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Pastimes : The Scariest Moment of Your Life -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob who wrote (5)	4/18/2003 12:52:25 PM
From: Jorj X Mckie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93

Two Diving Stories.... First Dive after getting my Recreational Diver Certification This was at Anacapa Island in California. I had just gotten certified about 30 minutes earlier, but we had one final project...navigation. We were supposed to drop down the anchor line and swim out a distance and then navigate back. My buddy and I decided to swim directly into the current so that the trip back would be quick and effortless. It turns out that the current was much stronger than we had thought. I'm not sure that we made any real progress swimming against it. We went out for about 12 minutes and then figured that we would have a three minute swim back. After three minutes of swimming back in the direction that we knew the boat was in, we didn't see anything that looked like the boat. We went a little bit further and decided to pop up and see if we could find the boat. I had about 1000lbs of air left, but when we saw where the boat was...or more importantly where we were, it was clear that we were in a bad way. We were at least a quarter mile away from the boat and downstream in the current. No way did we have enough air to get to the boat underwater. Worse yet, we were about an eigth of a mile from the point that would bring us into an open channel. And to top it off, this area is known as "shark alley". Great whites cherry pick seals here all day. Not the place you want to be doing a surface swim. But, we had no choice. thankfully, after about 30min of making no progress, a park ranger in a boston whaler happened upon us and brought us back to the dive boat.