"If you were there when a blackout happened and observed the conditions and what was going on before the blackout I guarantee you would find that they broke one of these rules.
1. Not taking adequate rest between dives.
2. Ignoring that the water is cold, and other conditions, and that they need to shorten their dives accordingly.
3. Pushing themselves too hard, staying down too long - thinking "I can stay down a little longer, just to spear this fish".
4. Pushing themselves too hard by diving deeper than is safe for them."
J Cambell, You are undoubtedly right that Ted did something wrong, but not any of these 4. Undoubtedly, he went beyond his limits, We just had no idea how. We hashed it over and over, and brought in DB in a thread to find other opinions. The only things we could come up with was maybe some dehydration might have contributed and/or, since he was filming and swimming up and laterally at the time, maybe 02 use exceeded what it needed to be. We have his video and you can tell where he BOed, so we know he did not "lose" any time or memory of being beyond his limits. The point and problem is that "apparently" he was well within his limits, both to him and to me. This is the central problem with BO. No matter how aware you are of your limits and how they change with conditions, you still run some risk of BO if you are freediving.
The only way I know to avoid the BO issue entirely is to stay in the pool and limit your breath holds to a minute or less, with some rest in between. That applies pretty well to people with normal physiology, but not necessarily to odd physiologies, which brings back the uncertainty.
Link to the original thread:
Well, its been 4 years and both boat and divers (Me, unirdna (Ted) and my 16 year old son, Preston) were very glad to get back to the Bahamas. I've been doing these trips for many years and most are amazingly smooth, mostly. 2005 changed that. I went three times that year and hit the edges of...
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