Also, I wanted to thank you for the chuckles. I always get a laugh when people make blanket statements based on their own experiences. Based on your user name, I would have thought a former Navy person wouldn't have made those mistakes. Maybe you were Air Force.
First, fifteen foot swells offshore aren't really that big of a deal because of the distance between them. The cycles run longer because of the depth of the ocean. Really, it's like riding a gentle roller coaster. You should try it sometime. Like I stated, the wind made it bad because it broke the tops of them off and blew it horizontally. That and the rain.
And, since you don't seem to know about the difference between swells offshore and waves onshore, I'll give you the Internet definition of "Squall" too.
"A squall is a sudden, sharp, and violent increase in wind speed that is commonly associated with torrential rain showers, snow, or thunderstorms.
Squalls are accompanied by drastic and substantial changes in cloud patterns, cold fronts, and severe weather events."
Second, there are boats and there are boats. Isn't there a statement in the Navy manual someplace that says:
"In general, a boat is a watercraft (for want of a better word) that is small enough to be carried on board a larger one, and that larger one is a ship. This is sometimes expressed this way: “A ship can carry a boat, but a boat can never carry a ship.”
Our dive boat was a converted trawler. That's fairly good sized boat but obviously you didn't read the post. I said the boat left the area and then came back for us. You know...that part about hearing them blowing the horn, etc. We knew they had run from the storm and would be back for us.
And, just so we're clear because I've found that people who make blanket statements also jump to conclusions:
I stated in my post that it was 1975. No, we didn't know that storms would be in our area but the weather people back then were barely able to predict the sunrise. However, it was summer on the North Florida Gulf Coast. Storms happen. Regularly. They're called Squalls.
That particular dive location was a nice reef that we had found and marked on our chart. We located it again it by using radar bearings on condo buildings miles away on shore. We knew that they would find us again because of the marked location and also because they had "dumped the buoy".
The buoy was a large 24 inch orange buoy that was attached to the anchor line. That way, no time would be lost if you had to dump the anchor for an emergency. In this case, we were sure they saw the storm coming and dumped it so they could be sure to find the exact area again. It even had handles on it so a diver has something to hang onto it if need be.
We never saw it though and in fact, they found us again before the buoy. My girlfriends and mine only real complaint afterwards, was that we were cold. We were only wearing shorty wet suit tops. We didn't even have to dump any gear, not even weight belts.
And in case you're wondering, we absolutely knew they had dumped the buoy as soon as we surfaced. They were nowhere around and the masts on a trawler are pretty tall so we knew they had taken off to beat the storm. It would have been standard procedure to dump the buoy and come back later because that's the way we trained.
Nothing that I have recounted is extraordinary. It's not even a "story of survival at sea" because we were never really in any danger except of getting run over by some other boat or stung by jelly fish. It was actually kind of fun afterwards.
In closing, I'll say that it doesn't matter to me if you call BS or anything else. As far as I'm concerned, you lost any standing when you claimed that fifteen swells are not survivable for person or boat. That's just silly! I used to surf my little twenty footer in thru the Pass on bigger swells than that! Here's a hint. They're called "Rollers" for a reason.
Thank you for the laugh, I love some good BS and fairy tales.