VSdreams
02-17-2009, 06:44 PM
I knew some guys in school who dived the inlets, and I always wanted to try but I never did. Reading this story made me realize there are a lot of things that could go wrong. Anyone here scuba, wreck, or free dive? How do you deal with the currents?
http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/233956
Lost diver tells her story
As countian fought to survive for 7 hours in stormy, shark-infested waters, her mind raced: She prayed. She thought about her family.
A short time into their dive some 90 feet under the Coral Sea, Michele Turner's buddy made a "T" with his hands.
He needed a time-out.
The California man had breathed nearly half the air in his tank and needed to swim back to the boat, moored off the coast of Australia near the Great Barrier Reef.
So he surfaced, to get his bearings.
And what he saw alarmed him.
"I assumed he was going to go up, come back down, tell me where the boat was, we would swim and boom — we'd be there," recalls Turner, a 43-year-old Lititz-area woman. "But he gave me the signal to ascend, a thumbs up."
The divers had been swept away in a strong current — and their boat was more than a football field away.
"You're looking at it like, 'Oh, boy,'" recalls Turner. "We could see the boat. We just couldn't swim to it."
So began an ordeal straight out of the 2004 thriller "Open Water:" Turner, who had notched 85 previous dives, was stranded with her partner in open water known to be shark-infested for more than seven hours Feb. 5 as a storm lashed them with rain, waves crashed over their heads and the sun sank farther toward the horizon.
They had been about 10 minutes or so into what was to have been a half-hour dive.
"We turned around to go back the way we thought we had come, not realizing we had been drifting with the current away from the boat and not toward the mooring line," Turner said.
The air in their tanks was dwindling.
"We were both signaling, 'I don't know where the line is, I don't know where the boat is.'"
Then they saw it, about 100 yards away. They blew whistles, to no avail. Turner and her buddy inflated large inflatable "safety sausages" and tried to swim to their boat. "It was a futile effort," Turner said.
Then they saw a second boat, which was larger and appeared somewhat closer. "We started to swim to that boat, but that was a hard swim," recalled Turner. "It was pretty wavy. It was windy."
And, soon enough, that boat motored away, not seeing the two stranded divers.
"That's a very deflating feeling, I've got to tell you," Turner said.
But as daylight began to fade, Turner began to have other thoughts. "What if they don't find me?" she says she asked herself. "At least I'm going out doing what I love."
And then the two saw something in the distance.
Turner saw the airplane and thought she was about to be rescued.
"You're waving and all kinds of stuff," she recalled.
But the plane was far from them.
As the copter approached the first time, Bobby waved his orange safety sausage. But the device broke, and the copter apparently didn't see it. The two divers grew frustrated — "Expletives were issued at that time," Turner recalled.
They knew, though, that the copter would make a second pass. "I said, 'We have one more shot at this. He's going to come again. I gave him my sausage, I said, 'Here, take mine,' and he kept it high in the air.'"
Turner, meantime, pulled off one of her bright pink swim fins and waved that. At last, on its second pass, the helicopter saw the two divers and radioed the coordinates to one of the boats, which picked them up about a half an hour later, at 7:30 p.m.
"I'm going to be so tired of telling this story," she laughed. "I need to figure out a shorter way to tell it. 'We hung out in the ocean for a while. We got saved. That's it. No sharks. We didn't get eaten.'
http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/233956
Lost diver tells her story
As countian fought to survive for 7 hours in stormy, shark-infested waters, her mind raced: She prayed. She thought about her family.
A short time into their dive some 90 feet under the Coral Sea, Michele Turner's buddy made a "T" with his hands.
He needed a time-out.
The California man had breathed nearly half the air in his tank and needed to swim back to the boat, moored off the coast of Australia near the Great Barrier Reef.
So he surfaced, to get his bearings.
And what he saw alarmed him.
"I assumed he was going to go up, come back down, tell me where the boat was, we would swim and boom — we'd be there," recalls Turner, a 43-year-old Lititz-area woman. "But he gave me the signal to ascend, a thumbs up."
The divers had been swept away in a strong current — and their boat was more than a football field away.
"You're looking at it like, 'Oh, boy,'" recalls Turner. "We could see the boat. We just couldn't swim to it."
So began an ordeal straight out of the 2004 thriller "Open Water:" Turner, who had notched 85 previous dives, was stranded with her partner in open water known to be shark-infested for more than seven hours Feb. 5 as a storm lashed them with rain, waves crashed over their heads and the sun sank farther toward the horizon.
They had been about 10 minutes or so into what was to have been a half-hour dive.
"We turned around to go back the way we thought we had come, not realizing we had been drifting with the current away from the boat and not toward the mooring line," Turner said.
The air in their tanks was dwindling.
"We were both signaling, 'I don't know where the line is, I don't know where the boat is.'"
Then they saw it, about 100 yards away. They blew whistles, to no avail. Turner and her buddy inflated large inflatable "safety sausages" and tried to swim to their boat. "It was a futile effort," Turner said.
Then they saw a second boat, which was larger and appeared somewhat closer. "We started to swim to that boat, but that was a hard swim," recalled Turner. "It was pretty wavy. It was windy."
And, soon enough, that boat motored away, not seeing the two stranded divers.
"That's a very deflating feeling, I've got to tell you," Turner said.
But as daylight began to fade, Turner began to have other thoughts. "What if they don't find me?" she says she asked herself. "At least I'm going out doing what I love."
And then the two saw something in the distance.
Turner saw the airplane and thought she was about to be rescued.
"You're waving and all kinds of stuff," she recalled.
But the plane was far from them.
As the copter approached the first time, Bobby waved his orange safety sausage. But the device broke, and the copter apparently didn't see it. The two divers grew frustrated — "Expletives were issued at that time," Turner recalled.
They knew, though, that the copter would make a second pass. "I said, 'We have one more shot at this. He's going to come again. I gave him my sausage, I said, 'Here, take mine,' and he kept it high in the air.'"
Turner, meantime, pulled off one of her bright pink swim fins and waved that. At last, on its second pass, the helicopter saw the two divers and radioed the coordinates to one of the boats, which picked them up about a half an hour later, at 7:30 p.m.
"I'm going to be so tired of telling this story," she laughed. "I need to figure out a shorter way to tell it. 'We hung out in the ocean for a while. We got saved. That's it. No sharks. We didn't get eaten.'