If you’re like most divers, you have felt a certain sense of annoyance when it’s time to start your ascent. After all, there are more fish to see, or you’re not quite finished photographing the wreck you’ve been dreaming of diving for years. An interesting phenomenon that’s happening at the site of the HMAS Adelaide serves as a reminder that we need to pay close attention to our dive computers, no matter how fantastic a certain site is.
HMAS Adelaide and Decompression Sickness
There’s no doubt about it – HMAS Adelaide was (and still is) a great ship. Built in 1977 and launched in 1978, she was a guided missile frigate based on the US Navy’s Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate design. Armed with a Mark 13 missile launcher on her foredeck, a triple-barreled Mark-32 torpedo tube set on either side of her superstructures, a 76-millimeter Mark 75 OTO Melara gun atop her superstructure, and several other guns, she was a force to be reckoned with. The Adelaide is 138 meters long and has a 14.3 meter beam, and she lies at a depth of 100 feet beneath the surface, just off Avoca Beach in New South Wales.
The ship was carefully prepared prior to her 2011 deployment as an artificial reef, with diver access holes being placed around the wreck for easy access to such features as the captain’s chair and helicopter hangers, the crew’s cafeteria and berthing compartments, the operations room, still stockpiled with shells for the weapons on board, and much more. Besides the many fantastic features the wreck has to offer, it is already attracting an abundance of coral and sponge growth, and it serves as shelter for blue gropers, octopus, lots of batfish and blennies, and even giant eastern cuttlefish, to name just a few.
Approximately 18,000 onlookers attended the Adelaide’s scuttling, and divers from all over the world are visiting the site in droves. Unfortunately, many divers are experiencing decompression sickness after exploring the wreck. In part, this is due to the fact that Adelaide’s depth is just at the limits for recreational diving, and some divers are pushing those limits. Hyperbaric specialists at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital’s hyperbaric medicine unit reported 27 cases of DCS in HMAS Adelaide divers in August of 2012, compared with a total of 19 cases in divers who had various dive sites in the entire year of 2011.
According to Dr. Glen Hawkins of the University of New South Wales, who also serves as the medical director of a private company called Hyperbaric Health, there are several factors contributing to the number of DCS cases being seen, and to the DCS cases themselves. Among them are diver inexperience, lack of appropriate surface intervals between dives, and divers exceeding bottom time and/or depth recommendations.
Whether you’re diving the HMAS Adelaide or visiting other dive sites, it is vital that you pay close attention to all factors affecting your dive. You can seek additional training and become qualified to dive on mixed gases, for example; in addition, you can help keep yourself healthy by never overstepping the bounds of your training and experience, by taking appropriate surface intervals, and by ensuring you make safety stops as recommended in your dive profiles. Last but not least, enjoy your dives – but keep a close eye on your dive computer and save yourself the pain of decompression sickness. If you suspect you are experiencing DCS symptoms, get yourself to treatment as soon as possible.