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Almost Lost
So, Deco Martini and his sidekick Reservoir Mike were in Belize the 10th through the 18th at a small dive resort on Turneffe Atoll.
We were on the east side of the atoll. Our caye gets as narrow as 50 feet between the outer atoll and inner atoll. The distance between the shore of the outer atoll side and the sea wall is around 400 ft. Several channels through the sea wall let the boats take divers out.
A rich group of medical professionals showed up middle of the week and had the scratch to get the resort to send them on an impromptu blue hole trip. That meant they took the big boat that day and the only experienced boat captain there with them. In place of him we got the waiter from the restaurant.
Typical dive there is big stride off boat, head one way or the other along the reef, boat follows your bubbles, picks you up. Since we had the waiter on the boat, our DM deployed a sausage instead. The waiter was not experienced enough to follow bubbles. We were doing our afternoon third dive (and last dive for the day). There were 5-6 foot swells at the surface. The DM, Martini, and Reservoir all headed into the water (we were the only divers there that week, the rest were snorkelers). After a few minutes, the DM deployed the sausage (uh oh).
We had a splendid dive with some eagle rays being the highlight. At 50 minutes we headed up for our safety stop. I surfaced with 1800 PSI in my tank. Swells were still really big but at least we didn't have rollers. We looked around for the boat. "Too Sweet" (the waiter's nickname) was nowhere to be found. I lifted my ikelite housing and made sure to flask it in each direction since is has a mirror on the side. After a few minutes, the DM told us to go back down to 20 feet and follow his lead.
Now, at this point me and Mike have forgotten where we really are. Being unfamiliar with the shorelines and cayes and not really remembering the trip from the resort to this dive spot compounded with the fact that we don't come up where we go in. We spend a while at 20 watching the bottom get closer to us. Eventually we came up once again. No sign of the boat. Another ikelite 360 rotation. The DM points to something white in the distance. Its a channel marker, we're going to swim through the shallow channel and try to avoid getting drug over coral heads and rocks by the swells.
We head back down to fifteen feet and I am having a problem staying down. At first I think its the swells and just kick harder (mistake). I check my air and I'm fine, my tank isn't light yet. I'm trying harder thinking I just need to get below the swell action. My lungs fill up and make it harder to stay down. Here I make a judgement call and abort before I panic. I head up. Empty my lungs. And I am cool. The DM pops up and asks if I'm okay. I tell him yeah. (turns out the second time we came up, I didn't purge all the air out of my BC before trying to get back down, doh). He plays it safe and the three of us back paddle through the channel.
Pretty soon were front paddling though. At one point it gets down to 4-5 feet deep but the swells are throwing us through nice pristine soft corals which were trying to avoid. We get to the other side where the waters calm. All I see are mangrove shores which could mean crocodiles. The DM points behind me and says "the pier is that way". I turn and sure enough the resort pier is there. Its 400 feet straight to the seawall, but we are north of the pier also. Our dive dropoff was somewhere north of the resort and on the dive we had spent 50 minutes traveling south back towards the resort as it turned out. Its about 15 feet deep where we are and very calm. Everyone is tired because we've spend an extra half hour paddling already.
15 minutes later a dinghy from the resort pulls up beside us. And loads us up. The resort manager barely knowing how to drive a boat gently accepts my criticism that he should shut off the prop when he pulls up to us. One of the snorkelers was on the dock and had alerted the manager immediately. It took him about 10 more minutes to convince the manager to send the dinghy for us though.
The blue hold boat showed up a few minutes later and Too Sweet's boat was behind it. He didn't know we had deployed the sausage late and felt like a complete and utter failure. As his ship was pulling up at the dock I made a fist hitting hand motion and he nearly jumped over the side the boat. I was just joking with him though.
To be honest, as seen as we realized we were lost, I hit record on the underwater vidcam. While we were back paddling we were cracking jokes "hey, isn't this how Open Water started?" and having a pretty good time.
And that was my near miss in Belize.
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