Sometimes dives don't go as planned, or as briefed. Sometimes you have to decide how to cope with the problems you find.
I can remember doing a dive off the Peace boat in Southern California several years ago. We had a boat full of experienced and very strong divers, and the crew knew us all from prior trips. As a result, they felt comfortable putting us in the water in conditions where they would not drop most divers (which is how I got to dive Farnsworth, when two other boats dropped a DM and then pulled out). In this particular case, we were warned that there was going to be current, and I have subsequently learned the site is known for it. We were okay with some current, but not with what we found as we went down. Unaccustomed to doing descents hand-over-hand, we didn't plan one, and we were able to stay on the downline about 3/4 of the way to the bottom, until we had to detour around a thick clump of kelp that the anchor had gone through. On the other side of the kelp, we couldn't find the anchor line any more, which is not good when you are expected to return and ascend on it. Further, the deeper we went, the worse the current got -- it had been mild at the surface, but became more than we could handle as we got closer to the structure, and this was a deeper dive with the reef at about 90 feet. Ten minutes into this, Peter thumbed the dive, which was fine with me; of course, at this point, we had NO idea where the anchor was, so we shot a bag and did our ascent drifting. By the time we made the surface, we were probably a quarter mile from the boat, in significant chop. There we hit our one piece of luck -- the wind-driven surface current was taking us back TOWARD the boat. The superb Peace crew had quickly realized that none of the scooterless teams were going to complete their dives, and had the pickup boat out retrieving divers.
You could say we shouldn't have gotten in, but "expect some current" is not a quantitative evaluation. You could say we should have aborted when we lost the down line -- but we were pretty sure we knew which side of it we were on, and therefore there was some expectation that we could refind it, if we'd been able to dive at all.
It's not clear to me from Megan's story, whether the magnitude of the current was really clear before she got in the water. And I don't blame her for going down to 65 -- sometimes surface currents abate as you go deeper. The decision to abort when things got just plain uncomfortable was smart. And then we get to the "okay" signal given to the other divers, and this, to me, is a central part of the story.
What IS "okay"? Does it mean, "Hunky-dory, having a great time, no worries mate?" Does it mean, "Not experiencing any major malfunction that I can't handle, thank you"? Does it mean, "I've got an issue, but I'm dealing with it"? I can confess to having used the okay signal in all three situations -- more when I was a new diver than now, but it's awfully easy to define "not okay" as, "I'm in trouble," and not use it until things are dire. "Not okay" just means what it says -- "I'm not totally fine at the moment." If you think about the hand-rocking signal that is "not okay", it's a gesture I'd use on land to mean something along the lines of "maybe, maybe not" -- but not a signal that means disaster.
IF you tell other divers you are okay, they are likely to assume you are. Now, a diver who had planned a 115 foot dive to video, who is now ascending the line at 60 feet, is by definition not okay in some respect. For some reason, they have decided to abort the dive. If I were Megan's husband, I'd be curious as to what that reason might be -- flooded camera? Ears not cooperating? Equipment malfunction? I'd want to know, because the likelihood that she might need assistance later in the ascent would be based on the reason for ending the dive. I don't think I would have taken an "okay" as an adequate answer, because it doesn't make SENSE.
For less experienced divers reading the story, I think one of the takeaways here is that it is always better to tell your companions that you're not quite right, and then reassure them when the problem is solved, than it is to say, "I'm okay, I'm dealing with it," and then turn out to need assistance that is no longer available, because the other divers took your signal at face value.
BTW, even as a strongly committed team diver, I HAVE done dives as video support without a specific buddy -- but mine were in calm water no deeper than 30 feet. I'm with Daniel (OMG, Daniel Aleman and I AGREE about something!) that there were some issues with the original dive plan. But one of the biggest issues was the communication.
BTW, Megan, I empathize -- upper body strength is lower in women in general, and I've had a few pretty stressful experiences with tag lines in significant current. Always makes me want to go home and do a bunch of chin-ups (and I never do!).
