I have come up from a dive with no air in my tank.  This, for a diver, is a major embarassment.  Actually, you probably shouldn’t be diving if you come up with no air in your tank, and there was not a mechanical failure.  

I was looking at a little shrimp.  It was about half inch long, and hiding down in some coral.  I had been heading upward, to begin my safety stop, and I noticed that folks were gathered around a piece of coral, and pointing.  My thought process should have gone thusly:  you are running out of air, you can not breath underwater, you should no longer be underwater.   Instead, my thought process went thisly:  critter!!!!!      I tried to get a picture, and then resumed my heading upward to 20 feet.  I started upward with about 400 psi in my tank.  If you are a diver, you are shaking your head and whispering: “dumbass.” You really shouldn’t head upward with less than 1000, although, sometimes we play with these numbers, depending on the depth and length of dive.  I was ascending from a dive that had been deep enough that I absolutely needed a safety stop for 3 minutes.  400 psi is really not adequate to ascend to 20 from 40/50 (after having already come up from deeper), hang out for 3 minutes to offgas, and then slowly ascend to the surface, hopefully with some air to expand the BCD and bob if the boat is not right there.  I was lucky in that it was a static, or moored, boat.  I did my 3 minutes and then came up right at the ladder to the boat.  I like to keep the regulator in my mouth until I am entirely on the boat, in case I should fall back in after I have taken off my fins.  As I broke the surface of the water, I felt that it was a very difficult pull on the regulator, and then, as I put my foot on the bottom run of the ladder to the boat, there was nothing there to pull from.  The tank was bone dry.  Whimsically, I can say, I got my moneys worth on that tank, and why should I come up when I still have air on my back.  But, this was extremely reckless and dangerous, a point that wasn’t as poignant as it could have been, because of my safe return to the boat.  But, often the boat is not there.  If I have nothing in the tank, you have to inflate your BCD manually.  You are a smooth, tuned machine under water, with proper buoyancy.  However, on the surface, you have about 50+ pounds of metal and equipment on your person.  If you can’t get that BCD inflated, you can get pretty fatigued trying to tread water at the surface with that kidna weight.  Especially if your boat is off picking up other divers.  

Other than never coming up with less than 500 PSI back onto the boat, I’m not sure this event is taken as seriously as it should be by me.  I’m even trying to write about it to impress upon myself how close this was to potential calamity.  But, maybe it’s not so different from events we undertake every day, only more memorable to me because it occured under somewhat infrequent circumstances.  I only get to dive about 10 – 15 days a year.  Yet, I drive every day, looking away from the road for a variety of reasons while hurtling over the speed limit.  Deer are constant.  The roads are windy and narrow and one lane each way.  It is of constant happenstance that circumstances don’t align from these less than perfect actions on my part to coalesce into tragedy.  It’s a random chaos just accepted by us all.  We could randomly be felled by freak horrors every day, yet they so infrequently happen that they are of no moment to us.  We are truly shocked and affected everytime a 4000 lb car drifts over the yellow line into the other line, striking a car head on and killing a mother or child or nun.  Yet, even though  an army of tort attorneys will try to convince us otherwise, often times this is just random bad luck.  

We don’t accept random bad luck in our society.  There is always a why, or  a how, or a who done it.  And if there’s not, we’ll assign it.  It’s her fault, his fault, the bar’s fault, society’s fault, the churches fault, nature’s fault. But, sometimes, a tree just falls suddenly and kills someone walking underneath it that had only been walking there at that time because she was going door to door collecting cans of food to donate to the needy.  

I have stage IV cancer and it’s no ones fault, and it doesn’t really matter the who, or the why or the how.  I keep wondering if there is a deeper lesson to be learned, that the closeness of being 60 feet underwater with no air, and no ability to do a safety stop shouldn’t make me pause more.  But it doesn’t.  I now try to be committed to coming up on the boat with at least 500 PSI (well, at least 300), but, if I’m being honest, I’m still going back to see the critter.