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The good news is you don't have the bends. The bad news is ... I spent the summer of 1979 in the Cayman Islands with a small marine archaeological team. The Institute of Nautical Archaeology, based at Texas A&M in College Station, TX, had arranged with the government of the Cayman Islands to do a survey of the waters around Little Cayman. There were archaeologists, a mechanic, an electronics/survey guy (me), a divemaster - a total team of 11 as I remember. We had sent a lot of equipment down by ship from Miami to Grand Cayman, and we spent several weeks on Grand Cayman getting the gear organized, prepping the survey boat, and sending the equipment a little at a time to Little Cayman, which was served only by a fairly small plane that landed on a grass strip. One afternoon we took a break from the work and loaded up our survey boat, a 17' Aquasport center console outboard, to go diving at a site along Grand Cayman 's Seven Mile Beach . There were three of us from our team and two Brits who were living on Grand Cayman . The diving around the Caymans is spectacular because of the extreme dropoffs to very deep water. Our dive site was a place where you hit bottom at about 80 feet, near the edge of the slope to the deeps. There were spectacular coral formations, some with arches that you could swim through. Our dive plan was for a no-decompression dive, run according to the dive tables (no dive computers back then). 100' max for 20 minutes max, with a safety stop at 15 - 20' on the way up. I was a little nervous because I had not done much in the way of 'deep' diving. Not that 100' is terribly deep, but plenty deep enough to need to be concerned about depth and bottom time to keep out of trouble. At about 15 minutes into the dive I swam through a coral arch that was at the edge of the slope. I looked down the slope and saw Bill, one of our team, down the slope next to a gigantic sea fan, waving for me to come down and take a look. Bill was not my buddy on the dive, and there was no one with him. I looked at my depth gauge - 95'. I knew that Bill was deeper than the plan and became concerned. What to do - just wave at him to come up? Go get him? Why was he there - was he narc'ed? I decided I had to go get him so I quickly swam down, acknowledged the beauty of the sea fan, glanced at my depth gauge - 135' - grabbed his arm, and swam back up. I pulled out a plastic copy of the dive tables and had a heated pantomime discussion with him. The dive time was up and we rose slowly to the surface, did the safety stop, and returned to the boat. One of the sponsors of our project was the local Heineken distributor, so one thing we did not lack for was a supply of 'greenies'. These were small green glass bottles of the Dutch elixir. We sat around for a while talking, sipping greenies, and generally soaking up the sun. In the back of my mind I was still a bit concerned about the unplanned deep excursion. When it was time to go back I went to the steering console, grabbed the wheel, and started up the engine, while several others went to pull in the anchor line. All of a sudden the toes of my left foot started to tingle. Then they started to twitch uncontrollably. The tingling moved up to my entire left foot. Then that foot was involuntarily moving on the deck of the boat. The feeling crept further up my leg, until my entire left leg was dancing. As the tingling elevated so did my fear. Through this all I didn't say a word. Denial is an extremely strong force and I was in its grip. The others didn't see what was happening because they were paying attention to the anchor line, and most of my body was out of their view behind the center console. The tingling feeling kept moving, rising up the left side of my body. My whole left side was out of control. I finally spoke up, in a voice that I'm sure conveyed what I was feeling - 'I think I've got the bends! The whole left side of my body is tingling and twitching!' The others reacted quickly, telling me to calm down and they would rush me to a decompression chamber. Roger, our project leader, ran back to take over the helm. He reached for the wheel and as he grabbed it - his hand bounced off. He reached again and again his hand bounced off. I let go of the wheel. I was cured. We pretty quickly figured out what had happened. We were going to be using the boat as our main survey platform, and we were going to be running a magnetometer and an electronic positioning system on it. The equipment needed 24V that we were going to supply with two automobile batteries. We didn't want to lug the batteries on and off the boat every to charge them, so Bill, a brilliant mechanic, was doing an ingenious modification. He had removed the outboard cover and bolted onto the motor a 24V, 60 amp generator normally used on a diesel truck. A new pulley drove the generator off the main flywheel on the outboard. Bill had modified the outboard cover with fiberglass so that it conformed to the new shape with the added appendage. Just that morning we had attached 000 cables (that's nice thick copper cable) to bring the generator output forward to where we would be keeping the batteries under the steering console. We had run the cables neatly through the scuppers, but that was as far as we had gotten and the two bare cables were lying on the deck of the boat. The bottom of the boat was charged, and the wheel was the path to electrical ground. So I wasn't bent, I was being electrocuted at a leisurely pace. Roger's hand had bounced off due to the electric shock of hitting the full generator output. I hadn't felt that shock because I had been holding the wheel when I started the engine, so the voltage built up slowly through me as the engine, and the generator along with it, came up to speed. That experience ranks right up with times I have been most scared in my life (two others that come to mind involve the motorcycle that I owned for a short period). Awful at the time, but pretty amusing as soon as we realized what was actually going on.
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