February 18, 2011 – Pre-dive moron check

Should inconsiderate morons be allowed to dive? I don't usually discriminate, but after what happened today I think every dive shop must consider instituting a pre-dive moron check.

I went diving with Liang on the big boat today. Colombia Deep was our first dive. Javier had a small boat, and they went to Devil's Throat. The way this dive goes is you drop close to the "throat" cave, go through it one by one, get out at about 130 feet and start your multi-level ascent (that goes on for about 30 minutes). The dive master usually goes into the throat first and makes sure nobody drops deeper on the exit. And everybody was fine, except for this one guy who – upon exiting the cave – continued kicking down so fast that Javier and the others in the group were absolutely certain that he was determined to commit suicide.

As a dive master, what do you do in a situation like this? The rule of thumb is "don't do anything that may potentially put your life in danger". Of course, emotions always kick in and most dive masters will make an attempt to save the person who is making some kind of dangerous mistake. But this case was a bit different. It was clearly not a mistake. The guy knew exactly what he was doing. "I had only 3 seconds to make my decision, - Javier commented. – On one hand, I had a guy possibly committing suicide. On the other hand, I had 6 more divers at the depth of 130 feet. What if any of them loses control and starts dropping down as well? What if they get confused and worried if I follow the guy? What if somebody starts following me? I decided to stay with the group."

They stayed put and waited for several minutes for the guy to re-appear. Nothing. Javier aborted the dive, and after he put everybody back on the boat and reported the incident to the other boats in the vicinity, he went back into the water and did 30 minutes of free diving in an attempt to locate the guy's bubbles. All in vain. The guy was nowhere to be found. Javier's heart was ready to jump out of his chest. He had never seen anything like this before. What do you do? What the hell do you do?

The oppressive silence reigned back on the boat… Finally, the guy re-appeared. He looked a bit sorry, but not really. Javier handled the situation with an impressive poise. He made sure to talk to the guy one on one, careful not to involve any other divers in the conversation (as you can imagine, each of them was ready to rip the perpetrator apart). He made sure he never raised his voice. Attentively, he listened to the guy's version of the incident. Apparently, he hadn't been narked, he hadn't been lost, he had done all of this on purpose. His brilliant explanation was, "Well, but I always do this. I always go deep on my dives." He didn't offer any explanation of the outrageous breach of standard emergency procedures he committed. According to scuba diving rules, if you separate from the group, you are supposed to look for them for about ONE minute and surface if you don't find anybody. He, on the other hand, did a whole 63-minute dive all by himself! What the hell was he thinking, I wonder, diving all alone?

This was his first and last time at Aldora. Obviously, he wasn't allowed to make the second dive of the day, and he was banned from the shop as well.

I don't know what the silver lining of this cloud is, but there was definitely a funny lining to it. At the surface interval, one of the guys from our group returned from the bathroom looking very perplexed. He sat down at the table and shared that upon leaving the toilet he had been confronted by some angry-looking man who had come very close to him and hissed, "I want to punch you out!" Our guy was obviously taken aback by this proposition, quickly played back what had happened in the stall, and concluded with absolute certainty that he had flushed and there was no reason whatsoever to punish him for any rule breaking… Of course, he just looked like the perpetrator and Jim Vetter (the angry man at the bathroom door, a loyal customer of Aldora's) confused them.

So in the end, we all had a good laugh. With one exception though. Javier was very much shaken by this whole thing and couldn't really bring himself to laugh for another couple of days.