Funny Navagation Errors....

[SteveDiver]

Navigation skills are important. The funniest incident that I have ever seen was a couple(husband and wife) surface swimming to each bouy to determine if they wanted to go down to see the object that the bouy was marking....It was funny.. they would go down observe the sunken object then come back up and say hey do you want to (surface) swim to that bouy and see whats down there?....I observed them doing this about 4 times... they were in 25' of water max....What navigation errors have you observed?

 

[Tom Smedley]

My friend and I were doing our Advanced Open Water checkout off the beach at Grande Island in Subic Bay Philippines. We were supposed to do a large triangle with left turns. The instructor, Ev Anderson, was waiting for us on the swim platform.

We got really disoriented and had no idea which direction to go. We were about to give up and surface when a snorkeler came along. We quickly got his attention and wrote on our slates "Which way to the swim platform?" He pointed and away we went.

Old Ev was really surprised when we surfaced right on the mark.

 

[Mo2vation]

Navigation skills are important.... What navigation errors have you observed?

Arnaud and I were diving off of Eagle Reef (or mabye Isthmus Reef) at Catalina last year. We're diving HP130's, and are the last ones in - so do the math... we're definately going to be the last ones back.

Last dive of the day, its in the afternoon, current's picking up.

My nav skills aren't too bad. Arnaud's are actually quite excellent. He's leading this dive, I'm taking photos. We make the turn, we're coming back, and we're kicking, and kicking, and kicking.... I'm all where the heck are we going?

I use less gas than he does, and by now we're at about 22 feet or so. So I tell him I'm gonna do a pop up and look-see, and ask him to hang out. I'm on my way up, and I hear a weird noise - like a motor boat. I'm all, "great - I'm ascending into boat traffic...."

I carefully pop up, and see the motor noise is the inflatable chase boat from the dive boat coming out to look for us. And off in the distance, way off is the big dive boat, looking very small. :11:

I pop back down a few feet so Arnaud can see me, and signal him that the boat is a zillion feet away(signal: boat + FAR) and tell him to surface (signal: thumb dive + its all good) so we can get a tow from the chase boat... (the Kelp Salad is a story for another time...)

So we're talking to the deckhand in the chase boat on the way back (more like yelling over the little motor.) Apparently, the dive boat slipped anchor. Really slipped anchor. In fact, where we popped up is just about precisely where it WAS when we went in, and where is SHOULD have been when we came back. Arnaud's nav skills were right on.

No fair moving the dive boat when we're under water.

We still laugh about this one.

---
Ken

 

[diver_paula]

No fair moving the dive boat when we're under water.

Similiar story for me. My buddy and I were diving on an upside down drege barge off Milwaukee. We were quite intrigued with the wreck as there is a similar right side up dredge we had dove many times at a deeper depth. This gave us a much better chance to penetrate and to check some of the mechanisms out.

So there we are, nearing the end of our dive. No one else is around - not sure if our air consumption or tolerance to cold temps was the reason. & there's no mooring line!!!! We were both perplexed given the wreck hadn't moved. Neither of us was narced given the depth and what were the chances of us both being narced at the same time?.

So we start searching for the mooring line. Eventually one of the crew comes finds us. He had been flying around on a scooter earlier but had disappeared into the blue for a bit. He led us to where he moved the mooring line to.

Now wouldn't that have been a good thing for the captain to include in the dive briefing? I think so!

Paula

 

[kidspot]

I have a good friend who went night diving with a group (freediving) to spear fish. During the dive (everyone was solo) the boat crew decided to save electricity and turned off the lights ... he surfaced and swam toward the nearest light (assuming it to be the boat) winding up on a small island till morning ... he followed a lighthouse. He found his friends the next day and they didn't think anything of it... he never went diving with them again

Aloha, Tim

 

[diver_paula]

I have a good friend who went night diving with a group (freediving) to spear fish. During the dive (everyone was solo) the boat crew decided to save electricity and turned off the lights ... he surfaced and swam toward the nearest light (assuming it to be the boat) winding up on a small island till morning ... he followed a lighthouse. He found his friends the next day and they didn't think anything of it... he never went diving with them again

Aloha, Tim

Whoa! That is not funny - just plain WRONG! I wonder why your friend never dove with that group again?!?

 

[Charlie99]

Around my 15th dive, me and an even more inexperienced buddy went tooling around the shallow reefs of Key Largo. Navigating was a new fangled trick that I was still working on. I recognized a certain reef outcropping and knew exactly where the boat should be, but after swimming for a while and not seeing it, I thought that we had probably swum by it. So I had my buddy stay on the bottom while I slowly surfaced and took a bearing on the boat. About 150' away, but exact opposite of the direction we had been swimming. Strange, but OK, got it now. Went back to 25-30' bottom, indicated the direction to my buddy.

Swam for a couple minutes without finding the boat. OK. This is getting to be a bother. Again, I motioned for my buddy to stay, surfaced slowly and took a bearing on the boat. Once again, it's exactly opposite of the direction we were heading, but this time about 100' away.

My buddy looks at me like I'm crazy when I signal that we will retrace our path back the other way again yet again.

This time I look at my watch, and know that we should see it in exactly 1 minute. (I had done AOW the week before and knew my normal speed was 1kt or 100' per minute). After one minute of swimming along on the 25' bottom and not seeing the boat, I just said to myself "I give up, we are going to just swim over on the surface" (actually, that's the cleaned up version).

I signal "UP" to my buddy. He looks up and around and gives me the "huh?" sign. "UP" I reply.

At about 15' depth we see the boat directly above us!

Morals --- don't swim around at 30' when the viz is 15'; learn to recognize the dark shadow of a boat even when you can't actually see the boat.

Yet another moral is that it's more reliable to aim for the anchor or mooring pin rather than the boat, but that's another story

 

[kidspot]

Whoa! That is not funny - just plain WRONG! I wonder why your friend never dove with that group again?!?

Agreed - he actually ended up swimming close to 2 miles to get to that island, at the time he was living in Micronesia ... turns out it was common practice at the time (still wrong, but common)

Tim

P.S. I didn't actually mean to imply this was "funny" it just seemed very fitting

 

[mstudley]

This is embarassing but....

RIOceanographer and I were doing a dive at Folly Cove and I was to be the one to navigate. I use a wrist mounted Suunto sk5 compass and sometimes the needle will stick if I don't orient the compass properly when taking a reading. This is fairly easy to notice and correct, but not that day.

We swam out until we were in line with the gazebo up on the rocks and descended with the intention of heading over to the left wall and following it out. Well... after descending I took my compass heading and just started swimming. After about 5 minutes we still couldn't find the wall. We decided to surface and where did we end up? Exactly where we started! We swam in a complete (near perfect) circle.... Had I bothered to pay attention to the bottom I would have noticed that the lines in the sand weren't quite right for the direction I intended to go in... oh well, I pay a lot more attention to my compass now