>>96097773Every 10m of water adds another 1 atmosphere of pressure. Your tank has enough air for you to spend an hour at 10m (2atm) and to refill your BCD more than a hundred times. Each additional 20m of depth cuts this time in half. This assumes that you are calm, controlling your breathing, and using your muscles slowly with intention. If you panic, begin breathing quickly and move rapidly, this cuts your time in half again. You’re certified to 20m, and you’ve gone briefly down to 30m on some
shipwrecks before. So you were comfortable swimming to 25m to look at the arch.
While you were looking at it, you sank to 40m, and while you messed around looking for your dive master and then the computer, you sank to 60m. 6 atmospheres of pressure. You have only 10 minutes of air at this depth. When you swam for the surface, you had become disoriented from twisting around and then looking at your gear and you were now right in front of the archway. You swam into the archway thinking it was the surface, that’s why the Blue Hole looked smaller now.
There is no current pulling you sideways, you are continuing to sink to to bottom of the arch. When you hit the bottom and started to inflate your BCD, you were now over 90m. You will go through a full tank of air in only a couple of minutes at this depth. Panicking like this, you’re down to seconds. There’s enough air to inflate your BCD, but it will take over a minute to fill, and it doesn’t matter, because that would only pull you into to the top of the arch, and you will drown before you get there.
Holding the inflate button you kick as hard as you can for the light. Your muscles are screaming, your brain is screaming, and it’s getting harder and harder to suck each panicked breath out of your regulator. In a final fit of rage and frustration you scream into your useless reg, darkness squeezing into the corners of your vision.
4 minutes. That’s how long your dive lasted. You died in clear water on a sunny day in only 4 minutes.
