An e-mailer wrote asking for details on an offhand reference I’d made in a post to some technical issues while on a dive in Bali, at Menjangan. The correspondent was curious to know what happened and suggested I post about the incident.

So…I do so because it’s actually a textbook case of how something can go wrong on a dive.

It was the first dive of the day on a reef off the northwest corner of Bali, in between Bali itself and a tiny island just off the coast. Max depth was about 70 feet. There were five of us on the boat: my friend Greg Widen, a Swedish guy named Michael, a driver, and the divemaster, a Japanese woman whose name I don’t recall.

Two problems: The divemaster spoke very little English, and we were using rented equipment from a source we didn’t know.

Dropping down was easy and lovely; straight off the bat we saw four reef sharks. As we progressed along the reef to a sandy bottom, the dive got increasingly interesting; at around 20 meters we passed through a garden of eels, waving from the sand like tall grass, but slowly retreating into the sand if one got too close. Hundreds, if not thousands, of the eels. Gorgeous.

But after about twenty minutes, as my air tank got lighter (from me consuming air), I noticed that I was having trouble staying at depth; I was too light. Almost immediately after that recognition, I started rising to the surface. We had come to slightly shallower water, maybe 40 feet, the air in my BC was expanding, and suddenly, whooosh, I was soaring upward. Absolutely nothing I could do about it; as I tried to release the air from my BC, nothing happened. The release valve was busted.

I broke the surface about fifteen seconds later.

This is, of course, a very fine way to get the bends, though thankfully I wasn’t so deep that that was particularly likely.

Greg and Michael continued on; I was behind them, and they had no idea that I was now above them. The divemaster did see what had happened, and she surfaced as well. I tried to explain with her that my BC wasn’t working; she fiddled with another valve in the back of the jacket and let the air out. “You dive again?” she asked. I nodded—sure, what the heck—and she pushed me down. We caught up to Greg and Michael, who’d gone forward, having no idea what was happening—also not such a great idea on a dive. If you lose sight of the divemaster, you should really hang out and wait.

About two minutes later, the same thing happened again. Down about 30 feet, I shot to the surface as if someone was reeling me in. The divemaster followed me up again, but I wasn’t going to take a third chance; she whistled for the boat, which was a couple hundred yards away, and I pumped some air into my BC so that I could float at the surface.

Except that after I released the air injection button, the air kept flowing, and my BC tightened around me like a blood pressure cuff. Not so great. But after I clicked the valve up and down, it finally stopped. The divemaster released all the air from the back again, and I simply had to swim for a minute or so with no air in my BC and all my gear on until the boat arrived. Don’t try that at home.

So the moral of the story is: Try not to use rented equipment if you don’t know the source, and language barriers between divers and divemasters are bad.

One final point: The e-mailer mentioned that his son doesn’t like to dive unless it’s over 100 feet (I think that was the number mentioned). This seems silly to me. Unless you’re looking for pelagic life, there’s simply not that much to see past a certain depth. (Consider, for example, Belize’s Blue Hole.) My deepest dive was 150 feet and I loved it—I got a little narced, which is a nice feeling—but that’s too far down for the sun’s rays to penetrate, meaning that there’ll be less life on the reef, and fewer critters feeding on that life.

E-mailer, your son strikes me as being a little macho, which is actually something to look out for. Half the serious accidents in diving that I hear about stem from guys who want to show off how deep they can go or how great their fancy new equipment is…..