hey everybody welcome to another episode of dive stories and this week i'd like to tell
you kind of a little bit of a scarier story that goes back about 10 years.
So my friend Pierre and I...Pierre was our one of our cameramen for Blue World
for a long time good friend of mine who lives in Montreal and we were up
in the Saint Lawrence river way up in a place called Baie Comeau. And this is a place
where they had for a number of years these weird encounters where Greenland sharks--which are
exceptionally rare--they would come over to scuba divers underwater completely out of curiosity.
And what they thought was that maybe this is some kind of a pupping ground for them and and they're
there and they're bored and they're curious and they would come over to see what the noise
was. It's the only place in the world where people would regularly see Greenland sharks.
So we decided to go check this out and see if we can make a Blue World episode about it.
We drove all the way up there and that particular summer for whatever reason the water
was really warm in Baie Comeau. It's normally in the 30s in even in the summer um that's fahrenheit
in the 30s we're talking cold like 2 degrees celsius...and when we got there the water was
quite a bit warmer than that. It was in the high 40s which is still pretty cold by most people's
standards but for Greenland sharks which are sharks that like the arctic that was way too
warm for them. So we were doing dives and we were making noise underwater, clicking rocks together,
blowing bubbles, doing the things that would normally attract the sharks and they weren't
coming over to us and we were getting a little bit discouraged.
Then we realized you know what if we dive down deeper below the thermocline into the really
cold water layer that's down below a hundred feet, we might be able to get the sharks to come over.
So um what had happened was Pierre had hurt his ear in one of the dives and so he couldn't do
the deep dive. So I went with another diver who was a friend of the captain of the boat, and she
and i were going to go down really deep below 100 feet and see if we could find some sharks.
And I had told her like if we get a shark don't worry about me I might stay with
the shark and if you can't stay with the shark just i'll come up in a minute when i'm done. So
we went down, we went down to about 100 feet, it's really dark kind of green and we're looking
around and then all of a sudden wouldn't you know it a Greenland shark came over to investigate us.
And I thought I have won the lottery we got a shark I mean I've been here for four days we
haven't seen a shark and we finally have one and I'm so excited! So I put on the lights
and I started filming. Now these sharks are not fast they swim pretty slowly by shark standards
but that's still pretty fast for us so I'm swimming along with the shark and all I can do
is just keep that shark in the viewfinder and i'm trying to swim along beside it i'm trying
to take a little break i go behind it try to get on the other side, whatever i can do to get
shots of this shark. Well i'm focusing so much on filming the shark, the shark is going deeper
and deeper and deeper and deeper and i'm going with it. And in the back of my mind i'm trying
not to breathe too much. For those of you who know about scuba, you'll know that the deeper
you go the more air you use with each breath so for example when you're at 33 feet of sea water
you're at two atmospheres whereas at the surface you're at one atmosphere so it takes twice as much
air from your scuba tank to fill your lungs at 33 feet of sea water as it does at the surface
at 66 feet. It takes three times as much air as it does at the surface for a breath.
At 99 feet it takes four times as much, and it keeps going like that and the deeper you go
the more air you use with each breath so what that means is that if you're breathing heavily
your tank volume is depleting very quickly--your air--so you always have this thing in the back
of your mind when you're diving deep like don't breathe too fast! So you're trying to conserve
your breathing. Try it sometime: run down the street and get really you know winded but try
not to breathe too much--it's really hard. And what happens is co2 builds up in your blood and
you start to get this like feeling like you really got to breathe. The other thing that happens is
the deeper you go the more the nitrogen in your blood makes you a little cuckoo Jacques Cousteau
called it the "rapture of the deep." I love that name the rapture of the deep it sounds great.
Modern scuba divers call it nitrogen narcosis, but essentially nitrogen at a very high pressure
starts to have a narcotic effect. It's almost like being a little bit drunk, so you get a little
loopy, and the deeper you go you also get kind of a tunnel vision. And when you're staring at a
camera and you're swimming really hard and you're trying not to breathe too hard and you're getting
CO2 buildup in your blood and you're getting narcosis and it's giving you tunnel vision but
you don't notice the tunnel vision because you're focusing on the camera, there comes a point when
you realize "whoa dude I do not feel good!" And I just remember thinking okay I've probably got
enough footage of this shark, I should probably chill. And I slowed down and the shark swim away,
and I just remember thinking in myself i had tunnel vision and i was all and i had no idea
how deep i was and i thought to myself this is really a bad situation because i feel like i'm
about to pass out. And then you have this thought in your mind if I pass out at this depth, I'm
gonna die. I will drown nobody will find me, so I did what most people do in that situation which is
that you hit your inflator on your bc real hard and you start filling your BC as hard as you can
to get yourself moving upward without having to exert yourself. So I hit that thing and i
started going up and what happens is you start to accelerate, and you start to accelerate,
and accelerate. And what will happen is: if you don't get it under control, you're going to come
shooting out of the water! And you can get bent because you came up way too fast. So fortunately
as i started coming up my mind cleared and I immediately realized whoa i got to get this
under control! So I started venting my bc and venting my dry suit at the same time,
trying to hold my camera and vent and i finally got my ascent under control. At about 50 feet i
came to a stop and then i chilled out and i looked around it's like okay i'm good i'm at 50 feet i i
can i can do my decompression i'm not going to get bent. I have plenty of air. I'm going to be fine.
I was like okay so i came up, i did my deco--I didn't actually, believe it or not,
i didn't go into deco. I wasn't down long enough. But i definitely was down deep for a long time and
i needed to go slowly coming up, so i did a safety stop at 30 feet. I did a safety stop at 20 feet. I
did a safety stop at 10 feet, and then i finally popped up. And when i popped up, everybody on the
boat was so relieved. They came over they're like oh we didn't know if you were okay and i was like
you know "what was the problem?" Well the person that I was diving with, when she saw me take off
with the shark, she tried to follow for a while and she had all the same things happen to her, and
then she panicked and then she hit her BC and then she came flying out of the water like a Polaris
missile and they, you know, they had her on the boat on oxygen and they thought that I was dead
and everybody was freaking out. And of course you know i played it really cool i was like "yeah oh
guys you know i was fine! I chased the shark for a while, then i had to do my deco stop and I was
i was cool it was all fine i'm sorry i worried you guys! You know, come on, I'm a professional here!"
And then we got on the boat and then you know a little while later Pierre said to me he said
"hey mon ami, are you are you okay? What really happened?" and I said "Dude i was so scared man!
I completely freaked myself out!" I looked at my dive computer later and i had hit 170 feet
on air in 36 degree water. And it was so dark it was like a night dive, and that's not advisable.
That's that's dumb, that's reckless uh that is bad diving technique, um and i'm not proud of the fact
that i did that. And i tell this story because you know you can get caught up in the moment
filming something and lose sight of reality a little bit and forget that
you're doing something stupid for an image. And i've had friends die
doing that. I've had friends get horribly bent and end up in a chamber from doing that.
And i try to now always remember in the back of my mind that there's no shot that is worth
your life--even if it's the only time you've seen a Greenland shark in your entire life,
it does not matter if you if you don't if you kill yourself or get seriously hurt trying to
get the shot, that's just dumb. So i try to always remember that in the back of my mind
when i'm filming now no shot is worth getting bent or getting in you know in serious trouble or even
getting killed for it's just not worth it. And on that happy note, that is this week's dive story.
Who knows what we'll get next week? But you know, until then i hope you'll subscribe,
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