2airishuman
Contributor
For me the primary lesson is, always be positively buoyant before going up the ladder.
Sort of. He should have had his weights off. You don't try to go up the ladder on a private boat with your weights on, because compared to a dive op's boat, the ladder is narrower and more wobbly and not as deep and there aren't handholds in all the right places.
The second lesson is, always have your regulator in your mouth until you are safely on the boat.
Again this is cattle boat thinking. On a small boat you take off your kit and clip it off or hand it up so that you don't have all that extra weight and bulk to carry up the dodgy ladder.
That means you won't have a reg in your mouth, which won't matter because you'll be unencumbered by your weights and your kit, and will not sink. (There is the purely theoretical problem that if you are in fresh water with no wetsuit you could sink. This problem is purely theoretical because there is no freshwater dive warm enough to conduct without a wetsuit where the viz is more than 2 feet)