Originally Posted by Kevin R
Doug and I started diving together regularly while looking for someone interested in diving year round, both commenting on how hard it was to find a dive buddy who was willing to dive in Canada in the winter. We had been diving together for more than six years. We trained together took our Tech I and later, as our skills progressed, Tech 2 together. We dove on the Empress of Ireland, the Gunilda, the Jodrey, and Kingston Barges together as often as possible. No matter what time of year it was, Sunday was a standing date to dive. In the winter, when the boats were out, we almost always dove on the Kinghorn in Rockport. He was my friend and teammate.
We arrived in Rockport at 10 AM on Sunday morning. We walked to the entrance to check the ice conditions at the hole and discuss the dive. The plan was the same as it is every Sunday for us. Jump in do our checks and head to the wreck tour the wreck once or twice and head back, 45-50 min of dive time total. We each carried one 80 cf stage of 32% and full double 104’s of 32%. We planned on turning the dive at 1500 PSI on the 80, 30 minutes, or whenever one of us got cold, whichever happened first.
We broke up the thin ice around the ladder and hung our stage bottles in the water from a gear line. Doug jumped in first and after doing our bubble checks and valve drills we spent a couple of minutes under the hole, making sure everything worked and waiting out the ice cream headache before we headed out. I was in the lead and we swam slowly, following the mainline, stopping briefly at the stop sign so Doug could snap a picture.
At the end of the mainline I installed a spool and tied it off to the stake we had installed the previous week. I checked my timer and turned to get an OK from Doug to continue. It was 12 min into the dive and we were at approx 85’ and 700’ from the entrance. When I turned to look I could see he was dealing with a free flow. He was right next to me and I waited for him to deal with it so we could turn around and head back. As soon as he swapped regulators his primary free flowed as well. He gave me the OOG sign and I donated the stage regulator that I was breathing from. At the same time he was headed up with what I assume was a frozen free flowing inflator. I didn’t see the inflator get pressed and don’t know when it started to free flow. This entire paragraph happened in well under a minute.
We headed up past the wreck with me trying to swim us back down while Doug was breathing from my stage reg. I didn’t have time to deploy the long hose and was trying to shut down Doug’s right post and keep the regulator with him. I couldn’t get us back down to the wreck and was barely able to get my tanks up higher than the rest of my body so they hit the ice above my head. Once we stopped I saw Doug didn’t have my reg in his mouth. His backup was still free flowing in front of him and I handed him mine again, he didn’t take it so I tapped him on the head and turned him around to get his attention. His eyes were closed, his mask half full of water and he was quickly turning blue.
I shut off his tanks to stop the free flows, looked around hoping to see a hole in the ice we could surface through and didn’t find one. I put him in an unconscious diver position and started swimming him out with my long hose in his mouth lightly purging the regulator hoping it wouldn’t free flow. After a couple of minutes following my compass north just under the surface I realized I had to drop to the bottom because the current had carried us east of the mainline. I dropped to the bottom and continued north, planning to connect with the wall and head west from there. At about 50’ Doug’s suit and wing had expanded enough that we were heading up. The frozen gear made it difficult to dump gas from the position he was in. At about 10’ a bubble of air and blood came out of his mouth and we were pinned to the ice again. This time I couldn’t roll him over to dump his wing or suit; his inflator buttons were both frozen. Not knowing exactly where I was, I decided I had to leave him there and get myself out. I unclipped his light and let it dangle so the beam would act like a beacon if someone could get out to him in the next 3 or 4 hours, did my best to put him into a pocket in the ice so what negligible current there was in that spot wouldn’t carry him away.
I swam north-west and intersected the wall just east of the customs dock. At 35 minutes of bottom time, I exited the water dropped my stage and fins on the ice next to the water and my doubles on the dock at the top of the ladder, ran to my truck and called 911 from my cell phone.
