Diver lost in Cozumel today

[DandyDon]

Yes i was there and in that time frame. Never made it to the wall but to 150 ft with three others . The current at that point was out and down. I have video and am trying to figure out if i have the sandollar group 3 in it. I was not from the sanddollar.

You can upload it to Vimeo.com and post it if you'd like. PM me the link and I'll give you the code...

 

[scurbyduck]

I am at work now and will try when i get home .

 

[WSOPFAN]

Another crazy story from the past few weeks on that wall........


Diving in Cozumel | Scuba Diving with Alex Oliver

Things to do when you find a bad current.

Posted on March 29, 2012
There are a couple of theories to explain the crazy currents that we have being facing in Cozumel for the last 2 weeks:
1.Global warming ( of course…in our days whatever we can’t explain must be the global warming fault ).
2. A domino effect from all those funky earthquakes around the earth.
3. The beginning of the end of the world according to the Maya prophecy.
4. Somebody pull the plug at the bottom of the Caribbean and we are just suffering a “toilet effect”:
Never mind… I do not really care about the why and how of those currents but I do care about the consequences, truth is that it’s not fun to dive in such strong and weird currents but we still go and do it.
It is also truth that there is no way to control the ocean and that many times, if not always, we have to just tag along and deal with whatever we find down there…of course, must of the times we only deal with nice, moderate and friendly currents that make it so easy to just go with the flow and enjoy the view of the reef…the kind of currents that you guys like so much.
But the currents that push divers off the reef, into the “blue” and transform diving into a real 60 minutes work out session…well… those ones are a different kind of bug.
Last week I had an excellent group of divers, high ranked training wise and with many years of experience, many years diving together and having all kind of dives with me ( not to mention countless incursions into the untamed depths of Cozumel´s night life as well ) and I feel so lucky to had such a great group of divers because I faced one of the must crazy dives of my life with them.
It was at Santa Rosa wall.. 4 divers and myself. I checked the current and it seemed to me that it was “death”…meaning.. no current at all, I gave the ok for the divers to get in the water and by the time they all were at the surface with me ( perhaps 1 minute ) I felt that we had move just a little tiny bit from the initial point…I looked down and checked that my reference point was still there…and surely there it was…I told my divers to go down not before giving them instructions about doing a little swim to get to the wall since we had move a little…well… 30 seconds later and 40 ft underwater we found ourselves in the $(&·$%() of nowhere and with no sight of the wall at all!!! I knew…they knew that the wall was RIGTH there underneath us just seconds ago..and now we have to kick and kick and kick some more just to realize that we were not going any closer to the wall…now.. here comes the real issue… 2 of my divers went deeper looking for some sort of “current protection” rather that stay at 50 ft with 2 more divers and I….now they are out of my sight within seconds…not because they were that far away but because we were now getting surrounded by particles in suspension… for a brief moment I believed that I was in fact swimming on the opposite direction, therefore I checked my compas..nope…rigth direction!! just not walk at all…ok…now we have 5 minutes trying to get to the wall and 2 things are for sure, one: I can´t see my divers and two: there is no way we will get to the wall….
Here is my question: what would you do in such situation?
keep swimming?? keep banging on your tank until your arm hurt without getting any signal back from the other 2 divers that went deeper? call 911 ? abort the dive?
hmmmm…I just decided that we had enough leg exercise for a day and call the dive to the end.


3 of us got to the surface in Fairy tale land: FAR, FAR AWAY… the boat came and get us and once on board we were waiting for the other 2 divers to surface any time soon…well..they didnt. Did you ever have had that feeling of “this is not happening to me” ?? I had that one a few times in my life before, like when the border patrol so kindly pointed their searchlights to the fence I was attempting to jump on the Tijuana border…but…thats another tale… any way…yes… I got that terrible feeling of knowing all the possible bad scenarios that could take place . I don’t really recall how many minutes passed by…but I will say no less that 15 by the time we finally spotted the bubbles of the 2 divers on their way up to the surface…by them we had all ready ask the help of another boat to look for bubbles. At the end of the day my divers were fine ( thanks to their level of training and experience )…it turned out that they did actually reached the wall and were waiting for us to show up there…waited and waited and couple of times the current changed directions on them…finally and after waiting for a period of calm, they decided that it was time to get to the surface…

 

[gdbkev]

Yes i was there and in that time frame. Never made it to the wall but to 150 ft with three others . The current at that point was out and down. I have video and am trying to figure out if i have the sandollar group 3 in it. I was not from the sanddollar.

I'm still hoping the videographer that was filming our group has some clues. That footage may now be tied up in court...

 

[gypsyjim]

Another crazy story from the past few weeks on that wall........


Diving in Cozumel | Scuba Diving with Alex Oliver

Thanks for sharing

 

[jd950]

As Jim suggests, even if you had 2 divers then and there, they might have different views.

I suppose that's right, Don. I guess my comment that only another diver at that same spot would know was just a way of saying that there was no good answer to the question of what the current was doing at a particular spot at 10:10 AM on that day. The closest one could come would be a diver in very close proximity.

On the day in question I got out of a downwelling by heading away from the reef, which is what I have understood to be the best choice. My son also got pushed down somewhere near me, although not as far, and he went toward the reef and we were both eventually able to ascend. He ended up back on the boat while, I ended up being the subject of a brief search by the boats in the area and found by another boat a fair distance from the reef and quite a bit north of the dive site. They didn't know which way I might have gone because of the shifting currents. If I was in the same situation tomorrow I would still swim away from the reef, unless something at the moment made me feel it was best to do otherwise.

I still feel bad that everyone on the boat was quite freaked-out because I had disappeared. By the way, those Gyre maps you linked to elsewhere were quite interesting.

 

[WSOPFAN]

I suppose that's right, Don. I guess my comment that only another diver at that same spot would know was just a way of saying that there was no good answer to the question of what the current was doing at a particular spot at 10:10 AM on that day. The closest one could come would be a diver in very close proximity.

On the day in question I got out of a downwelling by heading away from the reef, which is what I have understood to be the best choice. My son also got pushed down somewhere near me, although not as far, and he went toward the reef and we were both eventually able to ascend. He ended up back on the boat while, I ended up being the subject of a brief search by the boats in the area and found by another boat a fair distance from the reef and quite a bit north of the dive site. They didn't know which way I might have gone because of the shifting currents. If I was in the same situation tomorrow I would still swim away from the reef, unless something at the moment made me feel it was best to do otherwise.

I still feel bad that everyone on the boat was quite freaked-out because I had disappeared. By the way, those Gyre maps you linked to elsewhere were quite interesting.

In reading all of the information associated with this accident, and there is way more than normal thanks to other divers from that time frame, there is one thing that sticks out that is very disturbing. Why were boats constantly looking for divers? Apparently not one diver had a safety sausage..........either by personal choice or none were suggested by any dive shop. I read about many divers, DM'S, and Captain's who sure would have been relieved if they had seen some deployed rather than sit for 5-15 minutes wondering if anyone is going to surface.

 

[DandyDon]

I suppose that's right, Don. I guess my comment that only another diver at that same spot would know was just a way of saying that there was no good answer to the question of what the current was doing at a particular spot at 10:10 AM on that day. The closest one could come would be a diver in very close proximity.

On the day in question I got out of a downwelling by heading away from the reef, which is what I have understood to be the best choice. My son also got pushed down somewhere near me, although not as far, and he went toward the reef and we were both eventually able to ascend. He ended up back on the boat while, I ended up being the subject of a brief search by the boats in the area and found by another boat a fair distance from the reef and quite a bit north of the dive site. They didn't know which way I might have gone because of the shifting currents. If I was in the same situation tomorrow I would still swim away from the reef, unless something at the moment made me feel it was best to do otherwise.

I still feel bad that everyone on the boat was quite freaked-out because I had disappeared. By the way, those Gyre maps you linked to elsewhere were quite interesting.

I prefer swimming away from the reef to get out, but you must have hated losing contact with your son. Dang! Glad it worked out well. Do you carry an inline whistle? Those things can be heard a very long ways. I blew mine without ducking my head in the water once, wow - but I've been found by boats I couldn't see.

This snapshot shows the North Atlantic Gyre at a time in 2005. See how it takes a sharp turn before hitting Coz, creating circular eddies north and south of western Cuba among many others? I can imagine the normal path taking a further easterly approach creating a circular eddie back around Coz - conflicting with the usual current. It's a speculation, but possible...

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Have you seen this video...?

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[Mike]

I read about many divers, DM'S, and Captain's who sure would have been relieved if they had seen some deployed rather than sit for 5-15 minutes wondering if anyone is going to surface.

This was a little bit of current to deal with, not the devil reaching out and grabbing people by the leg and pulling them down 800 ft.

 

[DandyDon]

This was a little bit of current to deal with, not the devil reaching out and grabbing people by the leg and pulling them down 800 ft.

I think it did one, overweighted newie with weightbelt wrapped around her several times at least...