She was more of the “vintage” type...a Tang class sub.

I was wearing an oxygen breathing apparatus (OBA) during an emergency, and my tender didn’t pull me out in time. I was found face down, barely breathing. The transition from being conscious to unconscious was beyond my control. I remember confusion setting in, almost like I had slipped into a dream, my vision went all…

Sorry,Twitdust, thought I was responding to someone else...

Exactly. And the depth drives the urgency. The basics are(were) like this: Escapees enter the escape trunk, the trunk is flooded up to about chin level, the trunk is pressurized with enough air pressure to overcome outside sea pressure, the escapees take a deep breath, the hatch is opened, and the escapee “does the…

Yeah, everyone needs to know their depth where narcosis sets in, or you have potential for disaster. Imagine two divers who hit narcosis at same depth. My depth is 85 ft, (give or take). During Navy qual dive, instructors were stationed incrementally down the line to watch for people going into narcosis, and guiding…

Let me clarify...practice in a tower under very controlled environment. First opportunity to use the tower was submarine escape training, next opportunity was dive training.

Yep, that’s it exactly. I was trying to convey to Redford why you couldn’t leave the submarine with lungs at atmospheric pressure. The escape trunk gets flooded, then pressurized (which means now your lungs are above atmospheric pressure), and then the hatch can be opened. Have practiced it several times, coming up…

There’s more air than most people understand. When the air gets thin, you can meter air in from the high pressure air tanks, the ones used to push water out of the ballast tanks. The risk there is that you don’t have air to surface the boat if you need to. Been there, practiced it for days on end...no moving, no…

Not exactly...in order to exit the submarine, you have to pressurize the escape hatch to overcome pressure at depth. That means your lungs would be carrying equivalent pressure, and you would have to exhale on the ascent, or you would suffer an embolism. At some point, you couldn’t hold the air in anyway.

Yeah, old diesel boat sailor here. To the untrained eye, a snorkel tube could be mistaken for a periscope...most people only think of periscopes rising from the sail. Lots of hardware in there. Discomfort, that’s funny. I recall feeling as though an ice pick had been thrust into my ear drum, when the snorkel valve…

I’ve experienced diesels running with boat submerged...it’s surprising someone didn’t shut them down manually. They would have had time. The first thing that happens from the huge vacuum caused by the diesels sucking the air from the boat is an intense pain in the eardrums, and even that takes a while. The snorkel…