardo and me returned to Pavilion Lake for 2 days and 4 tanks on July 10-11. One of my goals was to pinpoint the location for a dive float/descent line directly to the massive microbialite structures sitting on the bottom in 23m of fresh water.

So, for your future reference, you can navigate to the descent point by following a South heading along a line that starts from the "No Camping" sign and passes tangentially by the eastern edge of the island. See the pics below:

The air temperature was about 37C, people were swimming in 20C surface waters, and bather's were a little amazed to see us put on long underwear, fleecy snowsuits and then climb into drysuits before entering the lake to cool off. But the water temperature at depth was 8C, which is about the same as it is in the ocean around Vancouver in the winter time.

Here's a link to the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=650bSYfYsNc

In recent years,  entry-level diver training courses have become commodified. Whether this process has brought more long term growth to the industry, I don't know.  But one thing is clear: more and more people are finishing entry level group courses and then just dropping out. (or dropping out before finishing).

A lack of skill, competence and confidence are cited as main reasons that new divers drop out, which suggests that off-the-shelf group diving courses don't provide enough training. Cheap commodity pricing might draw more people into "checking out" the sport, but it takes proper training and a broader diving education to keep a new diver committed. Commodified training might be turning scuba diving into a bucket list kind of sport, where anyone with $500 to blow can check it out, learn some basics and go on 4 dives, then decide whether to continue with the sport or just drop out of it.

These are my impressions, based on a limited view of the industry. Here's an article taken from Undercurrent, a diver magazine, written by one of the most senior, experienced and well informed people in the diving world. 

Incidentally, PADI doesn't discourage or prevent instructors from extending their course offerings to more fully educate and train new divers beyond the bare minimum of an off-the-shelf course. But less than 1% of newcomers are willing to invest in that proper training.

One of the main problems with the diver training industry globally is that there are few barriers to entry, so there are too many dive instructors and dive shops worldwide, competing for market share, mostly on price. This race to the bottom ensures that only the minimum bare- bones training is provided to newcomers, with little or no mentorship.

At Vancouver Scuba diving school, we exist to train and educate divers, not to compete on price for market share and dominance. We've taken the off-the-shelf PADI Open Water Diver course and expanded the training and practice time by 50%. And you'll get this training one-on-one, not in a group of 8 strangers.

Here's a link to Undercurrent.

One of the risks in diving is buddy separation, and a more serious risk is buddy abandonment. Whether you're diving locally around Vancouver or internationally anywhere in the world, you'd be wise to expect that if you're buddied with a stranger or if you're just one of several divers following a professional dive leader, there's a very real probability that if you experience a problem of some kind, you'll be abandoned by your buddy or group leader just when you need help the most.

As a rule of thumb, you should never consent to buddy with someone that you've never been diving with before.

But don't take my word for it.....here's an article below from Diver Magazine that tells a typical abandonment story. 

One of the most frequent causes for buddy separation is the loss of buoyancy control. One diver rises in the water column, out of sight. This happens to me all the time. I watch the student rise out of sight, I wait, hovering in the area where we were separated, and most of the time they regain control and descend back down. 

A good rule of thumb is that the diver who loses buoyancy control has the responsibility to regain control and drop back down. 

If the diver goes all the way to the surface, then the rule is to stay there and establish positive buoyancy. A responsible buddy will meet you there in a minute or two.

Another common way that divers become separated when swimming side by side is one is swimming faster than the other. The rule there is that the faster swimmer must slow their pace, because the slower swimmer would become overexerted trying to keep up.

A third way that divers get separated is that each is following a different subject of interest rather than a single shared experience.  They just swim apart in different directions.

All of these situations can happen on a single dive.

Incidentally, when I was an unskilled novice diver, I was abandoned underwater by my buddies (strangers) in Hanauma Bay, Hawaii, when my low pressure inflator hose started to free flow into my BCD at a depth of 40 feet on the first dive of the day. I didn't know what to do and held onto a coral head until I lost my grip and rocketed to the surface.  My buddies just swam away. (These days, I'd disconnect the hose and continue the dive, inflating the BCD orally as needed. And I'd communicate this situation to my buddy). Luckily I didn't end up in the hospital, but I surfaced down-current from the boat and needed to be rescued. Back on the boat, the captain blamed me for leaving my buddies and having to get in the water to rescue me. He said there would be no refund (I hadn't asked for one!), even though the BCD continually reinflated itself to near bursting as it sat on the dive deck. He finally acknowledged the gear malfunction and encouraged me to take another scuba unit and reenter the water alone, because there would be no refund. Despite my lack of skill and experience with diving alone, I put on another BCD, re-entered the water, descended directly into the middle of a large school of small fish... and had my first ever face-to-teeth encounter with a feeding shark. I don't remember my fins touching the the ladder as I breached the surface and launched myself onto the boat deck. The captain looked at me like I was from another planet and insisted that there were no sharks in these waters.  At this point he insisted that I was not going back into the water for the second dive and I wasn't getting a refund. And I replied... not with your equipment I'm not, not with these buddies and not off your boat. When my assigned buddies finally returned to the boat, their excuse for leaving me was that they assumed I wanted to dive alone.  This is the reality when diving with strangers at tourist dive sites.

I've witnessed buddy abandonment many, many times as an instructor while teaching group Open Water courses and leading group dives. 

I can't tell you how many times I've signalled a diver to ask where their buddy is only to get a shrug of the shoulders in response or a finger pointed toward the surface. But one day, when leading a group of certified divers who were all strangers, on the descent at a site with a steep slope, the response was a finger pointed downwards. I signalled everyone to resurface and emptied my BCD to chase after the missing diver, a middle aged woman who hadn't been diving in a couple of years. I caught up to her at 25m/90 feet as she was tumbling and rolling down the slope. I stopped her tumble and found that the low pressure inflator hose was disconnected so she was unable to power inflate the BCD. (This failure to properly set up the scuba unit ought to have been discovered during the buddy pre-dive safety check). I reconnected the hose and we made our way safely back to the surface. Whew. She was terribly shaken up, but otherwise ok. And I set a policy to always personally double check everyone's gear before every dive.

Novice and inexperienced divers often don't know what to do when a problem suddenly happens, so I emphasize the development of buddy skills in the courses I teach. Very few certified divers have the skills, knowledge and capacity to properly plan a dive or help another diver in trouble.  Fewer than 1 diver in 100 is trained in rescue skills. So even if that assigned buddy doesn't abandon you, he or she might not be able to help you. Stick with the professional dive leader/Divemaster until you've evaluated a potential buddy's skills.

Click on images to expand.

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Failure to equalize is an inherent and continuous risk on every dive you will ever make.  I refer to this as Equalization Risk.

 A diver can injure their ears during the initial descent (when pressure changes are greatest), or at any other time during the dive. Effective management of this risk requires that you develop keen ear-monitoring skills (situational awareness) and good technique. And since safety is always the primary objective on every dive, a diver must be prepared to abort a dive if they are unable to equalize fully.

Over the course of my diving life (30+ years) I've experienced and witnessed many ear injuries. A high percentage of these injuries happened during the confined water segment of the Open Water course, in pools where the bottom was less than 5m/15feet deep. It's at this stage that the student is making their first attempts to equalize while possessing no developed buoyancy control skills and very little situational awareness.

It's a painful experience for the unfortunate victim of an ear injury, with outcomes ranging from a mildly annoying weeklong feeling of fullness and dull hearing, through to punctured ear drums, bleeding ears, near drowning, permanent damage, psychological scars, and the cessation of all diving activities. They'll never dive again.

PADI Open Water course materials highlight and emphasize the importance of  full and proper equalization of your ears on descent and what to do in the event of a reverse block on ascent. At VSds, we think that every novice diver ought to have a full medical and physiological understanding of what's going on in your ears when you go underwater.

The following article is taken from the Divers Alert Network (DAN) website. We urge you to read it closely and practice the various techniques at home. And we urge you to check out DAN.  Click on images to expand.

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Porteau Cove was recently featured in the UK Sport Diver magazine. Yours truly gets somewhat honourable mention. If you want to contact the author or learn about diving in the UK, click here: Diving UK

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I took up diving in 1986 on a dare from my best buddy Gary, who was a commercial diver. I had never learned to swim properly and had already been carrying (for 10 years) a nightmarish Jaws-inspired terror of being half-swallowed alive. I sweated about the decision for a few months and ultimately decided to face my fears. I signed up for a group open water course offered for $49 with the mandatory purchase of mask/snorkel/fins. 

I quit that course when I was required to flood and clear my mask for the first time. Kneeling in shallow water in the pool, I pulled the mask from my face,  snorted water up my nose, coughed out the regulator, swallowed more water, stood up, coughed my guts out, wiped the snot from my face and left the pool without looking back. The instructor never stood up to see how I was doing. I told the front desk on the way out that this sport just wasn't for me. I can't do this.

Gary harassed and humiliated me until I eventually went back and learned enough skill to pass the course.  I never completed the swim test. 

I only ever went diving with Gary twice. On my first dive as a certified Open Water diver, he took me into a 5 knot current at Active Pass and planned a 30m/100 foot free descent without dive lights from a live 16 foot aluminum boat, seeking to land on a seamount and gather scallops for dinner. Yikes! Woohoo! We missed the first time, dropping to 35m/120 feet and drifting for a few minutes into the Georgia Strait before he finally decided that we'd been carried past the seamount and gave me the ascent signal.  The boat picked us up a mile from the point of entry. We swapped tanks and Gary nailed it the second time. There were thousands of scallops resting on the dimly lit seamount and as we landed they started to swim off like a vast flock of video Pac-Men. This was the moment that I learned how to laugh into a regulator. Swimming and crawling along into the still-strong current, my ill-fitting mask half flooded, we filled our goodie bags and I had my first close encounter with a huge Giant Pacific Octopus swimming in open water.  A totally awesome, terrifying and overwhelming first two dives! And a great feast with stories to still tell 30 years later.

I know now that I never should have agreed to do that dive and that Gary was irresponsible for taking me there. It was way off-the-charts beyond my skill level. But I'm very glad to have done it. I eventually lost touch with Gary and have never been able to thank him. 30 years later, scuba diving is very much a core pursuit and value in my life.

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