Dan Grenier lost at sea.

[smlnd]

…How is Fiji so different from that, except that the search for the divers started much earlier? We know Dan and Danielle went missing in an area of open sea with strong currents on a day when wind and sea conditions were unfavorable both for spotting people in the water and for their survival. Dan had done that dive many many times before, and the usual procedures were followed by the boat, but the other divers reported that the current was going a different direction than expected on the other side of the reef. Currents in the passage are usually fairly predictable from the tide tables, but that day they weren't….

MaryMuir,

Thank you again for the detailed answers. You shared a lot of elements and what you say about conditions that day makes some sense of what happened. What is referred to here as a current dive is what we call a drift dive. When you go into the water you know that you are going to travel a significant distance. For this type dive, done in many places, the boat generally follows the divers doing the drift dive. Usually a leader carries a line to a float on the surface; the boat follows behind keeping the float in sight. Sometimes, if conditions are good and with groups of divers the boat will just follow the bubbles and the leader will gather the group at the end of the dive and then send a signaling device on a line to the surface. Its pretty clear from the description that the ocean was too rough to follow bubbles and that wasn’t the plan here anyway.

It’s interesting to hear that this is not at all how this dive was planned and I take it that it was done this way many many times as a practice, if I understand correctly. The boat drops them off, leaves and goes somewhere else and then picks them up later in some expected destination? Was that point out in the open ocean far away from any islands or reefs? How far apart are the drop off point and the expected link up point?

Again thanks, you are a wonderful friend. Please note I mean no disrespect with these questions but am still trying to understand how this happened. One of the things we do as instructors and dive leaders is to learn from every accident or incident. Sometimes we change techniques. Sometimes we gain other knowledge. Some times we just learn new respect for conditions.

The grief of families and loved ones is incredible. There is no way around that.

There is also a great frustration for fellow dive professionals to see this happen to people doing what we love to do. Not knowing what went wrong greatly compounds it, but not to compare with that for the families.

BC

 

[MaryMuir]

Current diving in the Vatuira Passage is not the same as drift diving in Cozumel. There are no long "walls" there, it's more like diving very large coral heads or sea mounts. I've done drift diving in Cozumel and it wasn't nearly as challenging as current diving in the passage can be. Also, I don't remember the dive master in Cozumel ever using a float; the boat always followed our bubbles.

The standard practice on Dan's boat was to drop the divers in the water at one end of the reef and then go moor the boat at the other end and wait for them to arrive. It was never that far a distance, and the mooring was usually around the "corner" of the reef in the lee. If you went all the way around the corner, you ended up on the other side of the same reef with the current pushing you back the way you came. Whatever way the current was running determined which end you got dropped off at. Most of these reefs can be dived in either direction.

Because the top of the reef is so close to the surface (at low tide some of them break the surface), following bubbles was not usually an option. Also, the boat had to watch out for the current pushing it onto the top of the reef.

"Mary's Maytag" is a coral pillar just off a second, deeper stretch of wall from "Garden of Eden". It was kind of like a lower step to the main wall. But it is deeper and it tends to get more current than the main wall.

Dan and Danielle were only a short distance from the other divers, but on the other side of the reef. They were dropped second. So the boat had to go back to the rendezvous point for the paying guests, as they were due to surface first. Dan and Danielle were supposed to rendezvous with the boat at that same point, which was the area by the mooring in the lee of the reef. Usually the divers doing maytag swim around the coral pillar for a bit, then head up to the main reef wall and let the current take them to the area around the mooring. That area is sheltered from current, and a good spot to do safety stops.

The other divers surfaced on time, and began their surface interval. Dan and Danielle did not surface. Exactly what happened is a mystery that will probably never be solved.-( Sometimes the sea refuses to yield its secrets.

 

[smlnd]

MaryMuir,

What you describe sounds quite controlled and different from what I typically call drift diving. I would expect nothing less from Dan. Of course, when one is diving in a place without emergency assistance available one must take that strongly into account.

A few years ago a couple of gals went missing off one of our local dive boats in our SoCal. Channel Islands. The US Coast Guard was called and they sent a Cutter and a Helicopter. The Helo found them about 5 miles away and the whole thing took about 4 hours. Without the Helo, who knows, probably not a good outcome?

I never made it to Dan’s resorts in Fiji. Our most recent talk was a few years ago at DEMA, I don’t remember which one. I did make a couple of trips to Taveuni to dive the Somosomo Strait with dive groups. The currents are to be respected. I remember an entry and descent down a weighted line with the divers going hand over hand down the line while flapping in the current like flags on a pole in a strong wind. A gal and her buddy did an unplanned drift dive. She was totally focused on her pictures and breathed her tank empty (very experienced but too comfortable). She went to her buddy and linked up with his alternate air, but in sharing they couldn’t fight the current so they went for a long ride. The divers coming back on board and the boat crew saw their safety sausage going away in the distance but the boat couldn’t leave until all the rest of the divers were back. (The boat did not have an underwater recall device, as is used out here.) It ended fine with lots of public kidding and a private chat on safety.

On another dive, another day, in the same area we saw another dive boat going back and forth in the strait. We talked to them on the radio and they said that they were missing a couple divers. Our crew said that we would search the section in the direction of returning to base. We found their divers and called the boat on the radio.

These are just a couple of incidents that I witnessed in one-week visits to a single resort. When the outcomes are good it’s easy to shrug them off and not look at the big picture on risks. Having to search for divers after dives especially without the support of the US Coast Guard or other capable assistance should raise flags, so to speak.

Thanks again for your wonderful insight and for letting me share a couple of personal Sea Stories. I think that Dan would remember well the term Sea Stories.

BC

 

[MaryMuir]

Just a quick question, BC, what's an underwater recall device? Is that different from the surface float on a line that you referred to earlier?

 

[smlnd]

U/W Recall

Its housing shape is a disk about a foot in diameter and it’s a couple inches thick. It’s lowered into the water on a line and the line has the power cord attached. When it is put in the water and activated, it sounds like a police siren and it’s loud. The possible use is part of the initial briefing before diving starts on every trip. The divers are told if they hear this sound to make a safe controlled ascent, signal a big OK, and look to the dive boat for a signal on what to do. If they get a hand signal from the crew, come here, and then return to the boat quickly.

That would be for a need to move the boat, for example, to get divers who can’t make it back. This is seldom required because the dive boats have either small inflatable motorboats or ocean kayaks that they can use to chase divers. Also long drift lines with floats are deployed whenever there are strong currents around the boat.

The other signal the divers may get is stay (the general hand signal to stay or stop). This is actually more commonly used in my experience. It means that the boat needs to power up and engage the props and they want to know that the divers are away from the boat and on the surface. Usually that’s because the boat has started to drag the anchor and the boat needs to reposition.

None of this happens very often but like any emergency equipment it and the training are ready. The crews are trained and ready with oxygen, AED, CPR, first aid and procedures for a helo pickup off the boat.

Most of our dive boats are in the 60 to 90 foot length range, so they are larger than the common resort boat. I don’t know how much electrical power it takes to run these recall devices. The boats have plenty because the compressors are generally electric motor driven and the diesel engines drive the generators.

There may be other types of recalls but that’s what we use.

BC

 

[smlnd]

Undercurrent

The October issue of Undercurrent has a half page article about Dan and Danielle vanishing. It mentions several points. It has details from a diving passenger on the boat that day regarding how things happened. It mentions the Fiji police spokesman’s theory. It mentions the use of a psychic.

Most importantly to me, it states as a fact that in addition to Danielle’s SCUBA Assembly that her wetsuit was found by the villagers in Yasawa seventy miles from where this started. It says that there was no sign of shark action. Was her intact wetsuit found?

Undercurrent has done positive reports on Dan’s operations in Fiji for years. Is there anyone here who can say that the wetsuit finding report is wrong?

BC

 

[manfish]

Bruce-

It's Brad Doane. It's been a long time since you Dan, Dave, James and I were all together in Marine Tech...

Plese send me an email with your phone number so I can call you to catch up and answer all the questions you might still have. Sorry to take so long to see your posts and contact you, but I had to disconnect from the world for a little while.

Hope all is well.

Brad

 

[smlnd]

Hi Brad,

It was very good to get your message. I replied to you in less than an hour (yesterday afternoon, PDT) using the “send a private message feature” of this SCUBA Board. It indicated that it worked, but who knows.

I sent you my phone, e-mail and regular PO Box info. Everything is unchanged from back in the MT days except we didn’t use e-mail back in the olden days. I’m listed in the directory and information.

If you didn’t get my message yesterday, please post here again. If you don’t want to post your e-mail address in the message so I can by-pass this board, say so, and I’ll post a one-time use e-mail address that we can use to get started.

BC

 

[smlnd]

Brad,

I responded to you Weds. afternoon, it’s now Friday night.

I think that I may have found the problem. I just ran a test using this SCUBA Board private message feature. The private message doesn’t send a message that goes to your regular e-mail, it just shows up internally here within the board. If you don’t look here you don’t even know that you have a message. It did not indicate that I had a message waiting anywhere that I could see until I found its inbox.

Brad, send me any message at:

sftydvr@juno.com

Then post here that you’ve done it. This address is a spam collector that I normally only check and dump every couple of weeks. It will get us away from this hidden address system.

I do have questions. The Undercurrent article has a pretty interesting timeline for that day, for starters.

BTW, where are you?

BC

 

[ScubaTom34]

At this point, I think we are all realizing there is not going to be a good ending to this accident. I hope everyone involved in the search will share all possible information on the events so that we can learn from this terrible loss of our good friend.

Thanks, Mary Muir, for filling in lots of the details on Danielle's gear and the swimsuit that wasn't her's. I also agree totally with your assessment of the Dive Alert horn in the conditions there.

Last December we dove Pure Magic in similar conditions. I spent the dive doing video of Dan and Cory. Dan was practicing buddy breathing with him, shutting his air off a couple times to make sure he reacted right, which he did. Then they played with a bunch of cleaner shrimp on Magic Mountian, Dan had them crawling into his mouth, then Cory tried it too. The dive plan was to end the dive with a safety stop hanging on the mooring line atop Magic Mountain in the current, then surface and be picked up by the boat. The problem came when the mooring line was missing. You could hide from the current at about 20 feet at the top of the mountain, but once above that, the current was too much to hold your position against, at least with a big video system. I stayed at 20 feet as long as I could, then went to ten and was trying to hold my position when I saw the boat come back after picking up other divers from down current. At that point, I decided to stop fighting the current, relax and go with the flow. Even though I cut that stop short at three minutes, when I surfaced, the boat was 200-300 yards away in 4-5 foot seas. My first move was to blast on my Dive Alert horn every time I was on a crest and could see the boat. As Mary points out, when the wind is wrong and the water rough, they can't hear it. Next, I started fumbling around trying to get my sausage out while hanging on to my video system, very hard to do. Fortunately, Alisi was on top of the cabin scaning the water and looked my way while I was on a crest and saw me wave.

Ever since Dan and Danielle went missing, I've gone over and over this dive in my mind. What they were in was probably much more extreme both in regards to current and surface conditions. Knowing how fast I was moved away from the boat that I was directly under three minutes earlier, I can easily understand how they could have been totally out of reach before they surfaced.

So what to do in the future? Two things have been foremost in my mind. Early on, George Taylor mentioned that never again will he buy black gear for rental equipment. I had never thought of it, but bright colored BC's and wetsuits are a great idea in a search situation. I know Dan, just like me, always had a black one. Hell, 30 some years ago when we started diving, that is all there was, and I never gave it a thought. The bright colors looked great on the pretty girls.

The other thing I have thought of, is a review I read a year or two ago of a safety sausage developed by photographer Stephen Frink, stephenfrink.com. This is a 6 foot tall, BC mounted giant sausage. He developed it to be a hands-free system for people with their hands full of camera gear. Inflate your BC, pull the ripcord, and it's up there. At the time, I decided a six foot sausage was overkill, and it was a bit pricey too. Now, the advantage of that giant, that is permanently errect as long as your BC is inflated, appears priceless. You would be visible at a much longer range to search vessels and planes, plus, how long could you hold up that hand-held version we all carry? Think of the boat that is looking for you, that is just out of your sight. I'm not sure if that sausage can be retrofitted to my Zeagle Ranger BC, but I intend to have one before my next trip into similar waters.

I still hope my good friend is found. My hat is off to all the family members of both Dan and Danielle who have posted to this list, you have handled this extremely well, and have my deepest sympathy.

Tom Reese