AaronBBrown wrote...
I heard about that accident. What happened? Which site was he at? Every time I hear a story, it is different.
Actually, it's funny you should say that, as I've heard several different versions of the story myself. Jimmy was actually my mother's cousin, but our entire family is very close.
Jimmy was lobster diving with three other people off of his/my family's property in Rockport. The seas were kind of rough, and one of the group was having trouble with trim/buoyancy. All four of them surfaced after about 20 minutes or so, and three of them got out.
At this point, Jimmy observed he still had 15-20 minutes of air left, and told the group he was going to head down for "just a couple more minutes" to grab some lobsters for dinner.
After 20 minutes, his wife started to get worried. However, she didn't call the CG right away. She had recently done that on another occasion and he had gotten pretty angry about it. So she waited for another 15 minutes or so and then called Jimmy's father and the Coast Guard.
Jimmy's father called my uncle and cousin, who were working on a house in Gloucester, and asked them to go try to find him. They showed up at the house and put on some wetsuits and snorkeling gear and jumped in the rough surf. At this point Jimmy had been missing for over an hour.
My uncle told my cousin prepare himself, as Jimmy had been under for too long to survive. My poor cousin found him after about a half-hour of searching. He was face down, close to the rocks, in about 15 ft of water, with his BC and tank floating loosely above his back. His mask was filled with blood. He had no air in his tank. His weight belt was still on, and he was missing a flipper and a glove.
The whole scene was pretty gruesome. There were boats everywhere, and a couple of helicopters. The media took footage of my uncle and cousin in the water, helping to pull him up onto the Harbormaster's boat, and showed it on the news. Pretty gross. The cause of death was listed as "drowning", and an autopsy failed to show any other cause of death.
Something happened to him down there (OOA, got stuck, who knows) and he was helpless to get out. And at a location where he had grown up swimming, snorkeling, and diving.
Another uncle of mine and my brother were doing some landscape work at the house when the group showed up to dive. My uncle actually said to him "Man, it's kind of rough out there today, don't you think you should reconsider?".
In hindsight, I feel there were several rules broken, including the abstract karma rule of "if it doesn't feel right, don't do it". Solo diving is one of the others.
Just goes to show that it happens when you're least expecting it. Maybe that's why it happens...
Matt
