Hello. I am Tori Mudge, one of the divers that was rescued.
We anchored at the wreck at about 9AM. We then proceeded to put our gear on and head to the anchor line. As one of my dive buddies was swimming towards the front of our boat I was like thinking wow this current is really strong. I swam my hardest to get to the anchor line. It was extremely difficult. As we were heading down, I figured our anchor was on the wreck since it seemed we were traveling more parallel to the ocean floor, than heading down to it. My dad told us later that the anchor actually came up and moved while we were going down it. We swam around for a while, trying to find the wreck. It was no where in sight and then neither was our anchor line, so we decided to surface. We slowly ascended and then did the procedural safety stop. That was what made us miss the boat. My dad said he had this nagging feeling to skip the safety stop. We didn't need it because we weren't down there for that long, and we only went 60 feet. We surfaced only about 30 yards away from the boat. No matter how hard we swam we just couldn't reach it. My dad, a former marine, even took his gear off and just tried swimming with his fins to the boat as hard as he could, while the other divers and I held his gear and swam that way at a steady pace. He soon realized he didn't have much of a chance of getting to the boat, and we were just getting farther away, so he swam back to us. At that point we decided to try for land. My dad and the other divers all work on the Air Force base and were able to tell landmarks. We had our sights set on one of the towers and tried kicking towards it. But no matter how hard we tried to get to land, we just kept traveling parallel with it. Because my dad and the other two divers had gone through water survival training, I felt alittle more safe. Of course in that they had a life raft and flares. We only saw a few boats while we were out there, but none of them came close to us. We just kept kicking because we didn't want to lose sight of land. There was never actually a storm ontop of us, but that night it was lightning all around us and we could hear the rumbles of thunder. The cool thing about the water at night was there was this fluorescent algae or something in the water. When we kicked our fins the water would glow, and they were like little stars floating all around us. They stuck to the hairs on my arm and the threads of my tshirt. It was pretty awesome. Anyways, before we saw the helicopter, we were making our way towards one of the buoys that led out of the pass of Mexico Beach. Then we saw it in the distance. The spotlight of the helicopter. We shined our dive lights at it. My hands shake sometimes, and my dive light was strapped to my wrist. The coast guard said they thought it was a campfire on cape sandblast at first, but the light was moving too oddly and so they decided to check it out. The helicopter came over to us, and that was probably the happiest moment of my life. It was midnight when they picked us up. We were in the water for at least 14 hours, and we were found 9 to 10 miles away from our boat.
---------- Post added October 26th, 2013 at 09:34 AM ----------
Oh and the boat owner, my father, former U.S. Marine and Air Force, is not an irresponsible person. He's one of the bravest and most responsible man I've ever known.
---------- Post added October 26th, 2013 at 09:41 AM ----------
Not to mention he was a Leiutinant Colonel and he was very well respected.
