Drift diving is NOT so relaxing!

[soggybadger]

The reality is that we teach divers who can barely swim, who can barely stay alive in a current free, wave free swimming pool, who has only dive in fresh water lake and quarries for the OW and AOW cards....

And you throw them out in a boat, rough sea, currents.... And expect them, by their number of dives, or rating... to handle the challenges and complexities of current and boat dives.

I think the flamers need to keep their flame thrower to themselves... and let people share their personal experiences so that average joe divers can get insight on how to handle situations that they have not been exposed to.

Fair one imo.

 

[hroark2112]

Drift diving can be very relaxing. Skills are important and being diligent with your air is your responsibility at all times, as is being properly equipped and weighted.

What do you do if you find yourself low on air at any depth? What were you trained to do? Let your buddy know you are low and head to the surface. Solo? Great, you should have an alternate air source (as you were trained to do in your SDI solo course) so you're fine.

Getting on a boat in "sporty" conditions happens to us all if we dive enough. Happens all the time here in NC, splash in 2-3' waves and surface in 6-8' seas. Happens in Florida too. I've been thrown off a ladder by an unexpected wave, glad I had my regulator still in my mouth as I was trained to do and had my BC inflated.

I've only done one boat dive without an SMB. Surfaced solo, well away from the boat, I could barely see the boat in the distance. When I got picked up, the captain chewed my ass and told me never to leave his boat without an SMB again. I never have left a boat without one again.

Knowing the skills & equipment you'll need for the diving you'll be doing is important.

 

[johndiver999]

Some of the suppositions put forth by the OP seem a little off base. Such as you need to vent the BC to climb a ladder, that you need a regulator to survive on the surface, that a diver is going to have to swim like mad to reach a boat in the current when drift diving, that you need to save a lot of air in the tank because you might be drifting on the surface for a long time.

On the other hand, currents do make most things more difficult when diving.

 

[shoredivr]

Rivers flow in 1 direction. There is only one vector. Not 3.

However, there can be down currents, up currents and back eddies. The St Lawrence River has lots of these scenarios when the water meets rock walls and goes in between islands.

Take the stretch of the river above which I’ve been diving for the past dozen years. The general flow of the water in the main channel on the Canadian side of Ivy Lea is from the left to the right of the photo, like the blue arrow. I do a lot of shore diving around here.

If I want to do a drift dive from the point of land above the word “thousand”, under the bridge marked in green and into the bay just past the bridge, I just go with the current. Except when I get to the part marked in red, the “washing machine” area. Here currents can strongly pull you down, and fifteen feet later try and haul you up.

Now, for my second dive, if I want to get from the bay just past the bridge, to Bucks Bay where there are a couple of bottle dumps, I need to swim with some effort against the back eddy (yellow arrow) from Bucks Bay. Once I get there, the back current drops off to almost nothing. To get back to the bridge, I just go back with the current.

And it’s never exactly the same from year to year because the water level and speed are controlled by downstream dams.

 

[shoredivr]

Here’s another scenario, the upper St Clair River at Sarnia, Ontario, where all of Lake Huron tries to shove itself through a small area. So you’d think the 4-6 knot variable current between the top of the photo and past the bridge would go all in one direction like the green arrow. Which is pretty well the international boundary with Michigan, USA.

But there’s a back eddy that can take you back up the shoreline towards the bridge, the yellow arrow. You can get in at the park near the word 3D, and drift down to the bottom part of the yellow arrow. This is called the Superman Dive as you are really flying. Stay on the bottom, it’s an active shipping channel. Catch the back eddy returning to the bridge literally along the shore, away from the boats.

Needless to say this is an advanced dive. The water is not always one directional in a river.

Oh, and if you get to the white line with the purple square on the shore below the yellow arrow you are at the casino.

 

[Steelyeyes]

I like drift diving. The live boat pickup makes it easy. I've had far worse shore dives when the waves come up and the exit gets dicey than I've ever had getting picked up by a boat and I've had some sporty pickups.

I do a fair bit of photography and getting some shots is difficult, others not so much if you can use terrain or an eddy in the current to your advantage.

 

[The Chairman]

The only boat I have had a line thrown to me was a white water rafting boat in Maine

"Tag lines" are pretty common in Florida. Usually they are twice the length of the boat and can be lengthened depending on currents. Great dive boats will pull your butt in once you are on the line, unless of course, there are several people hanging on the line waiting to board.

 

[nolatom]

I don’t get around much. All my drift dives have been at Jupiter and West Palm. Good boats, captains, DMs, reefs, buddies, instabuddies, critters, camaraderie. Lagniappe: Delicious fish dinners courtesy of my spearo buddies and friends.

So I’ve been blissfully unaware how un-relaxing and treacherous it can be. How naive of me..

To quote Monk, and Randy Newman,
“ it’s a jungle out there,
It’s a jungle out there,
Dum da dum da dum da dum”...

Who knew? ;-)

 

[Neal Yang]

I've dived mostly from boats (speed boats, cruise boats, live-aboard boats), in the warm tropical waters of Malaysia. In some of the dives, we have faced some current, nothing TOO bad (if you give enough effort, you can swim against the current and stay mostly stationary). I've never felt insecure in it, but then again, I don't just dive with buddies, we always follow a DM/dive guide who has dived the sites thousands of times. From the few dives I have had, we dodge currents by descending closer to the bottom or hiding behind a rock/reef most of the time. However, in cases when the current carries us in the right direction, i.e. to where we agreed to meet the boatman, we just drift. In any case, we always have a "check out dive" where the DM assesses the skills of the whole dive group, if even 1 of us cannot control buoyancy or swim well enough, we would not be led to challenging sites (or we are separated into smaller groups, where the more advanced group goes to more challenging areas).

Point is, in my opinion, as long as you are diving from a good DC with good DMs, drift diving should be quite relaxing. If you ARE the DM and customers who you know can't do it insist on doing it, then yeah, I would say, that is not relaxing...

Now down currents on the other hand...

 

[Trace Malinowski]

I would like us to envision situation where in a drift dive, you have experienced difficulty and how to prevent it and deal with it safely.

Here, in the 1000 Islands, drift diving is a way of life in the St. Lawrence River/Seaway. 3 to 5 knots is common and I've been in as much as 7 knots during a record outflow rate. A dive during that record outflow resulted in an article I wrote being published in American Lifeguard magazine. Everything went to hell, my trimix team of three was separated, and each of us found ourselves in an individual world of hurt as we were blasted against rock, blown upward, shoved downward, and eddied around like rag dolls in a washing machine. I agree with the OP. Sometimes drift diving can become a fight for survival.

We tend to get our game faces on when drifting into wrecks like the J.B. King in 170 feet of water. Most of the time it is fun! Dodging boulders the size of pick-up trucks and dealing with severe updrafts and downdrafts on that site can test the skill and rattle the cage of even some of the most experienced technical divers. A local dive shop owner died on the King. His wife continues to successfully run the dive shop and charter business.

The other day, we did a nice long drift dive into the wreck of the Daryaw, an upside down freighter, in 90 feet of water. We continued past the wreck and down through a narrow cut in the old channel for an hour. It was a beautiful dive with good visibility. Yesterday, the visibility dropped to less than 10 feet and a normally benign wreck challenged my trimix students to the point where we decided it was unsafe to dive the Roy A. Jodrey at 130 - 250 feet deep because it would be too easy to be pushed or swim into an overhead and not have enough gas and time to find our way out.

Didn't we lose one of our most beloved members of this board to a drift or drift-like conditions where up and down drafts resulted in her and her husband becoming separated and they never found her?

Water is always bigger than we are. Giving it the respect it deserves is the first precaution we can take to help ensure our survival.