Interesting dive off Palm beach yesterday

[tekkydiver]

A floatball has the DD flag at the top.

Not necessarily. They can be used to attach to anchor line when we have to ditch the anchor and chase down a fish.

 

[Pavao]

. He noticed this fisherman in the area and (apparently there was enough communication established, since he speaks some Spanish) to request that the fisherman, go over, grab the float and then pull me in so I would not be lost.

In my eyes, this was one of the biggest errors in this whole thing, the lessons learned is in this bit here, turning off engines while you have divers in the water doing a drift dive is pretty dumb, but the whole scenario was made worse by requesting the fisherman pulled you up.

I can say that, had I allowed the fisherman to pull me up, I’d be screaming hell into the mofo who would do that to me, I’d be extremely pissed off if my own boat did that, I’d only be getting angrier as I make out the single engine and realize it wasn’t even my boat.

The likely scenario for me is that I believe I’d detach myself from the line, as I have done, then deploy my SMB, if somehow that too gets pulled up I’d now either not have any more SMBs to deploy, or chose not to deploy it and wait till I’m on the surface, with each delay and separation from a surface marker increasing my lost status.

Asking for a boat in the vicinity to aid in the situation was a very prudent decision, I just think that requesting the fisherman go pull up the line wasn’t the best choice in the request of how to help.
There are a number of ways to signal your attention, revving the engine is a pretty distinctive and loud sound, a few yanks on the line would call your attention too, just to name two examples. And in both of those, you’d have no reason to believe they weren’t coming from your own boat.

I’m glad it all worked out.