divers body found in wreck

Just read a body of a diver was found in a wreck here in Rhode Island. The wreck was in 130 feet of water, known as a tech diver difficult dive. The diver was diving with 2 buddies on the wreck. They surfaced and reported him missing. HELLO??? Is something wrong here??? I always cry about buddies leaving buddies, so here is another one. The body was lost last October, 2002. Why was it not recovered then? The 2 divers who found the body marked it with a buoy and it was easily recovered by the Harbormaster yesterday. We will never know if the dead diver was diving with 2 clowns who didn't care about him or if he took off. I guess at 130' depth you really can't surface and wait for your missing buddy. How sad.

Very sad.

Do you have any more information, newpaper link, etc?

Which wreck was this???

Where did you hear about this???

The diver who passed away was a board member on the Rodale's message board.

Here is a link to that discussion as well as the newspaper article.

http://www.scubadiving.com/talk/read.php?f=1&i=773049&t=773049

Here is a link to a discussion about this over on scubadiving.com. Joe Pasquale was a relatively frequent poster on that board, although I never met him in person.

He was originally declared missing back in October 2002. Based on accounts I read in the media at that time, it appeared that he signalled his buddies that he wanted to ascend and that they should remain on the bottom. When they surfaced, they could not locate him.

I would not characterize this as buddy failure. Joe was an experienced diver. He made the decision himself to ascend alone. Something unfortunately went wrong during his ascent.

Thoughts and prayers go out to his friends and family, who hopefully will get some closure from this. This link is slightly more current than Wendy's.

http://www.scubadiving.com/talk/read.php?f=1&i=773833&t=773833

The Providence Journal article is what I read this morning. I guess the anchor line got snagged on the wreak. Joe Pasquale needed to surface because he was not feeling well. He may have passed out on the way up and sank to the bottom, being lucid enough to drop his weight belt. But the belt got snagged on his catch bag. And he passed out again.They did their deep dive and went down to free the anchor. I am not that knowledgeable in decompression diving. What would make Joe pass out?

In 1980 I belonged to a dive club, we had a 29' cabin cruiser. We dove the U-Boat off Block Island in 110' feet. After our 10 minute or so non-decompression dive we went back to the boat. Our 60 pound danforth anchor was snagged on the wreak. The captain of our boat told me to go back down and get the anchor. I denied him without proper surface intervale time and he got mad and got the anchor. Nothing happened to him, I guess the Navy tables were very conservative at the time. My point is, anchor lines do get snagged on wreaks and they need to be freed.
But everyone needs to stick together.

At least he didn't die at his post.

joed once bubbled...
Just read a body of a diver was found in a wreck here in Rhode Island. The wreck was in 130 feet of water, known as a tech diver difficult dive. The diver was diving with 2 buddies on the wreck. They surfaced and reported him missing. HELLO??? Is something wrong here??? I always cry about buddies leaving buddies, so here is another one. The body was lost last October, 2002. Why was it not recovered then? The 2 divers who found the body marked it with a buoy and it was easily recovered by the Harbormaster yesterday. We will never know if the dead diver was diving with 2 clowns who didn't care about him or if he took off. I guess at 130' depth you really can't surface and wait for your missing buddy. How sad.

Click to expand...

There might have been more to it than meets the eye. If someone is disoriented and lost inside a wreck, especially if it's silted out, then going to look for him might make you a victim too. You don't know why they got separated, how much time/gass they had to mount a rescue attempt etc etc etc. It could very well be that their actions actually saved two lives by not doing anything stupid.

R..

If they have retrieved his dive computer. They should be able to figure out if he did anything wrong.

Surely an autopsy will also provide some info.

You could have a hole in the heart and not realise it or something wrong with you and not know it until it happens. Some people die while diving because something happened to them that may have happened to them on land (a month or so ago a 40 yr old guy died in Bermuda of a heart attack after he surfaced from a shallow dive, but after the autopsy they said he would have had a heart attack around the same time even if he hadn't have been diving).

You can get DCS while following all the tables and being really conservative. You could be dehydrated which can increase the risk of DCS or just have weird body tissue and really bad luck.

At least he died doing what he loved.

Just thought I might have scared some new diver......


The chances of something bad actually happening to you underwater if you follow all the safety precautions and are medically fit for diving as far as you know are very very slim! It does happen to a very tiny number of people but if you worry about it happening to you, you might aswell not leave your house for fear of being struck by lightning on a sunny day.

so go dive and have fun