Griffo
Contributor
It's a little hard to precisely define what the biggest lesson from this dive was. Maybe it was that you should vet your dive guide before a penetration dive just as you would your buddy. Or maybe it's the old adage of never being afraid of thumbing a dive. For me it highlights exactly what the term "never dive with dangerous divers" really means. For yesterday, we certainly were diving with dangerous divers.
After three weeks diving in the Solomons, my wife and I had spent a week and a bit staying and diving with Sangat dive lodge near Coron in the Philippines. We had a wonderful time diving with Georgio on wrecks such as the Irako, Kogyo Maru, Olympia Maru, Taiei Maru and several gunboats. They had a great setup including membrane Nitrox system which is pretty impressive for a remote eco-island dive resort. It was also obvious by how he dived that Georgio was an experienced tech diver, not just a resort diver taking people on wrecks.
Georgio took us into progressively more challenging penetrations, and we managed our way through the dives quite well I thought without any kind of incident. At all times we had clear instructions on the layout of the wreck and I always felt that we could extract ourselves alone given a worst case scenario.
We however ran out of time to do the Okikawa Maru. We'd heard of a great dive swimming in through the propeller shaft, and so after moving to another resort 30 minutes away, we booked in for a dive the next day with a recommended local dive shop -both locally and on SB this shop had been recommended.
So we gear up the next day in the shop, talk about the dive, and the owner tells us that we won't be allowed in until he does a checkout dive with us. I was glad that he had such a policy, but we wouldn't have another opportunity to dive the wreck, so with a bit of convincing, and with a text from Georgio we were allowed to do the penetration dive. On the boat we were teamed up with three other divers and the guide. The other three divers were a large German man, and two young backpackers. The instructions were quite light, but consisted of two important messages - that we should leave a decent gap of at least 5m when entering the shaft, and that after the first room, there were plenty of holes in the wreck where we could escape at any time if our air was running low.
We had our usual wing and can lights, backup lights etc, but the other divers had rental jackets and a single crappy hand held torch.
As soon we started descending to the wreck, I had my first doubts. The large German man was highly overweighted and was swimming vertically. His first act was to land on the wreck and destroy several corals. Just what kind of vetting he had undergone still escapes me. Maybe they consider that if you could breath you were ok?? Anyway, we continued to the prop shaft. At this point a mad rush started with the fat german climbing over people to be first in the hole, and the other two backpackers not far behind. The male backpacker appeared to be an ok diver, his girlfriend however was clearly not. I considered bailing then and there, but decided that I would go last and at worst case swim backwards back out of the shaft. And anyway, there were ample opportunities to escape the wreck right? And it cant be that bad in there if they are taking these novices in...
Well that started the worst 20 minutes underwater I've experienced. The divers ahead of us did nothing but create silt. The fat man basically walked his way through the wreck, and the girl didn't seem to know how to inflate a bc, so she basically crawled though it. My light struggled to penetrate the silt, and while following the wife at about one foot, I could only see the bright blue heel of her boots. By the time we were in the second room, I discovered three things. That there was none of the promised escape holes, that the place was so badly silted up that I could see nothing but silt, and that the guides method to navigate the wreck was to swim to the next doorway, and then grab the divers and inject them into the next room to silt that one up too. While he didn't touch me or my wife, my dive consisted of 20 minutes of following a pair of fins in a silt cloud and looking for an exit. The moment we got to a visible hole, I lied about my air, thumbed the dive, and headed for the surface. I think I'd used 100bar (half the Ali 80) in that time in 24m or so average depth, so I was obviously not exactly relaxed.
On the surface, words were had with the dive shop owner, who promised us our own guide for any further dives. They didn't seem to care about the fact that they took several completely unsuitable divers into a silty, deep penetration wreck from which none of them would have found their way out. If the guide had hit his head, or passed out, or simply disappeared, they'd all be dead. If one of them panicked when their cheap rented torches failed to penetrate the gloom, they'd be in all kinds of ****.
I know I'll cop flack here for even entering the wreck, but we'd been lulled into a sense of security based on recommendations and recent experiences with other dive shops on the other local wrecks. By the time I realized there was no easy exit, there was also a high risk in trying to turn back. I couldn't signal the guide that this was f'ing crazy diving so sat back and followed the silt cloud as I thought that was the least risky option by that point. But boy, would I never dive with those guys again. Talk about crazy stupid.
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After three weeks diving in the Solomons, my wife and I had spent a week and a bit staying and diving with Sangat dive lodge near Coron in the Philippines. We had a wonderful time diving with Georgio on wrecks such as the Irako, Kogyo Maru, Olympia Maru, Taiei Maru and several gunboats. They had a great setup including membrane Nitrox system which is pretty impressive for a remote eco-island dive resort. It was also obvious by how he dived that Georgio was an experienced tech diver, not just a resort diver taking people on wrecks.
Georgio took us into progressively more challenging penetrations, and we managed our way through the dives quite well I thought without any kind of incident. At all times we had clear instructions on the layout of the wreck and I always felt that we could extract ourselves alone given a worst case scenario.
We however ran out of time to do the Okikawa Maru. We'd heard of a great dive swimming in through the propeller shaft, and so after moving to another resort 30 minutes away, we booked in for a dive the next day with a recommended local dive shop -both locally and on SB this shop had been recommended.
So we gear up the next day in the shop, talk about the dive, and the owner tells us that we won't be allowed in until he does a checkout dive with us. I was glad that he had such a policy, but we wouldn't have another opportunity to dive the wreck, so with a bit of convincing, and with a text from Georgio we were allowed to do the penetration dive. On the boat we were teamed up with three other divers and the guide. The other three divers were a large German man, and two young backpackers. The instructions were quite light, but consisted of two important messages - that we should leave a decent gap of at least 5m when entering the shaft, and that after the first room, there were plenty of holes in the wreck where we could escape at any time if our air was running low.
We had our usual wing and can lights, backup lights etc, but the other divers had rental jackets and a single crappy hand held torch.
As soon we started descending to the wreck, I had my first doubts. The large German man was highly overweighted and was swimming vertically. His first act was to land on the wreck and destroy several corals. Just what kind of vetting he had undergone still escapes me. Maybe they consider that if you could breath you were ok?? Anyway, we continued to the prop shaft. At this point a mad rush started with the fat german climbing over people to be first in the hole, and the other two backpackers not far behind. The male backpacker appeared to be an ok diver, his girlfriend however was clearly not. I considered bailing then and there, but decided that I would go last and at worst case swim backwards back out of the shaft. And anyway, there were ample opportunities to escape the wreck right? And it cant be that bad in there if they are taking these novices in...
Well that started the worst 20 minutes underwater I've experienced. The divers ahead of us did nothing but create silt. The fat man basically walked his way through the wreck, and the girl didn't seem to know how to inflate a bc, so she basically crawled though it. My light struggled to penetrate the silt, and while following the wife at about one foot, I could only see the bright blue heel of her boots. By the time we were in the second room, I discovered three things. That there was none of the promised escape holes, that the place was so badly silted up that I could see nothing but silt, and that the guides method to navigate the wreck was to swim to the next doorway, and then grab the divers and inject them into the next room to silt that one up too. While he didn't touch me or my wife, my dive consisted of 20 minutes of following a pair of fins in a silt cloud and looking for an exit. The moment we got to a visible hole, I lied about my air, thumbed the dive, and headed for the surface. I think I'd used 100bar (half the Ali 80) in that time in 24m or so average depth, so I was obviously not exactly relaxed.
On the surface, words were had with the dive shop owner, who promised us our own guide for any further dives. They didn't seem to care about the fact that they took several completely unsuitable divers into a silty, deep penetration wreck from which none of them would have found their way out. If the guide had hit his head, or passed out, or simply disappeared, they'd all be dead. If one of them panicked when their cheap rented torches failed to penetrate the gloom, they'd be in all kinds of ****.
I know I'll cop flack here for even entering the wreck, but we'd been lulled into a sense of security based on recommendations and recent experiences with other dive shops on the other local wrecks. By the time I realized there was no easy exit, there was also a high risk in trying to turn back. I couldn't signal the guide that this was f'ing crazy diving so sat back and followed the silt cloud as I thought that was the least risky option by that point. But boy, would I never dive with those guys again. Talk about crazy stupid.
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