So.....
We had two dives scheduled for each day this past weekend, Saturday we were joining a group from a shop that used to be local to us when we lived in NH.
We had two seal dives planned out of the NH seacoast, a pile of rocks in the ocean that the seals liked to hang out at. Since we hadn't been to that site before, we opted to follow the dive leader on the 1st dive, and broke into two groups.
Big mistake, the dive leader and someone else in the group had reached their turn pressure by the time they got to the bottom - of course they thought we were starting out in 40-50', when actually the bottom was at 75' so after 15 minutes of gazing at clams in 75' of 47 degree water, we surfaced. Granted the surface current was bad, which had everyone breathing hard.
During the dive, we noticed some fiasco with someone's weight belt from the other group, got back on the boat and found one guy from the other group had skipped the first dive. Oh, and there's a mystery weightbelt on the boat.
Waiting for the other group (who were happily watching a seal underwater) to get back, a call comes over the boat radio from another boat saying they have one of our divers, and he's not in good shape!
We're all like, no way - we have all our divers, must be from someone else's group.
Nope, the boat gets there right as the other group arrives and it's the buddy of the guy who skipped the first dive.
He does not look well, and has to be carried into our boat, he's screaming about his legs and they put him on O2 and take his wetsuit off, he calms down a bit.
It turns out he lost his weightbelt on the surface, and the dive leader of the other group and his buddy (the one who skipped the dive) retrieved it. He gets it back on and goes down again without anyone in the other group knowing except his buddy, makes it somewhere between 50 - 70 feet before losing the belt again, rockets to the surface in 2 seconds, and gets carried a couple hundred yards or so away by the current and somehow manages to hold on to a buoy at the surface.
So we rush to the Coast Guard station to get him to a waiting ambulence for a nice hyperbaric chamber ride, and end up spending the day at the station dock waiting for the boat captain and dive leader to be released. Yay!
I feel REAL bad for the poor bastard, and I hope he's ok. My wife is going to ask the shop owner later to see.
His buddy, when I last saw him being taken away in another boat to get his and this guy's stuff to his car, looked like he knew he had fucked up real bad. I only hope he's capable of apologizing to his friend.
We had two dives scheduled for each day this past weekend, Saturday we were joining a group from a shop that used to be local to us when we lived in NH.
We had two seal dives planned out of the NH seacoast, a pile of rocks in the ocean that the seals liked to hang out at. Since we hadn't been to that site before, we opted to follow the dive leader on the 1st dive, and broke into two groups.
Big mistake, the dive leader and someone else in the group had reached their turn pressure by the time they got to the bottom - of course they thought we were starting out in 40-50', when actually the bottom was at 75' so after 15 minutes of gazing at clams in 75' of 47 degree water, we surfaced. Granted the surface current was bad, which had everyone breathing hard.
During the dive, we noticed some fiasco with someone's weight belt from the other group, got back on the boat and found one guy from the other group had skipped the first dive. Oh, and there's a mystery weightbelt on the boat.
Waiting for the other group (who were happily watching a seal underwater) to get back, a call comes over the boat radio from another boat saying they have one of our divers, and he's not in good shape!
We're all like, no way - we have all our divers, must be from someone else's group.
Nope, the boat gets there right as the other group arrives and it's the buddy of the guy who skipped the first dive.
He does not look well, and has to be carried into our boat, he's screaming about his legs and they put him on O2 and take his wetsuit off, he calms down a bit.
It turns out he lost his weightbelt on the surface, and the dive leader of the other group and his buddy (the one who skipped the dive) retrieved it. He gets it back on and goes down again without anyone in the other group knowing except his buddy, makes it somewhere between 50 - 70 feet before losing the belt again, rockets to the surface in 2 seconds, and gets carried a couple hundred yards or so away by the current and somehow manages to hold on to a buoy at the surface.
So we rush to the Coast Guard station to get him to a waiting ambulence for a nice hyperbaric chamber ride, and end up spending the day at the station dock waiting for the boat captain and dive leader to be released. Yay!
I feel REAL bad for the poor bastard, and I hope he's ok. My wife is going to ask the shop owner later to see.
His buddy, when I last saw him being taken away in another boat to get his and this guy's stuff to his car, looked like he knew he had fucked up real bad. I only hope he's capable of apologizing to his friend.