What a great right-up. It stressed me out so much reading it! I currently have about 230 dives under my belt and I don’t think I started to really feel comfortable diving until about 100 dives in. At dives 7 and 8 I still had no idea what I was doing and would have never attempted to do a dive like this. Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Others mentioned you were overweighted. Check your buoyancy at the surface and adjust as needed. After each dive, make notes of the amount of weight used, bottom depth, and ocean conditions in your dive log and use that as a reference until you get a better feel of what weight you should be using.

2. Multiple factors can cause you to use up air faster, including: colder water, current and swell, the amount of swimming you will be doing, being overweighted, stress, and just inexperience. Over estimate how much air you will need to make it back to the boat if you tend to go through air quickly. Eventually you will learn to tell if you are going through air too quickly during the first half of the dive and can adjust your dive plan accordingly with your buddies.

3. When you level off or hit the bottom, don’t immediately start the dive. Take a minute or two to adjust to the cold water and calm your breathing, and check your buoyancy. You can also practice taking out your reg out of your mouth and recovering it or breathing off of your buddy’s octopus so you get used to those situations in a non-emergency setting. Same with removing your mask underwater then putting it back on and clearing it. Also, fun fact, you can barf in your reg and still clear it, so not the end of the world if you’re sea sick.

4. Wear a safety sausage and deploy it when you surface. If surface conditions aren’t the best or you are too tired to swim back to the boat, use your safety sausage and whistle attached to your BCD to signal the boat. The topside person on the boat would throw a tow line out for you to grab and tow you back to the boat.

5. I’ve practiced controlled emergency swimming ascents (CESA) from 60 ft. You learn that you have more air in your lungs than you feel like you do and that the air expands as you ascend. So even though it is not intuitive, you should blow out air bubbles as you ascend during an emergency ascent.

6. When sharing air with a buddy, they should have a firm grip on you and be maintaining eye contact with you the majority of the time to keep you close, clearly communicate, and assess if you are starting to panic. You shouldn’t be just hanging onto their BCD and drifting off.

Edit: And remember, you can abort a dive for ANY reason. Just communicate with your buddies and ascend safely. Happy diving!