Lucky rescue

[seanik]

A couple of weeks ago some friends and I were drying off and stowing our gear on the boat after our last dive off the Key Biscayne wrecks. The one with the better ears heard a faint calling in the distance. Scanning the horizon we saw someone waving at us, in the water, about 200 yrds off our port stern and drifting north with the current.

With one person keeping an eye on the diver we quickly pulled the anchor and motored over to pick him up. Turned out there were two divers in the water, one wearing a full wetsuit, carrying a spear gun with a small snapper still attached to the spear, and floating with an inflated BC. The other diver was his teenage daughter, also wearing a wetsuit but no diving gear. Their boat was anchored maybe 1 mile South of where we found them. He was spearfishing under the boat but when he ran low on air decided to surface where he has rather than coming up the anchor line, which he said he couldn't find. He came up short of the floating current line and buoy and called out to the boat. His daughter was on the boat and when she saw that he was beyond the floating buoy she jumped in the water! I have no idea what she thought she was going to do so now there are two people drifting 3 miles off Key Biscayne, at 3:00PM with no whistle, sausage, or any other sort of signaling device.

WHen we pulled up to their boat a third person was on it, we thought the girl's boyfriend. He probably didn't know how to operate the boat because he was still anchored but he was able to reach someone by phone or radio because the Coast Guard, Marine Patrol and SeaTow all arrived as we did.

They got extremely lucky. Just an hour earlier there were plenty of boats around, dive boats on the wrecks, grunt boats on the shallow reefs and sportfishers with kites up in the middle of a sailfish tournament. We were one of the last boats left. ON the positive side, it reinforced our own procedures on how we dive in fast current where we are relying entirely on our own skill to get back to the boat safely. And if I ever thought that the safety sausage was just taking up space in my BC that is definitely not the case anymore.

 

[DandyDon]

I shudder when I think of all the divers that go to sea like this: "....with no whistle, sausage, or any other sort of signaling device. Glad you could save 'em; hope you chastised him well for not carrying signaling devices.

He left the two kids who didn't know how to operate a boat and dived alone. 1+1+1=3 :silly:

 

[BKP]

I shudder when I think of all the divers that go to sea like this: "....with no whistle, sausage, or any other sort of signaling device. Glad you could save 'em; hope you chastised him well for not carrying signaling devices.

He left the two kids who didn't know how to operate a boat and dived alone. 1+1+1=3 :silly:

Exactly my first thought:
Inadequately equipped solo diver in the water with two completely clueless/untrained individuals in the boat.

What a recipe...

 

[TSandM]

As the brand new owners of a boat, this is one of the things we've been talking about. It's easy to say, "Don't dive off an unattended boat," but harder to remember that a boat occupied by someone who doesn't know how to run it is, for all intents and purposes, unattended.

I almost never get in the water without an SMB and spool in my pocket, and when we have dives off charter boats, I often have a DiveAlert with me as well. It's a fairly easy circumstance to imagine, if you're diving off a small boat and have told the "crew" what your expected run time is, to surface early and find them reading or dozing or otherwise inattentive. An SMB is only useful if somebody is actually LOOKING for it, but the DiveAlerts would get someone's attention for some distance, at least in quiet seas.