Blow out air to avoid an embolism.what is blow and go?
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Blow out air to avoid an embolism.what is blow and go?
awesome pics as usual Phil.The African Queen can be a nice dive but that sounds like a day to abort early. I've found that when the vis is bad at the beginning of the dive it rarely improves. Sometimes it's better to dive another day.
Here's the African Queen on a good day.
My worst current story.
So I'm on the Peace dive boat out at the Channel Islands a few years back with my buddy Jon and on this particular dive the captain decides to pick a spot very close to a known potato patch that is between Santa Rosa Island and Santa Cruz Island. The area I found out later was known for ripping currents. Some boat captains like to try and catch these spots on a slack tide because the diving can be really great.
So the boat anchors and the gates are open. We notice there is a slight current running by the way the kelp was all pointed in one direction so we decided to go up current then back with it to the boat. Every thing went as planned, but as we were diving we noticed the current had picked up considerably and when we looked up the giant kelp was almost laying down sideways. We were in 70 feet of water the entire dive, and the kelp was very long at this spot, probably over 80 or 90 feet maybe more. We drifted back to where we though we should about be and hung on to kelp as we went up. At my 15 foot stop I remember having my wing fully inflated just to maintain a steady depth and hanging onto a kelp stalk for dear life just flapping in the wind like a flag.
When we came up we were aimed perfectly in front of the boat and it looked like we could just drift right into it. So the boat got closer and closer and I though I was home free getting a river rapid ride when as soon as I got about 20 feet away from the boat it swung away and I wizzed right past it. They had a current line out and I fought like hell to get to it. I finally got to it about two feet from the end and it was a three hundred foot line! My buddy actually got to it about half way up but the rope wrapped around his tank valve and pulled him under while he was trying to undo it. But he managed to pull himself hand over hand and get to the swim platform.
Me, I started pulling hand over hand and after a while my grip started to fail. I even lost the rope for a second and lost about 30 feet of hard earned headway. I grabbed the rope again and kept trying, giving it all I had. I got maybe not even a quarter the way to the boat and my grip completely failed, shot, gone, couldn't even work my hands anymore. I lost the rope and was on my way to Hawaii. The boat started to get further and further away quickly and I was waving so they could see me. They fired up the chase boat and came and got me.
When I got back on board the captain apologized to everyone for putting us in such a current. Apparently I wasn't the only one who needed to get chased down, but since I was the last one to get back on the boat I didn't see that part.
That would be one piece of advice I could give anyone thinking of diving the Channel Islands, make sure they have a chase boat.