All quiet below - Chaos on the Surface

A cautionary tale of Not Knowing

A while back I did a rescue diver certification. Our instructor had responded to many intense diving rescues, including 2 body recoveries when it had gone horribly wrong. He drove the group hard in our scenarios to prepare us for the realities of rescue. His diligence didn’t stop my epic error.

We finished a final dive in bleak and stormy weather. Most of our group had dried off and changed into warm clothing. My buddy and I, last out of the water, were still partly kitted up. A stranger in dive gear told us she had lost her buddy and had not seen them for some time. Perhaps this was our final scenario, but the set up was perfect — we didn’t know if it was real or not.

Because we were still kitted up, my buddy and I rushed back onto the jetty to see if we could see tell tale bubbles of a diver in the water. Even though we were told the missing person was last seen on the north side, our eyes were quickly drawn to bubbles on the south. We leapt immediately to a conclusion and to action. This must be our missing diver! We heroically dove in and followed the bubbles down in murky conditions. There’s a diver kneeling on the bottom.

Must be our person, surely! We surfaced with them, checked they were OK and spotted more bubbles. Despite being told we had one missing diver, and without checking with our team, or the person who reported them missing, down we went again to ‘rescue’ a second diver. We ‘rescued’ six more in short order, before an irate instructor (from a rival school) surfaced to ask what the hell we thought we were doing with her beginner class. The poor students had been waiting in a circle on the bottom for the instructor to test them individually on gear recovery.

They went back to class. We still had a missing diver, presumably somewhere on the north side of the jetty. Fortunately, the rest of our rescue team had found them and saved the day.

Our instructor was laughing hard through the debrief — despite an epic mess of the scenario, we actually passed because we were able to take significant lessons from our errors.

It’s incredibly easy to feel certain about something, where the certainty is based on flimsy info at best. If we’d taken the time to ask a few of last week's questions, the scenario would have played out very differently.

I’d love to hear from you if you have an experience where what you thought was happening turned out to be something different. Hopefully, like me you got to bank a lesson for relatively low cost.