Scuba diving is traditionally a look, don't touch kind of sport. But even careful divers can inadvertently run into trouble. By far the most common diving injury is the common scrape, usually from coral.
Irritations often occur as a result of a brush with coral or sponges. Coral scrapes can be painful and sometimes difficult to heal because the living organisms in the coral can get into the wound and cause infections. Contact with a sponge can leave irritating fibers in the skin, producing an itching rash that can range from mild to severe, possibly with pain and blistering.
Even if you're careful, it's likely you'll come into contact with coral someday. If and when, here's what to do:
1. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Makes sure your body is covered, even if just by a dive skin, and wear gloves where allowed.
2. Regularly irrigate a scrape with copious amounts of vinegar over a period of about 30 minutes.
3. Apply triple-antibiotic to the wound twice a day for a couple of days.
4. Scrapes can become infected even with proper initial care. Watch for hotness to the touch, redness or red streaks around the site, swelling, discharge of pus, or fever. If you see them, contact a doctor.
5. Fragments of coral sometimes become lodged beneath the skin and the body mounts a prolonged allergic reaction to them. In some cases, debridement is required to resolve the reaction.
Even in the absence of embedded coral remnants, it is not unusual for a marked hypersensitivity response to a coral injury to continue for three to four weeks before significantly improving. Sometimes the lesion will resolve, then return.
If a scrape doesn't substantially resolve within a month, or gets worse, you should consult a dermatologist.
Editor's Note: Even innocent injuries can turn deadly if you have an allergic or severe reaction. After any accident, watch for severe swelling, dizziness, blurred vision, breathing difficulties, weakness, muscle pain, cold sweat and a rapid heartbeat. If any occur, call 911 (or DAN's emergency hotline 919-684-4DAN if no emergency services are available) immediately. Injectible epinephrine can help calm allergic reactions. CPR may be necessary until help arrives.
It’s eating, breathing and sleeping scuba diving, 24/7.
That’s life on a “liveaboard” boat that Fraser Debney experienced in the Bahamas recently. He had liked his first liveaboard trip so he decided to try it again this year.
On April 13, Fraser and some of his friends left port in Nassau Bahamas aboard a Blackbeard Cruises (http://www.blackbeard-cruises.com/) liveaboard ship for a seven-day adventure. It would confirm his first impression of the experience. He loved it. The dive boat becomes your home and restaurant for a week and you don’t return to port until the trip is done.
“It would be our shark dive,” Fraser replies when asked for his favourite experience on the trip.
It takes place at a wreck site, and a good wreck dive on its own merits. But it is also a wreck dive with a difference. Using a rope, the boat’s crew suspends a glob of waste food about 20 feet above the divers. Looking up from the wreck the divers get a close-up look at the reef sharks, which range in size from four to six feet. Fraser acknowledges that many people object to attracting sharks like this but says it is good for tourism.
“These sharks were not aggressive and I don’t believe they generally are.”
That day they saw at least 20 sharks, as well as Nassau groupers and a lot of tropical fish, “all swimming around in the same area eating the scraps as the sharks chomped on the chum. Curiously, the sharks don’t bother them (the other fish).”
James Bond Grotto in the Bahamas, where the Thunderball movie was shot, was another favourite “because of the vast expanse of things to see. That movie is underwater battles. It is almost like a small cave. There were a couple of octopus, a lot of old and interesting elk horn coral growing out of the ground and various tropical fish that made the cave their own. It has an access and exit point.”
The boat itself is about 65 feet in length and on this trip accommodated 19 divers and a crew of six. Instead of cabins there are open bunk areas. Each serves as the sleeping quarters for four to six divers. “For anyone expecting 5-star it is not 5-star. It is camping on the water with the diving as a bonus. The diving is fantastic. As long as you are comfortable being in a trailer (atmosphere) and having to be organized, the space you have is adequate. If you spread your stuff all over it is not for you.
“All the entities of a dive shop are on the boat. You don’t touch your gear. They fill up the tanks on the spot. It was interesting for me,” says Fraser. “The food was fantastic. The meals were like homemade.”
Meanwhile, the boat is travelling from one dive site to another. While bad weather limited them to a couple of dives on the first two days, generally they made four or five dives a day. When moored at the end of the day they would do night dives before moving on to the next site in the morning.
The week-long experience costs $939. It includes everything to do with your diving, food and drinks, including a beer keg in the gallery, along with wine and rum punch.
“Your first alcoholic drink is your last dive (of the day). They’re very strict. If you have a drink at 10 a.m. you don’t dive at all.”
It’s not a loud and late night, either. Tired by the busy day of diving, most people are in bed by 8 p.m.
Scuba diving is traditionally a look, don't touch kind of sport. But even careful divers can inadvertently run into trouble. By far the most common diving injury is the common scrape, usually from coral.
Irritations often occur as a result of a brush with coral or sponges. Coral scrapes can be painful and sometimes difficult to heal because the living organisms in the coral can get into the wound and cause infections. Contact with a sponge can leave irritating fibers in the skin, producing an itching rash that can range from mild to severe, possibly with pain and blistering.
Even if you're careful, it's likely you'll come into contact with coral someday. If and when, here's what to do:
1. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Makes sure your body is covered, even if just by a dive skin, and wear gloves where allowed.
2. Regularly irrigate a scrape with copious amounts of vinegar over a period of about 30 minutes.
3. Apply triple-antibiotic to the wound twice a day for a couple of days.
4. Scrapes can become infected even with proper initial care. Watch for hotness to the touch, redness or red streaks around the site, swelling, discharge of pus, or fever. If you see them, contact a doctor.
5. Fragments of coral sometimes become lodged beneath the skin and the body mounts a prolonged allergic reaction to them. In some cases, debridement is required to resolve the reaction.
Even in the absence of embedded coral remnants, it is not unusual for a marked hypersensitivity response to a coral injury to continue for three to four weeks before significantly improving. Sometimes the lesion will resolve, then return.
If a scrape doesn't substantially resolve within a month, or gets worse, you should consult a dermatologist.
Editor's Note: Even innocent injuries can turn deadly if you have an allergic or severe reaction. After any accident, watch for severe swelling, dizziness, blurred vision, breathing difficulties, weakness, muscle pain, cold sweat and a rapid heartbeat. If any occur, call 911 (or DAN's emergency hotline 919-684-4DAN if no emergency services are available) immediately. Injectible epinephrine can help calm allergic reactions. CPR may be necessary until help arrives.
DocVikingo has been scuba certified for more than 35 years and has dived all over the world. He is a practising doctor in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area and has held faculty positions at several major hospitals, including Johns Hopkins. With an interest in diving medicine, he serves as administrator at Scuba Clinic Online.
A small fish nestled among swaying stalks of sea whip coral about 11 miles off the Alabama coast may be poised to shift the balance of life in the Gulf of Mexico.
While it has been less than two years since scuba diver Lawren McCaghren made the first confirmed sighting of a lionfish off Alabama, the animals are now so common that McCaghren said he routinely sees 50 or 60 during a single dive on local reefs.
The sudden colonization of the northern Gulf has scientists using words like alarmed, worried and afraid. First noted off the Atlantic Coast in the 1990s, lionfish swept across the Caribbean in three short years.
“The explosive nature of the population expansion is ominous. We’re getting reports of thousands of them documented across the northern Gulf and thousands in the Keys, all within a few years,” said Bob Shipp, head of marine sciences at the University of South Alabama.
“Whether they replace some of our native species on the reefs, or it is a temporary expansion that will level off, we just don’t know. They don’t have any natural predators. Perhaps some of our predators will eat them, but we have no indication of that yet.”
Lionfish, named for a lovely mane of elaborate fins that rings their bodies, are native to the Pacific Ocean. They are not native to the Gulf or Atlantic. The fish grow to about 15 inches long, but appear much larger due to the fan of fins that spread out around the body. The body is striped with bands of brown, rust, and white.
Scientists believe captive lionfish may have escaped from aquariums in south Florida during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. A few were seen off North Carolina around 2000, and reports of sightings began trickling in from the Caribbean around that time.
Within three years, lionfish had colonized the entire Caribbean and are reported to have eaten or displaced about 60 percent of the native species on reefs there. Lionfish have enormous mouths in relation to the size of their bodies, similar to a largemouth bass. They can consume fish nearly as big as they are.
The fish have become so prevalent in the Florida Keys that dive groups hold tournaments to see who can kill the most lionfish in a day. About 1,500 lionfish were killed in derbies in the Keys in 2011, a number scientists say represents a small drop in a huge bucket.
“Anywhere you go in the Gulf, you see them. Tanks and pyramids, they’re a given,” said McCaghren, manager of the Gulf Coast Divers shop in Mobile. McCaghren filmed a lionfish swimming on an Army tank off Alabama in September of 2010, the first northern Gulf sighting. Within a matter of weeks, divers reported encountering the fish on reefs off Florida and Louisiana.
“The natural bottom stuff, the Trysler Grounds, you don’t see one or two. You see 50 or 60 out there every dive. They’re on every outcropping,” McCaghren said, referring to an area of natural coral reef habitat about 20 miles off the Alabama coast.
McCaghren said he has killed about 100 using a small spear known as a “Lion Tamer.” Because each lionfish possesses three sets of venomous fins, he said he usually knocks them off the spear and leaves them in the water rather than trying to bring them back to the dock to eat.
A lionfish killed by the Press-Register on Tuesday yielded two small filets. The meat was firm and white and tasted delicious sauteed in butter. To clean it, the venomous barbs were simply clipped off with a pair of wire snips.
If you get stung by a lionfish, run the wound under hot water and seek medical attention. The telltale water stream from an outboard motor can be used to provide hot water if you get stung while offshore.
While federal officials have been encouraging people to eat lionfish, it appears unlikely that such a program will make a dent in the Gulf population. In part, that’s because the fish don’t typically take a baited hook, and in part it is because they have apparently colonized the deepest parts of the Gulf.
“No one expected to see a lionfish at 1,400 feet down, but that’s what we’re seeing,” said Thomas Jackson, an exotic species biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Jackson said he believes that lionfish are reproducing in the deep recess of the Gulf and moving in toward shore. Because the fish are native to the Pacific, he said, they are likely more tolerant of the colder water far offshore than many native species.
Shipp, with the University of South Alabama, said that might explain why most of the lionfish seen by divers in the Gulf are relatively small.
“These fish get up to 15 inches, but we’re not seeing that size. Most of the reports I’ve heard are juveniles,” Shipp said. “That’s alarming. If they are establishing themselves here as juveniles, without even reproducing locally, well, who knows what will happen if they start reproducing around here.”
A survey of scuba divers with spearfishing permits conducted by the Dauphin Island Sea Lab yielded hundreds of reports of lionfish in area waters. One fish was reported under a pier in Old River next to Ono Island, in just a few feet of water. Last week, a lionfish was killed in 11 feet of water at Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay.
“I’m hoping this won’t be like the brown tree snake in Guam. You’re talking about an entire ecosystem that has these predators in very large numbers,” Jackson said. “Our systems are already stressed. Now we’re adding a very efficient predator.”
Jackson said that it is still legal to import a number of lionfish species in the United States, including species that have not yet escaped into the wild. “It is not a good idea to continue to allow the sale of these fish,” he said.
“I think it’s only a matter of time until the lionfish move into shallower water and get into our coastal ecosystem,” McCaghren said. “Fishermen don’t understand the threat yet because they don’t see them. They’re here now. And the difference they’ve made in just a few years is incredible.”
Scuba diving is traditionally a look, don't touch kind of sport. But even careful divers can inadvertently run into trouble. By far the most common diving injury is the common scrape, usually from coral.
