The Rules of Diving | Descending

Scuba diving is a relatively safe sport as long as you follow the rules. Number one, you never hold your breath. If you ascend while holding your breath that change in pressure allows compressed air to expand inside your lungs, potentially causing them to over expand or rupture. The second rule, you have to ascend slowly. As you dive deeper the surrounding pressure increases and your body's tissues absorb the nitrogen from every breath you take. The longer you stay and the deeper you are the more gas you absorb. As you ascend the surrounding pressure decreases. Ascend too quickly and bubbles can form in the tissues and bloodstream. This is called decompression sickness or the bends which can cause paralysis or death. The third rule is that you always dive with a buddy. Scott and I have been planning this trip for a year. Our plan is to dive the world. He's not reckless, at least not with his friends and family. He's reckless perhaps with himself sometimes. The first dive as we're gearing up we knew that we were going to be diving dry suit. With a dry suit you're sealed off and basically it's a pocket of air around you that keeps you warm. As you go deeper the suit compresses with the pressure of the water and eliminates that air space. So in order to keep that thermal property you've got to inject air into the suit to kind of create that air barrier around you. So you're constantly adding air which then of course affects the buoyancy of it. With Ellis receiving his new dry suit just when I showed up he had never dived in it before and so he was going to have to get used to it mighty quickly. Andre. Andre. What's up? Ellis is having some issues with his new dry suit. I've got too much air in my suit. I can't get it out. I'm too light. I started coming up and I thought nah this is not good I need some help here. So Andre passes me a rock and he gave it to me and I just hugged it to my chest but no that wasn't heavy enough so then he went and got a bigger rock so he got one about this big. Thankfully it was enough to keep me down and so I then had to do a three minute safety stop only 15 feet below the surface but at 15 feet I was extremely buoyant and so I'm just holding on to this rock for you know for all I was worth. My face pressed down in the sand and I was just counting the seconds. Embarrassed that I made a mistake and frustrated with myself. When he reaches something that he can't conquer he's his own worst enemy. He will now go into the next dive a thousand times more determined than what he woke up this morning.