# The Bends! First Incident.



## Cpt Dick Brooks (May 13, 2013)

The first incident involving a potential case of the bends happened while Debut was anchored in the Bay of Virgins, on the west sheltered side of Fatu Hiva, in the Marquise Archipelago in French Polynesia. The small wavelets lapped against the rocks, below the 1,000 feet high vertical cliffs, and there was an occasional whoosh as a small wave rushed through the arch in the promontory to the south of the bay, leading into the next bay further south along the shore. Hanavave Valley led up between vertical rocks on each side to the mountainous central spine that formed the island between individual columns of rock, reaching out of the dense foliage of the valley floor like fingers from the mire.
My crew were preparing to go for our daily dive to catch fish in this bay, and were assembling the necessary diving gear needed for the adventure. The rest of the crew could put in their order of the fish that they preferred to eat for the next day. The fresh catch would be filleted on our return from our dives and stored in the refrigerator, while the catch from the previous day was then eaten. A small piece of each fish was fed to the ship's cat to prevent ciguatera fish poison effecting our crew. If the cat was still healthy on the following morning, we knew that the fish was safe to eat.
Our cook, Fritze, had asked one of our new crew to teach him to dive, and was preparing to take him for a training dive beneath the ship before we headed off to catch fish. Roland was from Switzerland, and had joined the ship in Nuka Hiva with his German girlfriend, Gabby. He was also a professional diver, with dive-training qualifications. Fritze was a 6'5" tall Dutchman from Friesland, on the north coast of the country. They spoke in a mixture of Flemish and German mixed with English, and got on well together.
Fritze had joined the ship in Aruba, in the Dutch Archipelago in the Caribbean, and had written to his friend, Rekus, in Holland. Rekus stood at 6'7" tall, and had joined Debut in Acapulco as her chief engineer. He was also a keen professional diver in his own right and had been involved in many diving expeditions while on board Debut.
Both tanked up and wearing wet suits to prevent scuffing from the coral about the ship, Roland went through the various diving signals on the surface alongside the ship. They were intending to descend down a weighted line running from the dive-platform on the starboard side of Debut to have more control on their descent. Fritze was a little nervous, as was common for a new diver on his first dive. Perhaps a shallower dive would have been preferred, but the seabed was level at 100 feet deep right up to the base of the cliffs.
With Roland holding onto Fritze's weight-belt to keep control of him, they started slowly disappearing into the crystal-clear azure blue of the Pacific Ocean. At ten feet, Roland stopped and exchanged dive signals with Fritze to make sure that he was okay. When he returned the OK sign, they gently eased further down the weighted line towards the seabed below. Even at a 100 feet deep, it was as bright as day and crystal clear, with small brightly coloured fish swimming about them.
Roland was holding Fritze closely to him... face to face... and was confident that Fritze was coping with this new experience well. He had trained many novice divers before, and was sure Fritze would turn out to be another good diver in the ship's compliment. Just before they reached the seabed below the ship, Roland stopped their decent of the weighted line to go through their dive signals again. When Fritze gave him a confident OK sign, Roland let go of the weighted line to descend the last few feet to the black volcanic sand of the seabed below. There was a feeling of ease and confidence between them as they looked into each other's face masks for the final few feet. 
As soon as Fritze's fins touched the seabed, he panicked and stirred up the visibility. Roland tried to control him, but Fritze was thrashing about with his arms and legs, stirring up the sand. The sudden loss of visibility made his attempt to surface even more critical.
Roland was a fit man of slender build, but was only 5'6" tall compared to Fritze at 6'5". There was no way that he could control him, and he broke free from his grip and panicked, swimming and hauling on the weighted rope to reach the surface as quickly as possible. A diver should only ascend at the rate of his smallest bubbles, and breath normally... but in his frantic state, Fritze drained his diving tank of air in only a few minutes. He was lost to Roland's visibility in a haze of bubbles.
Roland ascended as fast as he could, but knew that he must not exceed the recommended rate. There was no decompression tank on board Debut, and the nearest one would be at the naval base at Papeete in Tahiti... some 600 miles away... so no more mistakes could be made. Even it there was an airport at Fatu Hiva... which there wasn't... it could not have been used. Flying is completely out of the question when suffering from the bends, other than virtually at ground level. He looked upwards at the outline of the ship as he ascended up the weighted hand line... not looking forward to what he knew he would find when he surfaced.
Fritze was thrashing about on the surface of the sea beside Debut. Several of the crew realized what had happened and started to get kitted up ready to dive. Once Roland surfaced, I told him to drag Fritze back down to the seabed again with the help of as many crew as was needed. A shuttle service of full air tanks was set to re-kit out Roland and Fritze, and to help other divers stay down for as long as possible on this critical decompression dive.
Fritze was completely physically restrained by Roland and a couple of other divers. Rekus was even taller that Fritze, and managed to keep a tight hold of him. He was brought to the surface at ten foot intervals and physically restrained until the allotted time had passed on each decompression stop. They finally broke the surface, and Fritze was hauled out of the water into the bottom of the Rabalo launch for his own safe keeping.
During the rest of the day, and in that evening, a close watch was kept on Fritze. If he showed any signs of the bends, it would be back down to the sea bed again... even in the dark of night. The first sign of the bends is the tingles... a slight tingling feeling in the fingers and toes, which then works its way up the elbows and knees... but Fritze was okay, he had got way with it this time. He never dived again. All the best, Cpt Dick Brooks.


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