I had a sorta scarey dive incident this weekend with my 12 yr old kid. To make a long story short, I was not watching him closely enough and he could have been seriously injured.
He wanted to take his speargun on an 80 ft drift dive this weekend, but since the current was very strong (over 2 kts) I said "no, too much current" It is too easy to get separated and things can get out of control too easily.
He then begged me to carry my pole spear, to defend himself from sharks. I reluctantly agreed, but told him we never see sharks on this dive.
We were diving with another diver. I shot a smal fish that I had with me. Pretty soon an inquisitive 6 ft carribean reef shark shows up, he was kinda dogging us, trying to get closer etc. Eventually at the very end of the dive, the other guy slammed the shark really hard with hsi gun and it finally left us alone for the last 3-4 minutes.
We were out the whole day on the water and on the drive home in the truck, my 12 yr od kid asks me if i noticed that the back of the shark was a little tore up. I said "no, not really, why?" He said that during one point in the dive we were 20 feet from him and the shark came in on him pretty hard and he had to jab it with the pole spear and this ripped the skin up some.
I've taught him that if a shark comes in close enough to jab with a gun or a spear, defintely DO IT. Apparently he followed orders, thought nothing of it and waited 5 hrs to even mention it to me.
I had thought that I was keeping a good eye on the 90 lb kid and 100 lb shark the entire time, but apparently not. I never saw any portion of the incident (and it probably occured in 5-8 seconds) but I was pretty disappointed in myself; he was more bummed the video didn't come out.
I guess sometimes diving is more dangerous than driving a car.