Читать книгу Into the Abyss. Diving to Adventure in the Liquid World онлайн

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I knew that my mask was now almost completely filled with water. I had been trained in the pool how to ‘mask clear’ in a situation like this - but I was now in an incident pit, when one small thing triggers off a series of events and you lose the ability to sort it out. Each incident is manageable on its own but it is the culmination of these individual factors that causes problems. A bit more common sense and experience and it would have been simple to resolve. As it was I couldn’t deal mentally with the depth or the mask flood and loss of vision. I was starting to lose it.

I tried a mask clearing drill by holding the lower part of the mask off my face and blowing through my nose. You can only do that when you are in a ‘head up’ position - and I soon discovered the hard way that you can’t do that exercise when you are head down. As a consequence, the air I breathed out trying to clear the water from my mask disappeared, and more water flooded into my mask.

My mask was soon completely filled with water. As I breathed, it was going up my nose and making me gag. My eyes were bulging wide open - and were completely immersed in water. Why I didn’t simply bring my legs and feet beneath me to repeat the drill I don’t know.