PeterNBiddle
Contributor
After years of reading (and occasionally feeling anxious) about down currents in Cozumel, I got to experience a real live Cozumel down current today. Here's what happened:
Our first five was a nice nearly current-free run Tormentos. I( was diving sans my wife buddy for the day) At the end, when we were on the surface and getting on the boat, we got a very significant upwelling that smoothed out the chop like glass and slowly spun the boat like a top. Nothing too weird about that, right?
For our second dive we headed north to check out Eagle Ray wall. Our DM checked the current and at the top it was heading North so we dropped in. It turned out we were a decent distance off the wall, as the water underneath us was dark blue and I couldn't see any bottom.
I dropped somewhat slowly because I've been needing more time for my ears to adjust, while others dropped fairly quickly. At about 20 or 30 feet I noticed a distinct shift and I felt like I was heading down faster than I ought to be. Two of the divers in our group looked like they were rocketing down straight under me with at least 50 feet of depth on me and they weren't slowing down. We were on EAN 36 and I became worried about depth. At least one person looked to be shooting past 100 feet while I was watching him and I didn't see him check his depth. (He later told me he hit 121 feet.)
At 60 feet and still deep blue underneath I was kicking hard for the wall and found that it was slow going - the current I was in was both down and out from the wall. I kept feathering my BCD and tried to use the current to plane into the wall. Rather than scrub the dive I figured if we could get to our agreed upon destination - the top of the wall - then the current might be alright and we'd have an okay dive of it. At the least we'd be where we had agreed we were supposed to go.
I eventually made it to the wall at about 80 feet and lost another 10 (my comp says I hit 94 feet max) before i was able to stop. The DM had passed me a minute earlier after telling us to stick together going about 10 knots (okay, maybe less) on her way back out to help others.
Two of us had made it to the wall so 4 were still somewhere else. The two of us (talk about insta buddies! My official buddy was helping the DM with other people) decided to go up the incline to the top of the wall. From there I figured we'd have a better view and could decide if the dive was a total scrub or if everyone else showed up.
Stuck to the wall at 94 feet I never felt desperate - I have an absolutely massive amount of lift in my BC and I'm a decent swimmer so I figured between those two things plus my SMB and 4 pounds of weights I could ditch I could always get up. Once we were on the wall I was also much less worried about going past the EAN 36 depth limit but I didn't want to get dragged to Playa Del Carmen either, so up the wall seemed like a better bet than out into the blue.
The other diver and I made it to the top of the wall and I wrote him this note:
Yes, "fem" minutes are "few". Stress typo maybe?
So, we waited. And waited. Aaaaaaand waited. Nothing. Not even a bubble. (The current wasn't too bad at the edge of the wall so at least it was a fairly easy wait.) We decided to do our safety stop and surface.
This meant I got to play with my sausage (ha ha ha!) which I always love doing. I filled it up generously, figuring we might be blown all to hell all over the coast and I wanted the boat viz, and I dumped my BC to empty, not sure of what would happen between the wall and our stop. The currents were doing pretty much everything they could to be amusing.
I locked the line at 18 feet and noticed that we were back in a significant down current. I could tell because I kept bobbing down on the end of the line and had to hold on quite tight and some of our bubbles were going down, not up, which is fairly unusual. Bubbles aren't supposed to do that. Additionally a lot of the sargassum that should have been floating above us, on the top of the water, was going down past us to the bottom.
At one point when I checked on my dive mate I saw a funnel about 50 feet behind him. It went from the surface all the way to the bottom and was pulling sargassum and bubbles all the way down to the sand. It was freaky cool and scary looking. He moved much closer to me, and I felt extra good about having the SMB out.
After a proper safety stop we surfaced. I manually inflated my BC to max and topped off the SMB so it was sticking straight up. We spotted the boat about 400 yards north of us picking up somebody. As they were doing that I saw another SMB go up about 800 yards north and a couple hundred yards west of us, so in pretty short order we had been blown all over the place. Our boat captain pinged the nearest boat to us and after a few mins that dive boat came over to us and we told him we were fine and he radioed back to our boat. Our boat then picked up the further out group and then came back for us.
Dive time was 16 mins, float time maybe 20-30, max depth was 94 feet for me and I burned about 1200 PSI.Nobody was hurt, the DM did an extremely good job securing everyone and we dove shallows next and saw an octopus, so I got that going for me.
Our first five was a nice nearly current-free run Tormentos. I( was diving sans my wife buddy for the day) At the end, when we were on the surface and getting on the boat, we got a very significant upwelling that smoothed out the chop like glass and slowly spun the boat like a top. Nothing too weird about that, right?
For our second dive we headed north to check out Eagle Ray wall. Our DM checked the current and at the top it was heading North so we dropped in. It turned out we were a decent distance off the wall, as the water underneath us was dark blue and I couldn't see any bottom.
I dropped somewhat slowly because I've been needing more time for my ears to adjust, while others dropped fairly quickly. At about 20 or 30 feet I noticed a distinct shift and I felt like I was heading down faster than I ought to be. Two of the divers in our group looked like they were rocketing down straight under me with at least 50 feet of depth on me and they weren't slowing down. We were on EAN 36 and I became worried about depth. At least one person looked to be shooting past 100 feet while I was watching him and I didn't see him check his depth. (He later told me he hit 121 feet.)
At 60 feet and still deep blue underneath I was kicking hard for the wall and found that it was slow going - the current I was in was both down and out from the wall. I kept feathering my BCD and tried to use the current to plane into the wall. Rather than scrub the dive I figured if we could get to our agreed upon destination - the top of the wall - then the current might be alright and we'd have an okay dive of it. At the least we'd be where we had agreed we were supposed to go.
I eventually made it to the wall at about 80 feet and lost another 10 (my comp says I hit 94 feet max) before i was able to stop. The DM had passed me a minute earlier after telling us to stick together going about 10 knots (okay, maybe less) on her way back out to help others.
Two of us had made it to the wall so 4 were still somewhere else. The two of us (talk about insta buddies! My official buddy was helping the DM with other people) decided to go up the incline to the top of the wall. From there I figured we'd have a better view and could decide if the dive was a total scrub or if everyone else showed up.
Stuck to the wall at 94 feet I never felt desperate - I have an absolutely massive amount of lift in my BC and I'm a decent swimmer so I figured between those two things plus my SMB and 4 pounds of weights I could ditch I could always get up. Once we were on the wall I was also much less worried about going past the EAN 36 depth limit but I didn't want to get dragged to Playa Del Carmen either, so up the wall seemed like a better bet than out into the blue.
The other diver and I made it to the top of the wall and I wrote him this note:
Yes, "fem" minutes are "few". Stress typo maybe?
So, we waited. And waited. Aaaaaaand waited. Nothing. Not even a bubble. (The current wasn't too bad at the edge of the wall so at least it was a fairly easy wait.) We decided to do our safety stop and surface.
This meant I got to play with my sausage (ha ha ha!) which I always love doing. I filled it up generously, figuring we might be blown all to hell all over the coast and I wanted the boat viz, and I dumped my BC to empty, not sure of what would happen between the wall and our stop. The currents were doing pretty much everything they could to be amusing.
I locked the line at 18 feet and noticed that we were back in a significant down current. I could tell because I kept bobbing down on the end of the line and had to hold on quite tight and some of our bubbles were going down, not up, which is fairly unusual. Bubbles aren't supposed to do that. Additionally a lot of the sargassum that should have been floating above us, on the top of the water, was going down past us to the bottom.
At one point when I checked on my dive mate I saw a funnel about 50 feet behind him. It went from the surface all the way to the bottom and was pulling sargassum and bubbles all the way down to the sand. It was freaky cool and scary looking. He moved much closer to me, and I felt extra good about having the SMB out.
After a proper safety stop we surfaced. I manually inflated my BC to max and topped off the SMB so it was sticking straight up. We spotted the boat about 400 yards north of us picking up somebody. As they were doing that I saw another SMB go up about 800 yards north and a couple hundred yards west of us, so in pretty short order we had been blown all over the place. Our boat captain pinged the nearest boat to us and after a few mins that dive boat came over to us and we told him we were fine and he radioed back to our boat. Our boat then picked up the further out group and then came back for us.
Dive time was 16 mins, float time maybe 20-30, max depth was 94 feet for me and I burned about 1200 PSI.Nobody was hurt, the DM did an extremely good job securing everyone and we dove shallows next and saw an octopus, so I got that going for me.
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