Honest Question: If you had not been diving with redundant air - would you have made the same screw-up?
In the situation with the Spare Air I was not diving with redundant air.
The pony bottle incident would have happened even if I hadn't been carrying the redundant air source.
The pony bottle incident happened 2 weeks ago, when I was on a cruise to Grand Cayman. After doing 2 uneventful morning boat dives, myself and one of the others who were on the cruise with me to celebrate Dad's 80th birthday, did an afternoon shore dive off of Sunset House. We were warned about the current but as always I was reckless and I wasn't going to let some current stop me from doing a dive I had been anticipating for months.
We dove in, swam out until I was at about 1300 lbs and I turned the dive..on the way back we hit some outgoing current that I was either totally unaware of or it changed at right about that time. I found us making little to no headway back to shore, I was down to about 500 lbs and I signaled low air to my buddy and surfaced. She had more gas, and she took off and descended at an angle back towards our entry point while I headed straight in towards shore.
I drained my tank on the surface and used my 19cf pony which got me in to shore, but then I had to swim parallel to the rocks because the usual entries were too high too reach..the pony allowed me to swim forward on the surface rather than on my back, and made the task manageable. The gas lasted until I was back at the entry ladder.
A snorkel would have really helped although there was LOTS of surface chop and waves close to the shore.
We found out later that there were current warnings in effect and there was no diving for days, and the cruise line canceled all water sports excursions on that day. We never should have been in the water.