[Note: It’s Thanksgiving, and I almost did not run this piece today because it is pretty dark, but then it occurred to me that it does fit Thanksgiving; see if you agree…

One of the downsides of advanced scuba certification is that you become aware, and sometimes its painful awareness, of how many people struggle with scuba diving.  You also tend to become more sensitive to watching and listening to other divers to find out if they are likely to have problems with the dive. Typically I am watching to see how divers put their gear together to see whether they know how it should be assembled and to see how confident they are in their topside skills. If they don’t know how their gear goes together, that is usually a pretty good sign someone on the dive needs to keep an eye on them underwater because chances are pretty good if something goes sideways they could easily panic and hurt themselves. Sometimes I hear divers say things that just don’t make any sense to me; like an average sized diver asking for about twice as much weight as I would expect he would need. I’m learning that when I hear things like that I really need to watch those divers.

One of the really bad sounds to hear when you are underwater is the captain of the boat pounding a weight on the hull of the boat as a recall signal. A repeated Bang bang bang sound usually means that something has gone very wrong for someone on the dive.

Not long ago I was diving in the Bahamas.  We had quite a few dive professionals on the boat; and we had one rookie blue water diver and an older diver among others. The rookie was buddied up with a dive master and the older diver was buddied up with another dive master. My buddy and I were near the other dive leader and were following him into the current to get to some swim throughs.  I noticed that the older diver seemed to have some problems with buoyancy, and he was way too involved in looking at his go pro. The rookie diver looked like he would huff through his air pretty fast. I figured he would be on the surface inside of 20 minutes on what otherwise would have been at least a 45 minute dive. Once I saw Harry, the older diver in the water, it was pretty obvious he would be all over the place, would have bouyancy problems and I figures he might be down 25 minutes.

At about the 20 minute mark my buddy and I had entered a swim through and were quite a ways into the swim through when I heard the dreaded bang bang bang of the recall signal. We came  out of the swim through and headed to the boat with the current at our backs. We were going relatively quickly, in part because the current was at our backs.  Not long after  I heard the recall signal, I shut down the camera and started kicking towards the boat. We rose in the water column and did most of our safety stop on the way back to the boat. When we got on board, the rookie was sitting on the floor of the boat, but otherwise appeared to be alright. I looked around for Harry and he was no where in sight. I hadn’t seen Harry on the way back to the boat so I assumed something was wrong. Actually, after I looked around the boat and realized Harry wasn’t there, the first thought that came to mind was “oh boy” Harry’s dead.

The captain looked a little nervous, but did not seem to be completely upset. I kept looking in the vicinity of the boat expecting to see other divers. Finally, when my gaze shifted out to about 200 meters away from the boat I could see someone holding on to another mooring line. As the boat made its way over to the other mooring line I could see Harry holding on to the mooring bouy and one of the dive staff was with him. Harry had blown thorough his air and had not been able to swim back to the boat because of the current. Fortunately, the dive leader assigned to him had helped him drop weights after he surfaced and had manually inflated his BC. Harry was ok, but needed help getting back on the boat. Had Harry not been with a professional, Harry could have gotten himself into some real trouble. Harry by his own admission was overweighted, underinflated and unable to do anything except hold on to the mooring bouy. And, until his weights were dropped by the diver professional, Harry was “drinking” a lot of sea water. Harry’s situation could have gotten really bad if he had not had immediate help.

The dive staff earned their pay that day. And just in case you are curious what it sounds like to hear a weight banging on the hull of a boat, here is the last bit of the dive with the banging at the end.

In reflection, the dives for 2015 for me, are pretty much done for the year. Everyone came back more or less in one piece. No one got bent. No one suffered a serious injury. So I do have a lot to be thankful for; I just wish the Harry’s of the diving world would be a little more careful, and maybe take a refresher course so they wouldn’t take such big risks.

From the title, my philosopher friends are probably thinking I am going to write about the connection between present time and future time; but they would be wrong. My diver friends know that I’m thinking more about will there be a strong current underwater on my next dive? Underwater currents are like the wind. You really can’t see them except in relationship to other things. So for instance we can drop a few blades of grass on the water and assuming we are still,if there is a current, the blades of grass will move one direction or another. If the current is too quick we may decide to go to another site where there is either less current or possibly none at all. Of course, we may elect to do a drift dive and just go with the flow.

When there is a modest current we usually want to swim into the current on the way out and have the current push us back to the boat on the way back. By doing this we have an added measure of safety because, all other things being equal swimming back to the boat with a current to our backs should help push us back to the boat so we do not exert ourselves as much and therefore use less air.

Currents are not inherently bad for diving. if they were there would be no dive industry in Cozumel Mexico. Cozumel is famous for its drift dives. The basic concept is you drop in at point “A” and you let the current take you along the reef for a distance until you get to a certain point “B”in your air supply and then you ascend. Hopefully, the boat captain has followed your bubbles well enough to at least be in the same zip code and can bring the boat close to the divers for an easy exit.

So the question remains will there be a current on your future dives?

I was thinking back to a dive I did in Anguilla on a wreck known as the MV Commerce. Wreck dives are typically dives where I want to have my underwater camera set up to shoot wide angle. Close focus wide angle is a great way to try to capture the large expanses of a ship for instance, but it really doesn’t do to much for trying to take pictures of small critters. Shooting pictures of small critters with a wide angle lens makes them look insignificant, if they can be found at all.

Alot of times before dives, I try to find out what are we likely to see on the dive. The reason is if it sounds like we will see big objects than I rig the camera for wide angle which works best. If it sounds like we will see small critters, then a macro setting with a 60mm or 105mm lens works best for me. For the most part, I shot wreck dives with a wide angle lens. Of course, some dive masters incorrectly think that if they tell me what we are likely to see that that will either jinx the dive, or will take away from it in some way. Understand, I don’t need detail, what we will see is often quite different from what has been seen at the same dive site on prior dives; but I just would like to know, big or small features so I can rig the camera accordingly.

The MV Commerce was a over 100 feet in length so I figured, good wide angle shooting. Little did I know but our dive master was very good at finding the small inhabitants who had made themselves at home on the wreck. The MV Commerce at that point had been down over 20 years, so there was quite a bit of coral and sponge life on the ship. Great habbitat for small critters. As it turned out, the dive was the first time I had really looked at an arrow crab. Now arrow crabs remind me of daddy long legs spiders, but have an elongated head which comes to a point. One of the crabs we found that day had been hunting. And, it appeared he had been quite successful. He not only had food in one of his claws, but had jammed some of his prey down on the spike at the end of his head. (Bless his pointed little head). Of course rigged for wide angle I could try as many different shots and angle as I liked with little success. At one point I put my dome right in the crabs face, but the image still looked punny. Nevertheless, I did get bailed out at the end of the dive. A green sea turtle swam down from the surface and started napping on the remains of the deck of the wreck. Sometimes it better to be lucky than good.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what it looks like when I am rigging my underwater camera, here is a short timelapse movie I shot a while back, where I rigged the camera for wide angle. I just wish I could rig the camera this fast in real time.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+BruceCampbell65/posts/PyBnFTnmatG?pid=6004089089182503426&oid=104442422001208185337

a href=”http://vimeo.com/user16230710″>