Arete
Registered
Today I did a dive with the university club, and given the weather's warming up it was by far the busiest uni club dive I'd done.
Most of the people there were either just out of OW, or out of practice and I was the most up to date/experienced diver besides the instructor (with my huge 30 dives and AOW). As such I got buddied with a chinese exchange student who'd done his open water 5 months previous and not dove since.
We did an easy shore dive, max depth 12m (35ft). It all went fine until about 20 min in when I turned around and he was surfacing (bottom was about 15ft at this point). I followed him up and asked him what was wrong. He signalled ok and said "I'm fine". I said "Ok, well do you want to go back down?" He said "Yeah, ok"
I went to descend and he lunged over to me and tried to climb me, knocking off my mask and reg. I was shocked, so dropped under him and sorted out my stuff underwater ingesting and inhaling half the Pacific Ocean as I did so.
I surfaced again a couple of metres away from him and yelled at him to put his reg back in his mouth. He was trying to find his snorkel mouthpiece however he'd dropped his snorkel when he was panicking. He put his reg back in his mouth eventually and calmed down a lot. I swam round behind him (figured he'd be less likely to ty and climb me there) inflated his BC and towed him the 250m (ergh, tired) to the beach.
When we got back to the beach he said he was worried about getting low on air (he had 40 Bar left, I had 160 so I hadn't been super vigilant on his air yet). He also said he couldn't stop going up when he was near the surface (I checked and he had 33lbs :shock: and a 5mm one piece).
Apart from not suggesting we continue the dive, I think I did ok. I was a little annoyed that no one else in the party surfaced to help out, but in the end everything worked out ok.
I'm sure this sort of thing has happened to a lot of people out there. Has anyone got suggestions for spotting a distressed diver, even when they're telling you they're fine, or advice should this happen again (Uni club + summer = probably likely)?
Most of the people there were either just out of OW, or out of practice and I was the most up to date/experienced diver besides the instructor (with my huge 30 dives and AOW). As such I got buddied with a chinese exchange student who'd done his open water 5 months previous and not dove since.
We did an easy shore dive, max depth 12m (35ft). It all went fine until about 20 min in when I turned around and he was surfacing (bottom was about 15ft at this point). I followed him up and asked him what was wrong. He signalled ok and said "I'm fine". I said "Ok, well do you want to go back down?" He said "Yeah, ok"
I went to descend and he lunged over to me and tried to climb me, knocking off my mask and reg. I was shocked, so dropped under him and sorted out my stuff underwater ingesting and inhaling half the Pacific Ocean as I did so.
I surfaced again a couple of metres away from him and yelled at him to put his reg back in his mouth. He was trying to find his snorkel mouthpiece however he'd dropped his snorkel when he was panicking. He put his reg back in his mouth eventually and calmed down a lot. I swam round behind him (figured he'd be less likely to ty and climb me there) inflated his BC and towed him the 250m (ergh, tired) to the beach.
When we got back to the beach he said he was worried about getting low on air (he had 40 Bar left, I had 160 so I hadn't been super vigilant on his air yet). He also said he couldn't stop going up when he was near the surface (I checked and he had 33lbs :shock: and a 5mm one piece).
Apart from not suggesting we continue the dive, I think I did ok. I was a little annoyed that no one else in the party surfaced to help out, but in the end everything worked out ok.
I'm sure this sort of thing has happened to a lot of people out there. Has anyone got suggestions for spotting a distressed diver, even when they're telling you they're fine, or advice should this happen again (Uni club + summer = probably likely)?
