Nitrodiverrr
Registered
Saturday I was diving from one of two private boats on the Vermont side of lake Champlain. The two boats were each flying a large dive flag, and were anchored about 100' apart in less than 10' of water on a shoal. One bost was about 150' the other 250' from a green can marker out in the middle of the lake. There were three divers in the water from each boat. Each group was pulling one divers down flating flag. When the 1st group surfaced including myself, there were sailboats from as small as 10' to the majority which were probably 30-40' long going around the can, next to our boats and very close to the still submerged divers floating dive flags. Many of the sailboats were within 100' of our boats and within 50' of the divers dive flag. Divers from group had to yell at the sailboats to watch out for the divers still in the water. One of the sailboats even circled all the way back around to us to yell "that because they are not under power, they don't have to stay away from dive flags". Actually Vermont law restricts all boats from coming within 200' of dive flags. We surmised that the can was a turning point as the sailboats came from the direction of Burlington and then headed south. The operator of a hard bottomed inflatable that seemed to be a race monitor ignored our request to come over to us for about 10 minutes. When he finally did approach, he was told to keep his race off from the heads of our divers, he then went out beyond the can to tell incoming boats to give us some space. No one from our group was hit. The incident was immediatly reported to the coastguard, who said they would send a boat out from Burlington. The coastguard raced past us almost an hour after the incident first started. We were on the site for a couple of hours and never heard anything from the coastguard. We had written down a dozen boat numbers (from sailboats that came within 100') to give to the coastguard. Being that the coastguard never came back to us, it would appear that diver safty isn't one of their higher priorities. This assumption is partly based on a similair sailboat incident a couple of years ago at a diffrent spot on the same lake to one of our 6 divers. The coastguard had been notified that time as well. You would think that the coastguard would have notified the offending yacht club after the prior incident. Divers are trained to not surface when they hear a boat overhead, but how do you know not to come up, when you can't hear a sailboat ?