Passing Out Under Water

This is a story about passing out under water, something that I experienced for the first time about 10 months ago in the waters of French Polynesia. Before it happened, I viewed the prospect of black out with awe: even the most experienced and amazingly talented divers (of which I am neither) pass out, a seeming signal of their limit-pushing and dedication. But post-black out, how naïve my previous views seemed, because while free-diving itself is a master’s skill acquired through great practice and patience, it takes absolutely no talent to blackout.

I am fairly new to free diving.  Only a year ago, I didn’t know what it was.  And if the South Pacific had more rock to climb, I might never have gotten into it at all.  But last April, after a month-long Pacific crossing on a sailboat, I found myself in a world of water, the highest land masses crumbling carcasses of ancient volcanoes with nothing taller than a sloping slip-and-slide down 800 meters.  Rock climbing was not an option.  And after a fairly calm month at sea, I was hungry for an adventure replacement. Free-diving, while perhaps the antithesis to rock-climbing in many ways, fit the adventure bill nicely. It opens up an entirely eerie and alien landscape, a suspended and silent facsimile of almost-familiar objects, swarming with mostly non-mammalian life and growing other-worldly plants… all there, your own unadulterated playground.

But as I said, I would never have discovered it solo. Though I have been sailing for over a decade, when it comes to active adventuring, Tucker and I have been predominantly land monkeys. That’s where Phil comes in. We met Phil immediately upon landing at Hiva Oa in the Marquesas. Hailing from Alaska, he owned a beautiful Amel 39 called Victoria on which he too had just done the Pacific crossing, he from Mexico.  From the get go, we knew that hooking up with Phil was a god-send, and I’m pretty sure he felt the same. In a sub-culture (the cruising world) full mostly of retirees, we were (relatively) young folk with the same kind of active, adventure life-style Phil likes.  And he likes it all:  sky-diving, mountaineering, skiing, hiking, surfing.  But the South Pacific islands don’t offer much in the way of that kind of play (even the surf breaks can be few and far between).  What it does have to offer, however, is some of the most beautiful underwater life on the planet.  So Tuck, Phil, and I sailed off on Victoria all equally stoked for months of exploration and photography of life under the sea.

To get started, Phil suited us up. The water there reaches temperatures of 92 degrees Fahrenheit, so neoprene wasn’t necessary, but he gave us his extra weights and masks.  As he and Tucker are a similar build, he had extra fins for Tuck.  I purchased the only ones that fit me in the tiny city of Atuona, Hiva Oa, an island with a population of 3000, big for the Marquesas.  They were rigid yellow plastic, a foot long, made for kids to putt around on the shore.  Compared to Phil’s professional diving fins at a length of about 3 feet, they were laughable.  But at that point, as a diver, so was I, and I didn’t need anything that offered high performance.

 

 

The three of us spent the next 2 months winding our way through French Polynesia, diving between 4 and 6 hours every day. Tucker and I cut our teeth on the steep drop offs and crystal deep blues of the Marquesas (and learned that most sharks are way less scary than you think), then sailed west and south through the Tuamotus (touted as one of the premier diving areas of the world, and well deserving of the reputation, full of startling, varied life), and then further west and south through the Society Islands. As we left the Tuamotus, the underwater life became more scarce, and the three of us defaulted to pushing the limits of our diving rather than seeking out new encounters with ocean life and landscape.  We read up on whatever we could find about free-diving dos and don’ts. We developed a system of two people diving while one stayed as spotter on the surface.  For though we had experienced none of the common dangers of free-diving, aka blacking out, we knew we were pushing our limits and wanted to be cautious.  We also created a “dive-computer”: a weighted 100ft string tied to a plastic bottle with distance markers along the string.  We cut caffeine and dairy from our diets (caffeine ups your heart rate, making it harder to hold your breath, and dairy can clog your sinuses), and we became masters of calm in the water.

For those who do not know the particulars of long breath-holding, the idea is basically this: the less energy you exert, the longer you can hold your breath.  Use small, slow movements underwater, preferably only for minimal kicking, keeping the rest of your body relaxed and motionless.  And less obviously, try to relax your mind.  The brain eats up an amazing amount of oxygen, just in the default action of noticing and processing everything around it.  A long dive requires a clearing of your mind, a relaxing of all your muscles, down to your jaw and tongue.  I think, at the very bottom of my love for this new sport lays this necessity, this meditation and the peace it creates.

But it can be a fine line. There is another similarly blissful effect of holding your breath for a long time.  I won’t call it nitrogen narcosis because there is some controversy amongst the diving community (scuba vs free) as to whether or not this can happen to free-divers, but as far as I can tell from what I’ve read, the symptoms are very similr. Basically, if the conscious brain is oxygen-deprived for long enough, you will start feeling high and you will experience this lovely, happy fuzziness.  When free-diving, it is usually a sign that its time to start heading back to the surface, perhaps should have already started heading back to the surface.  And though it is dangerous, a built in timer for the savvy against running out of oxygen, it is also a unique and altogether euphoric feeling.  You get down to the bottom of your dive and you feel like you could stay down in that quiet, open, blue (purple at deeper depths) paradise forever, and this narc-ed out desire can conceivably overwhelm the rational knowledge of a pending need for oxygen.  So, yeah, a fine line.  But not one you have to cross.  In almost the full 2 months we dove together, including the times we were pushing our limits, neither Tucker nor Phil nor I blacked out.

Did I already mention that Phil had a GoPro? Throughout our travels, it had been an invaluable asset to our diving success.  Even when the animals and terrains worthy of photography were missing, we used the camera to film one another from deeper and deeper depths, so it maintained its useful role as a distraction and, therefore, a prolonger of breath holding.  A week before Phil was to haul the boat out and fly back to work, we were anchored on the west side of Ta’ haa, mid west-coast of the island.  It was not an ideal anchorage at 70 ft, but the closest one to Pai Pai Pass.  It’s other downfall was that it sat in the middle of a river mouth, and as it had been raining the previous few days, the water surrounding us was brown and murky.  This was not an immediate drawback, but, as I will explain, it became one.  Once we had dropped the anchor, Phil let us know that he did not intend to join the dive, surprising because we had, until that moment, done every single dive all together.  But he was coming down with a cold and his ears were hurting.  So Tucker and I took the dingy over to Pai Pai Pass and had a really nice, clear dive, deep, full of brachial purple coral and eagle rays.  Phil is not the possessive sort, and we brought the GoPro with us.

There is no such thing as a fully reliable outboard, and Phil’s, at that time, was no exception.  So I think it was sort of with a mutual sigh of relief that Tuck and I got back to the big boat, adventure complete, no hitches.  We pulled up to the side of Victoria to unload our gear.  In the unloading process, Tucker dropped his fins in the water.  He quickly snatched them up, knowing they don’t float very well.  And then, seemingly immediately, he said, “Where’s the GoPro?”  There was about a 5 second lag as we both glanced at the other gear, and then he said, “Shit, I put it in my fin.”  He immediately jumped over the side, no mask, no fins.  And came up about 15 seconds later: no GoPro.  I snatched my fins and mask, Tucker did the same, and we started diving for it.  Quietly, as Phil was still asleep and we had the initial hope of finding it before he woke up.

But, as I mentioned, the boat was sitting in the worst possible conditions for diving: muddy, cloudy water with about 4 feet of visibility, anchored in 70 feet of water.  At that point, we could dive fairly comfortably to 70 feet.  But it was near our limit, and we could only spend a little while down once we got there, maybe 5 or 10 seconds.  As we dove we were reminded of another handicap: murky water messes with your dive head.  If you can’t see where you are headed, your brain starts to use a small voice that says, “Are we even going the right direction anymore?  Which way is up?”  It also starts to imagine very large mouths full of teeth that you won’t see until you are on top of them.  Neither of these little mental deviations is very helpful for keeping your heart rate down and holding your breath long enough to dive to a depth that is near your limit.  Our first few dives, we didn’t even make it to the bottom.

A few other factors were further wrenches in our system.  One, we had just been diving the pass for the last 2 hours and were tired.  Two, a boat at anchor tends to dance with the current.  So we were not entirely sure where the GoPro had gone down.  There was a rather wide area it could be in, and since we could only see four feet in front of us, we’d have to be on top of it to find it.  After a few dives, we started reaching the bottom, and starting reaching the conclusion that it was hopeless.  When you got down there, you could see about ten feet along the bottom, maybe fifteen, an encouraging fact at first, but after a few dives of seeing nothing GoPro-like, the more discouraging for its revelation that we actually had NO idea where to look.

We are frugal travelers.  And though we had entertained the idea of buying our own GoPro once we parted ways with Phil, we had in no way planned to buy TWO GoPros.  We started to really believe we weren’t going to find Phil’s lost camera, and we’d have to forfeit our own future underwater photography because of such a fluke blunder.  Usually we anchored in crystal clear water at about 30 to 40 feet.  But not today…

Tucker gets cold before I do, his body fat is nil.  So with a shrug and resignation to fate, he said, “Fuck it, I’m getting out.”  He climbed out of the water, took off his gear, and was in the process of taking off his wet clothes when I said, “Ok, I’m just going to go down one more time.”  He was non-plussed, cold, and less-than-excited about standing on deck and spotting me.  “You don’t have to spot me, it’s just one more dive.”  I took another look at the boat, moved over about 10 feet (for no good reason other than pretend calculation and blind hope), went through the breathing routine (it takes about 30 seconds to a minute), and dove.  I didn’t bother to look and see if Tuck was spotting me.

 

 

By the time I got to the bottom, I could tell I was tired.  I was already getting that feeling that happens right before the nitrogen narcosis hits, the little voice that says, “It’s time to go up.”  I hadn’t really expected this dive to have any different outcome than the last 10, but giving up was so final. So I pulled myself around from the diving position to the upright position, turning my head as I did.  And then I saw it.  About 15 feet away, a small, square shaped glimmer.  Nothing down there glimmered on that grey day in that cloudy water.  My heart jumped, not a good thing.  I knew that if I resurfaced, I probably would never come back down right on top of it.  So I pulled myself into a horizontal position and swam over to it.  And it was in fact IT.  As I got closer, the glimmer took on a more decidedly square shape and I could see the attached string floating above it.  I swam too quickly in an excitement I should have tried harder to dampen.  But you know how when you’ve been hiking uphill for so long and you get to the top and you feel like, I made it!?  But then there’s the downhill part… Well, I had found the GoPro!  But I still had 70 ft up to go. I reached over and grabbed the string, swung my feet down, planted them on the ground, gave an ineffectual push off the bottom, and headed up.

One of the coolest parts about free-diving (no, the other coolest part) is what happens when you start to sink. I weight myself to reach neutral buoyancy at about 30ft. So going down, you kick and kick, and then after you reach 30ft, you start to sink. One good kick, and then you can remain motionless and still fall, down, down, down towards the deep. It truly feels like flying. But, the reverse of that is, if you go down deeper than 30ft, you have to work to get back to it. All the rest of the oxygen use happens getting yourself back to 30ft. Then you rise… For me, now down at 70ft, I had a 40ft kicking ascent. A quick note:  I still had those small plastic yellow fins from the Marquesas.  I had the chance to replace them, but had decided I was used to them (and didn’t want to spend more money) and so had stuck with them. Now, the reason to use large fins (and most free-diving fins are 3 feet long, like Phil’s), is that the energy output required to gain more forward (or upward) motion is diminished. They are simply more effective. With my small plastic fins, I had to put out more energy and use more oxygen than if I had better fins. But they had never seemed to hinder me, and so I had never given it too much thought.

As I kicked my way to the surface, overly excited, I wasn’t thinking about the fins. I should have started up about… oh I don’t know, half a minute ago. But in my mind, everything was peachy keen. I had beaten all the odds, I had the GoPro, and I was going to pop up and show Tucker and we would be $400 dollars richer. And the last thing I remember was thinking, “Light, the surface, almost there.” And then Tucker was yelling my name and I was trying really hard to regain my sense of balance because it felt like I was falling and I was trying to respond but I just couldn’t make my voice work.

I had never passed out before (you already know that’s what happened because that is what this story is about). It’s the most disorienting feeling. I’ve been knocked out, but the difference there is that before you black out, there’s sort of fear spike right before you crash your bike into that car door, so you wake up knowing something probably bad just happened. With diving, everything is wonderful and you feel calm and in control and then all of a sudden time disjoints and you are somewhere you weren’t in your last memory: above water. It typically happens between 5 and 10 feet and for that reason is called “shallow water black out” or “ascent blackout” (also sometimes called “deep water blackout”, but that’s just confusing). The reason: as you rise, your lungs, which have been compressed during your descent (at depths of 100 feet, they are about the size of a tangerine), begin to re-expand. Your mind reads the expansion of your lungs as your body taking in new oxygen and begins to try to send oxygen to the parts of your body (your brain) that have been lacking during your dive, but it is sorely mistaken. Because, obviously, there is no new oxygen. So, because of this miscommunication, and because you simply don’t have enough oxygen in your blood to retain consciousness, your brain ends up shutting you down instead. And it typically happens between 5 and 10 feet, when your lungs are nearing full expansion.

I, on the other hand, passed out after reaching the surface. (All following information is second-hand, via Tucker.) Tucker, who had, like a stand-up diving partner, stayed on the boat spotting me, saw me surface, let out all of my air, and then start sinking. When I didn’t pop right up, he knew something was amiss. In a true superhero moment, he threw off his only article of clothing, a towel, and dove in butt naked. By the time he reached me, no mask, but eyes wide open under water, he saw me wake up 10 feet down, freak out, and frantically try to scramble my way back to the surface. He swam with me to the surface and caught me as I passed out again. I have no memory of any of that. Or of Tucker swimming me back to the boat, unconscious, head knocked back at a unnatural angle, lips electric purple. (The main regret I have about the whole experience is the horror Tucker must have felt seeing that.)

As a side note, the body’s reaction to oxygen deprivation while underwater is truly amazing. When you pass out underwater, your throat closes and does not allow water into your lungs for up to 2 minutes; it’s called laryngospasm. Unfortunately for me, that bodily response is greatly hindered by a snorkel. Because the snorkel is a passage for water straight into your mouth, and then, down your throat. Keen and experienced divers know to remove their snorkels from their mouths as soon as they begin their descent. I perhaps knew this, but hadn’t paid attention. I’ve changed my ways since.

So when Tucker reached the dingy and something to hold onto and tipped my head forward, quite a bit of water poured out of my mouth. He yelled my name over and over and I started coughing. This is the zone where we start having overlapping memories, because as he yelled my name, I must have starting coming to. The first thing I remember is this feeling of imbalance. I was, after all, still in the water, and the feeling of regaining a sense of being in the world is not made concrete by having no solid matter to press against and ensure yourself of the boundaries of that real world you are re-entering. At first, I couldn’t talk, though I was trying really hard. My throat, still tight from its natural reaction of closing up, would not respond, it was such an alien feeling. But finally, the first words to burst out, were “Do you have the GoPro??!!”

This story has a happy ending. Because, aside from the fact that Tucker saved my life, which he decidedly did do, when I passed out the first time, I somehow held onto the GoPro. And before I passed out the second time, I handed it, from my insensate, clutched hand, to Tucker. And even though he was scared shitless, as my father would have said, he managed to hold onto it. And even when I came to and started pawing him with every feeble groping I had in my exhausted body, first grunting and finally blurting out, “GoPro, GoPro!” he still managed to hold onto it. Through heroic grip strength and some luck, it wasn’t all for naught. Because how sad would this long, drawn out story be if we didn’t win in the end?

But we did. Not only did we save Phil’s GoPro, but in a more educative sense, we all got to see first hand what passing out looked like. We are now even more cautious than before. Because that happy ending, it really was a bit of luck. As Tucker likes to remind me, if I had lost consciousness just 5 feet deeper, he never would have seen me, I might have started sinking (though it’s hard to say…), and in that murky water, they might never have found me. But instead, well here we are. We just got out of the water at Poor Knight’s Island, a marine preserve off the east coast of North Island, New Zealand, Tuck and Phil and another friend and I. We met back up with Phil just a few weeks ago, he’s back from work, and we were all happy to find ourselves in the same country and to start back up on diving together. Phil brought a fancy new dive computer (a real one!) back with him and I have officially swapped out my yellow fins for some big uns. Phil’s back with a new spear, Tucker acquired one, and Emma has a pole spear, so they are pretty excited about hunting. I personally still prefer honing in on the fish through the lens of a camera. And here, at the marine preserve, there is no hunting. So today, all suited up against the cold, cold water in full neoprene, we dove comfortably at around 70ft, Phil swinging his same GoPro, and I swinging my slightly newer one…