The narrow road leading down to our dive site seems magically quaint, as it winds out of the trees by the guard shack and down to the sea. Beyond the forest the area shines with light, and in the shallows the water is air clear. We are all here on a fun dive sponsored by our local dive shop, and this is going to be a great day. That’s what I thought to myself. In a million years I would never have guessed that just two hours later I would be counting the seconds till the rescue boat arrived with its life giving tank of medical oxygen.
As we gear up the usual banter begins; our group of twenty includes old friends and new divers. The old friends haven’t necessarily driven together so conversations vault from car to car as the comedy of donning neoprene without stepping in the gravel begins….then BANG. A high pressure hose has exploded. Its owner is deeply stunned. Her gear is immaculately maintained, cleaned, stored. She’s the last person you’d expect to have a gear failure. I look at my kit-battle scared from a year of doing underwater construction work in dirty water, next to barnacled piers, tunneling into mud laced with all kinds of old rusty junk-and the first shadow of doubt crosses my mind.
The world’s largest save-a-dive emerges from Mr. Tech Divers SUV. He’s been waiting a long time to save the day and that box has been getting bigger and bigger. His save-a-dive box has been to more dive sites than most divers, and actually has its own log book of sorts. I’m kind of new, and haven’t seen the log book. Rumor has it that it’s sort of a travel journal written as if a save-a-dive could talk. Getting to see the book is a rite of passage. I’m not there yet.
With the hose repaired normalcy returns. The group is now thoroughly divided in readiness to dive with those closest to the cloud of ruptured spectra fibers still in street clothes while others further away are firing up the seven mil sweat lodge. Our able leader calls a quick huddle, speeds through the tailgate safety talk, and facilitates dive team selection. I grab a guy who’s so new the ink’s not dry on his temporary card.
Just as we head for the water the Ranger starts chewing out a guy who’s surface swimming really far from his buddy. My guy looks nervous, I turn face to face and tell him you and me we’re together like this I hold two fingers side by side till we’re back on dry land. His face relaxes, he learned in warm water, just like I did. This same group watched my back on my first cold water dive. Diving is like that: you try and pass on what was given to you. I have gained his trust-now I must earn it.
The dive is fantastic! I show my new friend how to swim in kelp, what to do if you tangle, when it gets thick we drop in at 30 feet. The visibility is huge, shafts of light shine through the kelp forest and spatter the seafloor – its magic. We cross the cove and chase the wall out to sixty feet. The fish here are fat, bold, and beautiful to watch. We do some compass work and surface not to far from the boat ramp, where I show him how to open the kelp with a blast of free flow and we pop up in a thick mat. I demonstrate the kelp crawl and he loves it! We exit the slippery ramp arm in arm. You almost can’t put a dive that great into words.
I drop my tank and fins and walk to nice flat rock to see who’s up on the surface and who’s still down. I was just thinking when…HELP…SPLASH, SPLASH, HELP. That’s what happens in real life: accidents intrude mid-sentence. There’s a diver in trouble far out in a shallow part of the cove where you couldn’t pay me to dive. His buddy pops up shouting “DROP YOUR WEIGHT….DROP YOUR WEIGHT!” Something is terribly wrong. I grab my mask and fins and hit the water and the Ranger yells Are you going to help? I say yes. He says I’ll bring the boat. Half way there Jon smokes by me, he’s younger and stronger, and he is swimming crawl stroke; gliding his fins like a kickboard over the kelp. If you ever need to get to someone quickly, that’s the way to do it. I switch from fining and start closing the gap.
I’ll call the victim “Joe” out of respect for his privacy. His face is the color of an eggplant, with deep labored breathing that rattles on the inhale. Joe’s buddy is holding him from sinking while Jon pulls his BCD. Jon passes the BCD to me with a warning that it’s really negative – meaning negatively buoyant. The damn thing nearly pulls me down; the tank is dead flat out of air so I orally inflate the BCD, and it now floats just fine. Joe’s wearing a two piece farmer john and jacket so he floats like cork with the BCD off. The rescue boat is close now, but they have to be careful there could be other divers below them. I’m mentally counting the seconds. We swim Joe the last twenty feet and they pull him up like a rag doll. A guy on the boat has oxygen ready and waiting. The rescue boat takes off and just like that my role in the rescue is over.
Jon and I talk for a minute; he got the basics from Joe’s buddy. Joe came up in the kelp, burned through his reserve air, and couldn’t power inflate. He went to ditch his integrated weights and they jammed in the jacket, he choked on water and then panicked. His buddy pulled the weights, and it took all his strength to get them out as he had to pull them one at a time. The three of us swim back. I tow the BCD that almost drowned Joe back to shore. We don’t talk-there’s nothing more to say.
At the boat ramp two big guys grab the BCD. The thing still weighs a ton and both weight pouches are at the bottom of the cove. I see Joe one last time as they load him into the ambulance, he looks absolutely fine. Normal color, no more rattles. I tell Joe his gear is safe and he pops the oxygen mask off and says thanks for helping me, you can tell he really means it. The ambulance guy puts the mask back on and tells Joe “that stuff is keeping you alive”. Joe spent two nights in hospital for having water in his lungs and went home in fine health. I never saw him again.
The group kind of broke up after that. Some went home; some went to check at hospital. I stayed and did a second dive with the new guy. The rising tide brought crystal clear water, and everything seemed electric. That dive healed me. Diving is like that: it clears your mind, simplifies things, and gives you clarity.
What stands out for me about this rescue is that four things went wrong at once: 1) the diver ran out of air, 2) the diver was confined by thick kelp 3) the diver and buddy were unable to mouth inflate a negatively-buoyant BCD, and 4) the diver was unable to drop lead and buddy was able to do so only with considerable difficulty.
Modern dive gear is not designed specifically for use in kelp. California divers need to be smart about how we adapt gear primarily designed for the warm water recreational market for use on our cold water and kelp-covered coast. I’ve changed my gear a lot since I started diving; I wear a lot less lead now. I’ve dropped from 36 lbs down to just 20 lbs. (about 10% of my body weight), and I never dive in kelp with anything but a quick release rubber weight belt (the kind many abalone divers use). All my lead is out of the BCD and on my waist now, and as a result, at the end of a dive my BCD becomes fully buoyant with just one breath. In one second with one-hand (left or right) I can pop shoulder high out of the thickest kelp mat, just by dropping my belt.
Dive safe.
Story by Everitt Gordon