TSandM: Missing Diver in Clallam County, WA

[descent]

Any chance of organizing some Scuba Board members in the area to search the areas shorelines?

That's such a dangerous and exposed area.

Much of the shoreline is rocky cliff pounded by surf from the open North Pacific.

Working in favor of a recovery near the dive site is the extremely convoluted bottom. It's rocky, with gaps between boulders and small canyons. A diver with fresh steel tanks who was venting at the cuff may be down in this terrain.

Working against a recovery near the dive site is the surrounding bathymetry. The sketched map below uses the rough pencil isolines that went into the NOAA base map for the area.

Away from the pinnacle, it gets deep fast. It's a short swim to several hundred meters.

 

[descent]

The upload tool shrunk this map about 4x. If you would like a readable copy, [-]send me a PM[/-] just get it from the member gallery instead.

 

[flyin01]

Being from Chicago I know nothing of the area. It was just a thought.

 

[PeterNBiddle]

That's a non-trivial dive.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[BRT]

Tidal currents, let alone open sea conditions that far north, are highly variable and change quickly. It sounds like you were very fortunate to hit the day and time you did.



Their agreed-to dive plan was to surface if separated. It could be said that the minute was spent making sure they were separated rather than her being in part of his sphere of visibility that was not scanned. You would want to be sure in this scenario because it would be a dive-ender at a place where the opportunity to access is limited. It wasn't their first rodeo.

Am I reading the current tables correctly? It appears to me that they hit the site at peak current on a very low current cycle, but still at max current.

 

[DocWong]

I've gone over this over and over in my head and with what Peter has shared with us and from other's I've spoken to, I can only come to one conclusion.

Lynn was extremely well prepared in equipment, training and experience. The fact that she was above Peter one moment and the next moment out of visual range and not at the surface means that she went out of visual range and descended. She was dumping gas out of her wing to compensate for the upward swell/current and if it then changed and pulled her down, as it sounds like the current was dramatic and changing, then she would have defended extra fast. Still she would have realized that and put gas back into her wing. Even if pulled pretty far down, she would have somehow gotten back up to the surface.

The only reasonable reason I could fathom is that she had a medical event that prevented her from getting back up to the surface.

God Speed Lynn, though she's no longer with us physically, her positive impacts she gave us lives on in each of us thru her words, actions and examples. She'll continue to have a positive impact on our lives and for that I'm ever grateful that you were with us.

 

[DiverLaura]

This was shot by one of the best/strongest expedition videographers in the northwest. He shoots video on our most challenging shipwrecks and other sites and makes it look easy. Even he's being taken for a bit of a ride. Posting this only so that folks will have a vague idea of the dive site and terrain. I do no know how this video compares to the actual conditions on the day of the incident.

[video=vimeo;7235459]https://vimeo.com/7235459[/video]

 

[diver 85]

Again I'll ask--------anyone know the ~ current that (time of) day????........tia.........

 

[Akimbo]

Am I reading the current tables correctly? It appears to me that they hit the site at peak current on a very low current cycle, but still at max current.

Not sure the table you are looking at but I don’t doubt your description. It has been years since I was diving up there but you have to remember what a huge mass of water is in Puget Sound versus the two small openings out to sea.

A lot of people don’t realize that there is a significant time delay between high and low tides at different points inside large bays with restricted flows. That can cause currents to be quite high well past the high and low peaks where most places normally experience slack water.

There is also a lot of variability depending on wind driven swell height and direction, temperature differentials, salinity (density really), bottom topography, and every other thing Mother Nature throws into the mix. All that water has to go somewhere and it changes its mind four times a day, just not at the same time.

Again I'll ask--------anyone know the ~ current that (time of) day????........tia.........

I can’t imagine that it is consistent enough for anyone to answer that question.

 

[DiverLaura]

It was not an unusual current, ocean surge or weather day to visit this site. To arbitrarily post the currents without the reader having a full understanding of the site, current corrections and actually having been there will do no good except cause people to second guess and point fingers. This site and others like it are known for being predictably unpredictable, and that is something people planning on diving it know and accept when working out their margins. I am quite sure that the team understood this, as was indicated by Peter's original post in the other thread.

Something else to keep in mind, this is a site that you can't really know what it going on underwater until you get there.

Case in point, take a look at this video.... Surface conditions would have made me think twice, but once underwater things seem reasonable.

https://youtu.be/VbHT-xyYkB0