This is a photo that was taken of me in the Blue Hole. It is a very popular Scuba dive on the Island of Guam. One day while working as a dive guide for some Japanese divers, we decided to dive the Blue Hole. The Blue Hole is a hole in the top of a shelf of rock at 60 feet on the South side of the Orote Peninsula. The hole is big enough to drive a large pick-up truck through the opening. It drops down like a shaft from 60 feet to 110 feet where there is a window that opens up to the depths. The very bottom of the blue hole sits at about 250 feet and slopes down from there into the Mariana Trench. (about 36,000 feet deep) We would descend down the hole and then exit out the window and then ascend up the wall facing the open sea. I was leading 5 or 6 Japanese divers down through the hole and I had told them that they needed to stay right at the top of the 110 foot window and to start ascending immediately after exiting the hole. The limits of recreational diving are at 120 feet and as a PADI instructor it was my duty to dive within the proper depths. We dropped from 60 ft down to the top of the window opening out into the expanse of the sea at 110 feet. In the photo above you can see the opening out to the sea at 110 feet in the Blue Hole. We hugged the roof of the window as we exited the hole. As we started ascending I was facing the divers making sure that no one was dropping lower than they should. One Japanese girl in her late 20's, early 30's started dropping at a fast rate. At that depth a body looses buoyancy. The pressure squeezes the wet suit so that it isn't so buoyant. Experienced divers know that at depth you must add air to your buoyancy compensator but these divers were inexperienced. The girl was not aware that she was dropping. I got her attention and gave her the ascend now hand signal. She was about 12 feet below me and she started to kick with her body in a vertical position looking strait up at me. As I looked into her eyes I could tell that she had nitrogen narcosis. I was swimming right next to less experienced divers so that I could watch them carefully and was hoping that she would quickly swim the 12 feet up to me. I was amazed to see that although she was kicking her fins and thinking that she was ascending, she was actually dropping. I immediately motioned to the other divers to cling to the rock face. Then I dropped down as fast as I could to bring her back up to the rest of the divers at 110 feet. When I caught her she was at 135 feet. I grabbed a hold of the yoke of her tank and started ascending with her as she weakly kicked her fins. I looked into her face and could see that she really wasn't aware of what was going on. Once we arrived at the other divers, we started ascending up the wall. From time to time I would have the divers grip the rock wall and rest. By and by we arrived at the 60 foot level. Below is my journal entry of that experience.
It was very interesting for me to see a person under the influence of nitrogen narcosis or rapture of the deep. Below is a definition of Rapture of the Deep from wikipedia.
The deepest depth that I ever dove was 200 feet. I was helping a fellow diver look for a watertight housing for a video camera that he had accidentally dropped. When I was at 200 feet, my entire body felt like that feeling that you have right before you pass out. Mild pins and needles over my entire body. I knew that as long as I moved slowly and kept calm that I could control the nitrogen narcosis that was affecting me. Down at that depth, according to the dive tables, you only have about 10 minutes before you must ascend in order to avoid decompression time at shallower depths. For safety reasons, I spent 15 minutes hanging from the decompression bar under the boat.
Father in Heaven has given us free agency to choose to stay in control of our physical bodies. The feeling of being very close to not having control of my body at depth was very uncomfortable to me. Why anyone would choose to lose control by taking drugs or alcohol is inconceivable to me. One of Gods greatest gifts to us, is that we can choose to be in control.
This is a photo of me diving right above the Blue Hole. I was getting ready to take some Japanese sport divers down through the hole. The tire and chain at the bottom of the photo is the mooring for the dive boat. You can see how strong the current is there by the angle of my exhaled bubbles and the angle of the mooring chain.
