Only to note that Cozumel, while promoted as an easy, safe diving destination, is actually based on an inherently dangerous model.
There are some easy dives around Coz, but the good sites seem to be predominantly deep and somewhat advanced. I don't think it's the best overall place for a beginner. That would be a place with lots of shallow reefs and (normally) easy to manage currents. Sort of like Key Largo!
[/shameless plug] I still liked the diving in Coz for intermediate and advanced divers and look forward to diving it again.
That was me- I got it in to my head that this was an anchored dive.
Ah, you made a mistake, just like the DM. It's my understanding that we stop making mistakes about the same time we die. Viva l'erreurs!
Drift diving towards a known danger means changing the plan and treating it as an 'into the current and back' kind of dive.
It sounds like they did just that, but underestimated the strength of the current. Here's the thing about currents: they are almost always stronger the higher you go. If I get blown off course by a current here in the Keys, I do a commando peak, locate the boat, set the compass and dive for the bottom. Once I and my group are on the bottom, the current is almost always far, far gentler, and we can make our way to the boat with relative ease and very little gas. However, if they won't follow my lead, because they think they know better than me, then we've got a heck of a swim and it's a sure bet I am towing someone's butt back to the boat. Here it seems that they only needed to do a couple of hundred feet to get out of the "danger zone". Unfortunately, some of the group freaked and went half way up, exposing themselves to lots and lots of current going in the wrong direction. At this point, a DM's plans go out the hatch and they morph from leading to herding. What could have been an easy swim turns into a freak fest where people are being towed out of the channel. Of course, it's always easiest to blame all of the mistakes on the DM and I am sure that they are not without fault. If the owner, had pointed out that the divers had turned a difficult situation into a bad one, then she would have been accused of trying to shift the blame. It's just not in our blood to accept any responsibility for our actions.
In the final analysis, no one was injured. No cruise boats were sunk. The OP has a story that they can relate to their kids and their grand kids. Hopefully, they will learn how to negotiate currents and stay low if they want to make headway against them. I've spent two weeks diving with Paradise Divers, and from a professional POV, they seemed to take reasonable precautions save for not pulling a dive flag on each and every dive. That's something that none of the boats do down there and I wish they would rethink it. A dive flag on the surface would have alerted surface support to the imminent problem of going near the channel. They could have easily given a couple of good pulls on the flag to alert the DM that they needed to surface earlier, rather than later. In fact, there are a number of incidents that would be averted in Coz if they only towed a dive flag. Unfortunately, that would stop them from doing any swim throughs and I doubt they would be willing to forgo those.
, I've dived channels where the current was different directions at different depths. A planned 'easy' drift in to the security of the atoll ended up being a dive where we ascended close to where we started. If we had drifted with the current outside the atoll, we would have been in big trouble due to the outside conditions.
