Rescue scenario at Dam Bay

Simulated unresponsive diver at nine metres. Locate, stabilise, controlled positive ascent at no more than nine metres per minute. At the surface: establish positive buoyancy on the casualty, open the airway, give two rescue breaths, then tow the casualty one hundred metres to the entry point while maintaining airway position and continuing breaths every five seconds.

I had run this drill in the shallows in the weeks before. The standard sequence: locate, assess, stabilise, ascend, breath, tow, breath, tow, beach, breath, call. Each verb is its own movement. Mr. Huy had told me that under stress, the verbs collapse into a blur, and the cure for the blur is to slow down each verb by half a second.

The brief from Mr. Huy was a sentence I wrote on the back of my hand and did not let rinse off: do the thing you trained, not the thing you feel.

May went limp at minute six of the dive, on cue, at nine metres, on the sand by a small rock. She was a relaxed liability. I had to remember she was performing. I had to treat her as if she was not.

I located her in three seconds. The visibility helped. I checked airway and regulator. I rolled her onto her back. I established positive buoyancy on her BCD using short pulses, not a full dump, because a fast positive ascent at nine metres is its own emergency. I started the ascent at what I tried to keep to nine metres per minute. The first ten seconds were too fast. I dumped a small amount of air from my own BCD, slowed the ascent, and kept it slow until we broke the surface together.

On the surface, the verbs slowed exactly the way Mr. Huy had described. I established positive buoyancy. I tilted her head. I gave two breaths. I started the tow. I gave a breath every five seconds. I kept counting out loud through my regulator, because counting is the thing that makes the verb a verb and not a feeling.

The tow took five minutes. I was breathing through my own regulator the whole way, because my mouth was the source of her rescue breaths and I needed my mouth to keep working. I did not panic. I also did not feel calm. I felt like a person performing a procedure I had practised, on a person I knew was acting, in a bay I had dived twenty times. There was no drama. There was only the sequence.

On the beach, I removed her weight belt, completed the simulated 911 call, and debriefed with Mr. Huy for nine minutes. He said the ascent rate was slightly fast in the first ten seconds. Everything else was clean.

The slip happened on the descent, not in the rescue. I had been so braced for the moment May would go limp that the moment she actually did, I had a half-second of relief. The wait was over. The drill was starting. The relief was the slip.

The relief was the wrong feeling. It was a feeling of permission, the way a rehearsed actor feels permission to start the scene. The real version of this scenario does not start. It interrupts. The real version is a buddy you have been diving with for thirty minutes who suddenly is not behaving like a buddy, and the period of unbelief, the half second of this is not happening, is the most expensive half-second of the dive.

I am writing the slip because the procedure I performed was good and the feeling I had at the start of it was wrong. The procedure can be drilled into the muscles. The feeling has to be drilled into a different place.

The rescue dive taught me what trained instinct actually feels like. It is not bravery. It is not adrenaline. It is the absence of the urge to invent. The verbs were there. The order was there. The cure for the blur was the speed at which I let each verb happen. Half a second slower per movement. Count out loud through the regulator. Do the thing you trained, not the thing you feel.

The hardest part to internalise is that the procedure does not feel impressive while you are doing it. It feels like nothing. It feels like the next move. The lack of any sense of accomplishment, the lack of a story you can tell yourself in the moment, is the proof that the training has actually started to take.