leah:
Great for you that you survived! I am glad that you did and lived to tell about it. Not all who face disaster at sea live to tell about it. Most don't. I think you are very lucky to be alive since you left the group and went it all alone. You didn't know "ALL" things before this dive or you would not have gone on it. At least I don't think you would. You certainly did not know you would meet with disaster or you would have stayed home that day or gone diving somewhere else.
However, I fail to see how your answers could help someone who might face the same. Winds, currents and the weather can all change without notice. Even the best forecasts are wrong and freak things can and do happen. If you knew EVERYTHING before hand, the disaster would not happen since you would know all, and be able to avoid it. You best plan is to know all you can to stay out of trouble in the first place. If that fails and you find yourself in trouble then you need a good back up plan.
Indeed, you are quite right about not going, if one knows all of the details.
I guess I was not suggesting that one "know all", just know and plan for the general specifics of the area.
I know for a fact that the guys that were in the boat that got hit by lightning, knew we had to come back by that area.. and so they waited and spread out fairly far apart so they could get our attention when we came back. They spent around 8 hours in the water, but were fine. If they don't signal us, then it would have been really ugly, for them.
I would guess it is possible that a specific situation has 10 different choices that would all work equally well, just have not seen it in real life.
What I would suggest, is that the details of the situation dictate the correct action. As you have pointed out, one cannot plan on everything.
In my actual case, I was the only one capable of making the swim..and there would be no coast guard, no search that would have saved us. (I had just finished para-diver training (the army's equivalent of seal training) and knew I could swim 3 miles). Had that been today, I would never have attempted it.
And the 20+ miles to the island - well it was down current and the current was more than 2 knots. They just had to angle a bit to hit it (still a long swim, but not more than 1/2 mile). Had the current been the other direction, we would have eventually drifted into the entrance of the Panama Canal, with lots of ships.
In any situation, there is what you know and what you don't know. What you expect and what you did not expect. The more one knows, the better the chance is that one will select the right choice. One hopes that the choices don't come down to only being one right section, and not choosing it means dying.
If you are diving with people all dressed in black, and you don't have safety gear or lights, then one should not expect anyone to see them at night. That has to be part of the "information" one is using to make a decision.
I happen to agree with you regarding having a plan... but it cannot be a plan (as you so accurately pointed out) that assumes what the event is before hand. Boy, that is difficult to express. Let me try to say it a different way:
You can consider the possiblities, and have what you believe are the tools and knowledge needed for an emergency, but you cannot actually plan for it (I believe your comment about not going on the dive, if you knew it was going to go bad is correct).
So you are left, having to improvise what to do, with the specific details. Hopefully, you or someone else, brought stuff with you that happens to give you more options.
If you ever get into a situation, where you have to actually survive, the more options and the more time you have, the better off you are.
Hope I said that correctly.
JK. Seriously, I never thought to carry water or flares or a streamer.
