Scary 1st SCUBA Experience
We’ve all heard the recent stories of the dive trips where a pair of divers gets left behind but this situation was almost real life for me only worse, my dive buddy wasn’t even with me! I was 17 years old and I took my certification trip out of West Palm Beach back in 1997. We left the dock around 9am and had a short stop in about 25-30 feet of water. This stop was a one-on-one with the instructor. We decended to the sandy bottom and then went over the different exercises to essentially get checked out for the other two dives that day. I passed with flying colors, no mistakes.
So back on the boat and off to the first reef dive. The reef lay in 60-70 feet of water. For those of you that don’t know, dives in the West Palm area are drift dives. This means the current is ripping in one direction, the boat drops you off up-current from the reef, you drift over the reef and the only time you could stop to look at something is if you swam as hard as you can into the current. Well, typically one of the dive masters is the leader of the dive and has a rope attached to them, the other end of the rope is at the surface with a buoy attached. The buoy gives the boat an idea of where the dive group has drifted to and the line going down to the diver is how all of the other divers in the group get to the bottom and stay together. All of the divers were instructed to put one arm around the line and swim down the line to all meet up together at the bottom. I started down as instructed but I was having major issues clearing my ears (equalizing) as I descended. Then the issue occurred…. The line that we were following started to bow and was going deeper. My ears were in too much pain to go deeper. My dive buddy had already descended, guess he thought we would meet back up when I eventually found the bottom. But there would be no bottom time for me, I had to let go of the line. I let go, swam up about 10-feet to where I was more comfortable and some of the pressure on my ears was released. Things were much better but I was alone. I could see the group, I could see the buoy line so I figured, “they are down current, it will be no problem catching up I will stay here, descend at my own pace and then catch up to them. Well I tried to catch up but there was no chance at all. I chased but they just got further away. Finally I stopped. I looked around. And there was nothing but blue Atlantic Ocean around me. I could see the bottom, I could see the surface but it was blue all around me. So I figured the best thing to do was surface and hope the boat was close enough to see me. As I rose to the surface I saw the boat about 200-yards away. Luck for me after about 2 minutes of waving and yelling they saw me and ran over to pick me up. A scary first experience, one I won’t ever forget…. but lesson learned. The worst part, the instructor saw me having ear troubles, saw me let go of the rope, and continued on with the rest of the group. On the second dive the insturctor stayed with me, and I made it down to the bottom no problem and had a very rewarding experience!
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