October 2011    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 26, No. 10   What's this?

Turks & Caicos, Grand Cayman, Costa Rica

plus advice about Mabul diving and your passport pages

from the October, 2011 issue of Undercurrent  

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Left Behind. Our feature story on Mike Ball's Spoilsport shows how well the Aussies count heads. They do so because two American divers were left behind on the Great Barrier Reef in 1998 and were never seen again (the subject of the film Open Water). Some American dive operations haven't caught on. On October 2, divers Paul Kline and Fernando Garcia Puerta were rescued by a private yacht when passengers spotted them clinging to a buoy off Key Biscayne. Seems as if they were on a dive with RJ Diving Ventures of Miami Beach, which had taken 30 people, including Kline and Garcia, out to dive. When Kline and Garcia surfaced, however, their dive boat was nowhere in sight. "We were in shock," Kline, 44, told the Miami Herald. "We could easily have died." The two said they clung to a fishing buoy for two hours until they were spotted around 6 p.m., as it was getting dark. "We could see two divers with all their equipment and an inflated red tube," the yacht's captain Elie Trichet told the Herald. "You could notice a strong feeling of relief." Kline said, "I wasn't gonna give up. We managed to find a buoy and we hung on so that if somebody came to look for us, we'd be in one spot, because I don't know which way the current is taking us. If it's taking us out to sea, that'll be a completely different story." The Coast Guard is investigating....