As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m a scuba diving fanatic. In fact, as a hobby, I teach scuba diving and am a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer. A friend emailed me this link to a story about a diver who was left behind on a dive recently and floated in the Pacific Ocean off of the California coast for about five hours before being rescued by a passing boat.
So imagine my surprise when I check out the story and I know the guy! I’ve been diving with him a few times and I also was an instructor on some of his training dives. I haven’t spoken to him since the incident but I can imagine that he’s not all that happy. I haven’t read the story but someone pulled some quotes from the LA Times interview with him in which he indicated he had no intention of suing the dive shop or anybody else involved but that he was upset at the incident. I’ve also seen Dan being interviewed on MSNBC and I hear he was also on the “Today Show” and he didn’t seem too angry.
I quit teaching at that dive shop about eight months ago but I do know most of the folks involved like the boat captain, the dive shop owner, etc. I don’t know the dive master though. He started there after I quit diving with the shop. The basic skills of dive mastering a dive are really not that hard though. You count the people going in the water and you count the people coming out and to be extra careful you take a visual headcount before leaving a dive spot. In fact, that’s one of the more important tasks. Before I let the captain pull up anchor I visually identify every single person on the boat sign-in sheet. I don’t care if they went down below to sleep or if they’re in the head. I have to see them before I mark them off as accounted for. Obviously there was some breakdown in this process.
It just goes to show how skipping a small and seemingly meaningless task can have dire consequences.