Near Miss on the Marissa Dive Boat (5/15/11) - San Diego

[HiQPen]

While this sounds like an unfortunate incident, I have always had good experiences with the Marissa, Lora and Brandon and would not hesitate to dive with them again.

It is unfortunate that you waited so long to post this, because that undermines your contention that this is just a safety issue for you guys, but rather smacks of an attempt to smear the name of the boat as retribution for not getting what you want.

 

[xstephenx]

While this sounds like an unfortunate incident, I have always had good experiences with the Marissa, Lora and Brandon and would not hesitate to dive with them again.

It is unfortunate that you waited so long to post this, because that undermines your contention that this is just a safety issue for you guys, but rather smacks of an attempt to smear the name of the boat as retribution for not getting what you want.

Oh, don't assume there is not some intent on, not smearing, but shedding light on their practices. Like Nicole said, we originally asked for no refund, no credit, no nothing. We just asked that Lora accept the fact that they screwed up and that they will learn from it. Is it such a bad thing to expect that someone learn from their mistakes? If someone is not going to learn from their mistakes would you still want to associate with them?

 

[on_two_wheels]

In the name of fairness, I'll flip to the other side for a moment. Personally, 27 min isn't THAT long. I know it will seem long in a swell but if I have to wait that long but can see the boat didn't actually leave, I'm not stressing about it. Yeah, I might want the day comp'd but not be over the top angry. Furthermore, both parties could have done better. They could have addressed it before departed the vessel. The capt could have made amends without apologizing (to preserve defense in court if needed). A simple, "sorry it took so long to return. The day is free for ya" would've worked.

In the end, they DID return safely. So to make suggestions to a boat captain without actually being a captain could be offensive. I used this example with a buddy: You've been driving for 30 years. You have a fender bender with a 17 year old kid. This kid with 1 year of driving experience proceeds telling you how to drive a car. Pretty sure you wouldn't take any of those suggestions to heart.

The divers could have handled it better once picked up. The boat probably could have picked them up 10-15 min sooner. Is this a reason to boycott the dive operator? Absolutely not, in my opinion. Is the response by so_cal_diver a reason to? Hmmmm.....maybe.

As someone said, the delay DOES suggest that it was less about the safety concern and more about not getting compensated the way they wanted.

 

[Rainer]

27 minutes might not seem like a long time if you're sitting pretty on a boat (or at your keyboard), but I can only imagine the frustration of sitting in 6' seas watching your dive boat just drift away for nearly 30 minutes, the whole time you're waving your SMB fruitlessly. The Marissa crew simply didn't have a lookout or anyone monitoring the position of their boat. That's a pretty big safety issue for me.

The main point, though, for me is that this *could* have turned out A LOT worse. What if the two divers had been blown off the wreck? How would the boat have found them? What if the divers had a medical issue at the surface? Sitting in rough seas without knowing the boat will actually return is bad enough, but the possibility of what could happen when you ignore your duty to attend to surface conditions is the real kicker. The crew dropped the ball big time. Honestly, it was the divers' experience (staying on the wreck, not panicking, using an SMB, etc) that made the difference in this turning out as well as it did.

The two divers then simply pointed these issues out to the captain and asked that future precautions be taken (e.g. always post a lookout, use a drift alarm on the GPS, etc). A simple apology and corrections probably would have seen this to bed. Offering a refund for the day's diving would have been the right thing to do as well. Once NONE of these steps were taken, I know *I* too would be asking to be allowed to sell my remaining gift certificates, since I'd have no interest in ever going out again with that charter. That communication took so long is also very off-putting.

Seriously, there are so many better operators in SD, it's just no big deal to choose any of the other boats over the Marissa.

In the name of fairness, I'll flip to the other side for a moment. Personally, 27 min isn't THAT long. I know it will seem long in a swell but if I have to wait that long but can see the boat didn't actually leave, I'm not stressing about it. Yeah, I might want the day comp'd but not be over the top angry. Furthermore, both parties could have done better. They could have addressed it before departed the vessel. The capt could have made amends without apologizing (to preserve defense in court if needed). A simple, "sorry it took so long to return. The day is free for ya" would've worked.

In the end, they DID return safely. So to make suggestions to a boat captain without actually being a captain could be offensive. I used this example with a buddy: You've been driving for 30 years. You have a fender bender with a 17 year old kid. This kid with 1 year of driving experience proceeds telling you how to drive a car. Pretty sure you wouldn't take any of those suggestions to heart.

The divers could have handled it better once picked up. The boat probably could have picked them up 10-15 min sooner. Is this a reason to boycott the dive operator? Absolutely not, in my opinion. Is the response by so_cal_diver a reason to? Hmmmm.....maybe.

As someone said, the delay DOES suggest that it was less about the safety concern and more about not getting compensated the way they wanted.

 

[ligersandtions]

Just so we're all clear here....

It's not so much that we were left out in the ocean for 27 minutes that frustrates me (don't get me wrong, that was a very frustrating experience, but I've cooled down about it by now), but the fact that the owner/crew seems to think this was acceptable and doesn't think that beefing up on safety procedures is worthwhile.

As Rainer stated above, what if we'd had a medical issue? Hell, what if one of us had flooded our drysuit? The water temp was in the low 50's....that's uncomfortable if you're kinda wet, but if you were completely flooded for 27+ minutes (after having done an NDL dive), that might well be bordering on dangerous. What if we'd been blown off the wreck on our ascent? I doubt they'd have noticed it and I'm curious how long it would be before the Coast Guard was called...


But despite all of that, if the crew had said anything resmbling, "The mooring line broke and we didn't realize it. Once we realized it, we picked you up as quickly as possible....we're sorry about the incident and here's what we're going to do to ensure something like this [this = not realizing the fact that the mooring line broke] does not happen again", I would have been willing to give them another chance. But all I got were defensive excuses about the whole situation.

If one is not willing to take an incident like this as a learning opportunity (I know we learned something out of it!), it's not someone I can put my full confidence in. And when it comes to diving, the crew is a big part of the team (this gets especially essential when it comes to bigger dives that we're not doing at this moment).

 

[Blackwood]

In the name of fairness, I'll flip to the other side for a moment. Personally, 27 min isn't THAT long.

To me it's not that they left them bobbing for 27 minutes, it's that they didn't realize they'd drifted away from divers.

If they were picking up a group and knew that S+N were planted on the buoy, great. But it appears that the crew didn't even know that the boat wasn't on the wreck (as evidenced by their complaining about S+N's overly long dive, which was in fact a short NDL dive plus a half hour bobbing).

Is it possible that Nicole and Stephen, people who have an entire room in their home dedicated to battery charging, are making up this story to belatedly extort a few hundred dollars from a dive op? I guess. It's also possible the sun may not rise tomorrow. It's even possible a certain participant in this thread may some day post something resembling a rational thought. But I'm not laying money on those either.

 

[jorge]

Thank you very much for posting this experience, at least i, will stay away from that boat.

 

[Doug Charney]

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle of all this...I don't find 27 minutes terribly unreasonable if they were assisting the other divers already hanging on the line when the OP surfaced. As far as I can tell, there was no way for the OP to know that, since she stated, that at times they couldn't even see the boat well. If the boat was attending to the other divers, there would have been no safe way to return to the mooring until they had completed the pick up. Would I like this to happen to me, No, but stuff happens. This smacks a little of "we should have been more important". I don't think 27 minutes was out of line if they had to assist the other passengers, then fire up the boat and return for the OP. I'm quite surprised how many people would blindly disavow the Marissa without any kind of rebuttal from the operation itself. I don’t know the OP, but maybe the Marissa was less than thrilled with your safety suggestions because they know they were doing the best for all the customers, not just you.

My 2psi…

 

[ligersandtions]

The boat was NOT drifting due to picking up divers who had blown off the wreck!

We have never had anything quite of this nature happen to us before. Once we realized what had happened we did everything we could to recover our divers (the two of you) as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I remember looking up at Brandon, from the galley, and seeing him watch the water. I realize that we drifted a ways off (less than a 1/2 mile), before we noticed it. However, we have reviewed the timeline and sequence of events several times since then, as we are not happy with ourselves for not noticing sooner, and we are constantly working to improve our performance.

Divers began to come up around 4:30-4:45, the first two were the ones we expected, as they had done a very short dive. The class again expected, came up about 15-20 minutes later. As we were getting the class out of the water and on the boat and unknown to us the line must have snapped.

We have tech divers doing drifting deco on a biweekly basis and about once a month one ends up a half a mile away. Not because we did not notice them, but we cannot abandon 10 other divers to rescue one. They use their SMB and they have to wait until we are able to retrieve them.

Lora acknowledges that the mooring line broke, they drifed away and didn't notice, and then came to pick us up.

Also, the Marissa's policy is to NOT retrieve drifting divers before all other divers (who stayed put on the wreck) have surfaced and boarded the boat. Them drifiting away was NOT to pick up other divers, but simply because they did not yet realize that they were drifting.

 

[Doug Charney]

As we were getting the class out of the water and on the boat and unknown to us the line must have snapped.

Seems to me they were attending to the other divers...

How many were in the class?