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My first dive at Barracuda was an absolute E-Ticket thrill ride!
I was on a boat with a bunch of experienced recreational divers and an awesome DM who held a very detailed pre-dive briefing. He laid down a few non-negotiable rules.
1. No camera gear
2. Must have DSMB (and know how to deploy it)
3. Descend as a group. No exceptions. It was all of us successfully descending together or call the dive.
4. Do not pass him in the group lead. He will call the dive if we shotgun by him in the lead.
5. We ascend together. No exceptions, regardless of how much gas you have. We will all start to ascend together as a group with the 1st person at 1k psi.

As soon as we all successfully descended to 90 ft , the extremely strong current took over and off we went! I never felt like I was in any danger though, and we all (8 of us) did a great job staying together. We hit a westerly outdraft at one of the small valleys along the wall and my dive-buddy son got caught in it. He did not panic and he was able to slowly get out of it by continuing to fin north. He was not hugging the wall like I was, and that is why the outdraft got him.

It was about a 50 min dive, with a max depth of 93 ft and avg depth of 61 ft. I had about 1200 psi of air when the DM signaled to surface as a group.

We did Punta Sur the day before and I think Barracuda is a more challenging dive site.
On the second experience I described earlier, we all ascended together and got on the boat with typical post dive discussions as gear was swapped out, etc. It was as if we had just finished a nice drift over Paradise Reef. After a while, I said, "Excuse me. Was I the only one working his ass off down there?" There as an immediate burst of laughter, followed by a somewhat raucous discussion of what a ride we had just experienced.
 
One possible reason why dive shops need to screen divers before taking them to some dive sites, next stop Cuba...... This could have been a fisherman too but just saying separation of a group up north can lead to a very bad day.

STAFF OF MEXICO'S MARINA-ARMED SECRETARY RESCUED A PERSON IN THE SEA OF COZUMEL.
According to the institution's bulletin as Maritime Coast Guard Authority, he reported that the missing person was located at a distance of 4.5 nautical miles equivalent to around 8 km northeast of Cozumel.
The Naval Search, Rescue and Maritime Surveillance Station (ENSAR) received a call for help from crew members of the identified ship ′′ El Barto ", reporting that a diver had dipped in the vicinity of Playa Barracuda and had not departed to the Surface.
At the same time, the air search was conducted with the support of an MI-17 helicopter carrying out aerial surveillance, locating the person who was put to safety by personnel of an Island Naval Sector Interceptor Patrol.
The diver from whom the name was omitted exhibited moderate dehydration and hypothermia, which is why he was immediately moved to Naval command and hence to Cozumel General Hospital to be treated.
With these actions, the Mexican Marine-Armada Secretariat, as the National Maritime Authority, acting as the Coast Guard, endorses its commitment to citizenship to turn in a timely manner to emergency calls with the main objective of safeguarding human life in the sea.
 
I taught a PADI Deep Diver specialty once as a shore dive at Buddy Dive, in Bonaire, to three students. For the 130 ft (3rd) dive the plan was to go to just above 130 ft right in front of the resort (easy to do) and hold depth there while we were doing the mandatory skills (this is the "narcosis test" that used to be in Dive One of the specialty). Part of the briefing was the idea that you didn't go deep just to go deep, you went deep for a purpose, for some mission, something to see for example. Our mission was to look out over the sand plain in front of Buddy Dive and estimate how many garden eels we could see. We did the rest of the briefing, about gas management, and simulated emergency decompression from a cylinder left at 20 ft, etc., and off we went. All seemed to go well. After we surfaced, we were debriefing and I asked how many garden eels they had seen. One of the guys said he'd just started counting until I'd called time and he'd gotten to 60 and then got bored. The lady said she'd estimated a little square on the bottom and counted 12 eels in it, and then estimated she could see at least 10 such squares, so she figured there were at least 120 garden eels. The third student listened to this, looked at me, and said, "Garden eels? I don't remember any garden eels." Yeah, he was narced.
 
Garden eels.

That sounds so much nicer than being asked to count toilets at the bottom of Hudson Grotto.
 

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