{"id":334,"date":"2020-10-30T01:58:08","date_gmt":"2020-10-30T01:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/?p=334"},"modified":"2020-10-30T03:22:57","modified_gmt":"2020-10-30T03:22:57","slug":"diving-is-fascinating-iself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/2020\/10\/30\/diving-is-fascinating-iself\/","title":{"rendered":"Diving is fascinating iself"},"content":{"rendered":"

I will not try to pull these considerations towards rational premises. I was on 15th August 2018 at La fouill\u00e9e.\u00a0<\/strong>It was a dive spot very close to Cannes itself. Near that theater where film awards are given once a year. And I was doing my navigation exercisers with eyes closed at 26 meters below the surface. I met one scoropionfish and squirrel \ud83d\ude09 (sea cucumber). But no matter for the first time since 10 years, just the second day and so deep, so many exercisers to pass to reach the new level of skills. And in that spot was the depth up to 55. We were hovering at maximum close to 30 with Erik. But a few divers descended close to that 55. Look how ended my dive in Seahouses. I was at 23 and then had to ascend much faster than safety rules allow. I had a little barotrauma a day afer. But I was experiencing also some little symptoms for a some time after I came back to Poland. It started during my flight first. In my sinuses and my lungs. Physiology is very complex thing. Sometimes first horror ever you experience is for example 2 days after just one innocent emergency no decompression ascend.<\/strong> Only one! And diving probably gives me the most versatile experiences to call many physiological experiences with subtle terms. Like to a river. We never enter twice. Our health changes, mood, attitude, fitness, preparation. Our cognition is very complex thing when we try to make it corresponding with how precise we can be in what we experience underwater. I do not want to demistify this story. But I could tell a few different scenarios. How those people could do some mistakes, how got embraced by stress. How fast. When you prepare perfectly, are very motivated, prepared, full of safe skills. Ok. But once you make one or a couple of mistakes things go wrong so fast… It is really so bad, and so fast that you cannot even feel stress. If you do not balance your buoyancy it just pulls you to the surface like parachute. This is why peak performance buoyancy is the skill worth as much as gold, you can specialization in it. You cannot do deep dive not being perfectly buoyant, weighted, with weight check, you cannot go deeper than let’s say 20 not being prepared to stay even as much as minimum 40 minutes underwater! Emergency, not controlled ascend can happen. But it is dangerous. It is even not scary. There is something sad in diving. It is not spectacular. It is like a flower dies, goes faint, like fragile girl dies. Diving is extremely subtle thing, subtle experience. And even risk of death and dying has something brutally innocent and silent in it. My another verisions of this story may be that 1) they did some mistakes during preparations, some people died – so those who survived made up a story of aliens that „”inflated their BCDs with the power of their will”” and THEY ALL suddenly parachutted to the moon.. Many mistakes are being made during preparations – equipment, attitude, fitness. 2) there was something wrong with gasses. All of them got wrong blends of gasses so started to experience weird things relatively same time. If period can synchronise between women so you know probably how contagious may be behavior of intoxicated with alcohol people. I often see people intoxicated with marihuana but I never smoked so I do not know how it feels. But I know well how nitrogen affects my body. It affect all my muscles along with the most important one – my heart. I never felt something to call intoxication with gasses – no matter – oxygen, nitrogen or whatever. But nitrogen affects the body and it is just an experience. Some condition is even defined as nitrogen narcosis. If it was Russia, so maybe they do not have safe limits – regulations, equipment to inflate tanks with fixed amounts of gasses. Maybe something if not happens regularly happened then. Also cold. It is another factor. It was winter. So many factors of stress. Stress kills people.<\/p>\n

This is absolutely typical Russian dive suit:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.ebay.com\/itm\/Russian-soviet-diving-suit-UGK-1-Not-used\/293138221274?hash=item44406648da:g:-fEAAOSwv4tdGcMN<\/a><\/p>\n

In my opinion? They really look pro even today. People laugh at many Russian technologies. I was stupid as a child that this mockery was contagious. But since one travel to Beijing. I was traveling by train 200 km along Baikal lake. I’ve read many things about Russian expeditions, inventions, in documentary movies, I saw with my own eyes Russian railway infrastructure. Ordinary people may scream from poverty but government maintains so many things in really good shape – especially industry, transportation that chapeau bas. But these suits may not be easy to combine with adequate undergarment. I was doing my OWD course in September in K\u0142odno lake. Below thermocline there was only 4 degree Celsius. It was cold, dark, cosmic experience. I was only in wetsuit. 6 mm. With additional warmener from my upper legs part to end on my head. I was feeling my mouth freezing. I was 19 years old and it was challenging to my heart. I was feeling pain in my heart after most of dives. Now I was diving in drysuit. I was perfectly insulated from water. But not from cold! When I descended to 23 meters. It was good visibility not like in Baltic where I was given a „buddy” girl for her 2nd dive in her whole life and she pushed me to my edges of stress with her overall behavior. It was dark, it was cold, it was a wreck and she was completely not prepared and did not know what to do. Stress was taking me to edges of my mental health and the ability to control my anxiety before panic attacks. So I do not believe too much what „stories” people bring from 50 meters, 70 meters, dark, cold etc. They sometimes take some photos. But time passes by differently<\/strong>, your attention is narrowed due to stress, cold, needs to control your gas mixtures, breath rate. I was learning during my AOWD to control my breath rate. It is to save air. But also to for safety. You need air for at least 40 minutes of dive. But you can breathe so fast that after 20 minutes you have air for 5 minutes of ascend to have 50 bar on manometer only. For example I do not know how it happened. I was diving in Mallorca in August 2019. I was just a few weeks after tragedy that has cut my fundamental feelings. The death of young girl was traumatic experience for me. And what? I was diving at El Toro where I was many years earlier. But on the other side of the island. The other side I would even probably recognize. But during the first dive happened relatively emergency situation. I spotted an octopus. Fantastic. Octopus was the subject of my readings since spring 2018. I was reading The Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith in English. Demanding book due to how many reflections also of philosophy kind I had to challenge but not intellectually but due to specific language habits of author. But I got used to this after some time and understood many of his points. Book was extremely interesting. And what? I spotted an octopus after maybe more than 20 minutes of dive so far. And I had also my underwater camera SeaLife. I stopped at that little rocky wall and the hide of the octopus. Water was blue, octopus was looking beautiful. Was staring at me with confidence and curiosity. It was extremely rewarding experience. And I detached from the group. A few minutes after when we compared our gauges with others from the group. It turned out that I do not have enough air to ascend with 3 minutes of stop. So my divemaster who was Swiss gave (there are a couple of young Swiss men and one Swiss foxy girl Vanessa who probably you can spot on many Facebook photos from Big Blue, she is joyful photogenic and waves hands of every photo) me his octopus air regulator to breath for some time. And at the end I could use „saved” air from my tank. Was it emergency? Was. And it wasn’t even more than 20 or 22 meters underwater! Emergency happens fast, can happen everywhere.<\/strong> You never have enough time for stress so you do not experience it like when chronic stress factors affect<\/span> you. Like neighbor is irritating you, famous rock star or someone else<\/span><\/strong>.<\/span> Every experience to our mind is narrowed. So I will not refuse cognitive skills to those who experienced these things. Maybe it was true. But so many things happened, diving has limited duration. Ok. They only remembered (who survived) what they remembered and good that they remembered as much as this and that’s it! But sometimes guilt makes that people make up stories, lie. Sometimes also intoxication affects whole the group equally and they start to behave weird. Waldermar Wnorowski during first day of my course. It was whole afternoon I was in Tryton whole afternoon first day only listening to him. No one else was there. And he was telling me enormously much as for me not being into too many extreme sports before – stories, information, physics, physiology, navigation, equipment knowledge etc. And about his experience that he was military diver, was a welder on oil platform doing welding job 70 meters underwater. I was 19 years old with one experience as I was 15 or 16 years old in Mallorca and many attempts to make water more comfortable what I wrote about my experiences for example in \u0141a\u0144skie lake near Olsztyn. In governmental complex with own harobor – boats, paddleboat I was renting for a whole day, setting off to the middle of the lake and swimming and diving ALONE! I was freediving to 6 and more meters using my own rope and ballast.<\/strong> So I wasn’t someone accidental. When I was ca. 17 I bought biography of Jacques Ives Couseteau. I was reading first chapters maybe 5 times repeatedly. So I was familiar with many things. But did not know such people. And then suddenly I had a lecturer who experienced solitarily more than most of other divers in Poland. All primitive techniques, methods from military, then his professional work, many stages of diving history itself – saturation diving on oil plarform and then running own dive center and having trainee and also another experiences! So he moved to dive accidents and then it started! I realized how much dangerous every dive potentially can be! And that even during simple course nitrogen narcosis can embrace a person wholly! For me the most shocking was a story that one girl, it was at ca. 30 m or more got a bit dizzy or looking as if no contact with her could be established. She suddenly took her regulator from her mouth and tried to give fish air to breathe!<\/strong> He suddenly swam to her. Imporant what did first! He inflated her BCD to take them both a few meters higher. And tried to re-establish eye-contact to make her take regulator back to her mouth and breathe. You just cannot push the regular into someone else mouth. This is very complex issue btw. Whole OWD course is about such things! Scuba diving is dangerous just from the beginning, and you cannot do many things intuitively. For every situation you have to be trained to behave a very specific way. With extremely adequate logic to situation. You do not have chance to correct some mistakes. People can drown easily. Human brain need so little time to die. So when someone gets out of contact underwater it means – it’s not only potentially – but it is in fact close to death situation. Some time passed by till she started back to have contact and to breathe normally and she did not know what happened through whole that period when she was behaving weird! So now look at what people can talk about when they dived much deeper, longer etc. I would not give much trust to extraordinary revelations from deep and long dives. If you have photos, documented something can show some proofs – maybe some extraordinary things may come into focus. May count. But normally all what you can experience below 30 meters is problems, challenges, and many other problems and challenges. Efforts. What you are able to refer to is efforts, problems, and how you dealt with it. If someone talks about aliens and do not refer to too many really technical details. It makes me really scared. What really might happen. I once posted statistics about criminal incidents underwater. Some accidents happen underwater that turn out to be criminal. I once posted it to my main blog. What is scary the most of them according to one scientific paper happened in… Croatia. Ex military conflict country…<\/p>\n

http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/?page_id=9842<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I will not try to pull these considerations towards rational premises. I was on 15th August 2018 at La fouill\u00e9e.\u00a0It was a dive spot very close to Cannes itself. Near that theater where film awards are given once a year. … Czytaj dalej →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":362,"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions\/362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mikepolanski.com\/science\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}