It was a good learning lesson.. now when the general public can access the park. that all goes into the vehicle.
I had a very similar experience at Ginnie Springs. I was there the day before my full cave class started, just getting in the water at the Ballroom to make sure all of my equipment worked. I had two dive bags: one with all my mechanical scuba equipment, and one with all of my exposure equipment.
It was Christmas Eve, and the park was virtually empty: there was exactly one other group at the ballroom except for me. They were non-divers, they were there before I got there, and they packed up while I was there. It was a fairly big group: it looked like two families.
It was about 10 or so minutes after they left that I went to go get some thing out of my exposure bag: and it wasn’t there. Uh oh. I was pretty sure the people that left took it. There was no other place it could be.
This was like worst case scenario. If they had taken all of my scuba gear, I could replace that pretty straightforwardly: for the most part, a regulator is a regulator. But all my exposure gear? I’m not freakishly shaped, but not exactly standard, and finding stuff that fits properly is not as easy as swapping out regs. Of course, my other thought was: who wants a bag of used neoprene, and very unlikely to fit anyone?
So I started calling around trying to see if I could get some replacements. Did I mention it was Christmas Eve? And like 5 PM? I spent like 20 minutes trying to work this out when a car drove up and a head popped out and asked, “Are you missing a bag?”
Turns out someone grabbed my bag thinking it was theirs and put it in the car. After driving about 15 minutes, somebody mentioned the extra bag that they picked up. They realized it wasn’t theirs, and was probably that diver guy that was next to them. So they drove back, and I was still there, so I got my bag back!
I’m just glad I had been nice to them earlier and answered all their questions about what I was doing!
A lot of people talk about how things get stolen at Ginnie all the time. I haven’t dove there a ton, but I haven’t really seen any reason to think that that is especially true. But the more people that are around, the more likely that perfectly honest accidents can happen: someone accidentally taking a bag, or somebody accidentally knocking something off a bench and you missing it, or whatever.
So I agree with you: where the public has easy access to my dive gear, access to that dive gear must be controlled!