You’re out on the water and all excited about your very first open water dive. You’ve been in a classroom and doing drills in a pool for about a month now and you’re ready for all your hard work to pay off.
The boat reaches the dive site and the captain calls out, “The pool’s open!” You can hardly contain your excitement.
You execute a perfect entry making sure to cover your mask and your weight belt and then you begin your decent to the bottom.
Like a good little student you’re careful to slowly inflate your buoyancy compensator as you decent to prevent yourself from crashing to the bottom, you clear your ears early and often and you check to make sure that your gauges and octopus are secured properly.
During your first scuba dive.
Your dive goes off without a hitch!
You stay in a horizontal position the whole time, your fin kicks are picture perfect and your buoyancy control is second to none. You’re monitoring your every move with painstaking detail and you think you’re doing a pretty dang good job if you do say so yourself!
After the dive you surface and climb on the boat and your fellow students are all smiles; but when you take your mask off, everyone looks at you with a horrified expression…except your dive instructor.
He’s laughing so hard he pees his wetsuit. What happened?
How do you get mask squeeze?
Sounds like you made a common beginner mistake.
Most students are a little overloaded when they go on their first dive. They try to remember everything their supposed to do and inevitably they forget something; like letting some air into their mask for example.
Mask squeeze occurs when someone (usually a beginner) descends without letting a little air into his or her mask. Since the mask has an airspace, it compresses with depth and sucks the face into it.
It isn’t as dangerous as it sounds, but it looks horrible!
A diver with mask squeeze will literally be red in the face. The suction pulls the blood towards the skin causing it to turn anywhere from a light pink to a full-fledged scarlet color.
However, the real drama is in the eyes. It can make the whites of your eyes turn blood red. It’s a bit of a shock to see, but as long as your vision isn’t impaired and you don’t feel any pain you should be fine in a few days, but if you find it hard to see or feel any pain, make sure you see a medical professional immediately.
Mask Squeeze vs Hurt Pride.
Most of the pain of mask squeeze comes from hurt pride. Mask squeeze is largely considered a rookie mistake and it can be easily prevented by occasionally letting some air out of your nose and into your mask on descent.
Rookies are much more likely to forget such a little step since their minds are swimming with all of their newly acquired dive knowledge.
They try to remember too many things at once and start to forget the little stuff.
