When I first saw a comment
from reader Teresa Yent (Raleigh
NC) about how she “always
thought that divers had the best
etiquette around,” I was inclined
to agree. We’re a “help your
fellow diver” bunch by and large,
but Yent’s story of a night dive
gone awry sounds like the
exception to the rule. Her North
Carolina group was spending a
week at CoCo View on Roatán last
May in the midst of a full-fledged sea lice outbreak. Yent says that she
“wished we had read your sea lice article before we went. They were
terrible!” (For readers who missed the article the first time around, the
full text is posted on Undercurrent’s web page at Undercurrent.)
According to readers Keith Young and John Murphy, the group was
looking for CoCo View’s strobe and spent 20 minutes following a couple
of lights before they spotted a strobe, surfaced, and found themselves
alongside Peter Hughes’ Wind Dancer with their boat nowhere in sight.
With four to five foot waves in pitch-black seas, the group of six lost
divers asked the Wind Dancer crew for permission to come aboard, but
were met with a less-than-heartening “no, stay away.” After 20 minutes,
the Wind Dancer crew decided to tow them back for what turned out to
be a 20-minute ride. Young lost one of a $150 pair of flippers, and the
prop heaved a seaful of sea lice up under the v-necks of everyone’s
hoods and inside their dive skins and masks. Murphy estimated that he
received at least 800 stings, enough that he reported his body stinging
all over and shaking like a leaf. He had nausea and dysentery the rest of
the week.
No one offered any explanations or entertained the group’s
complaints, but to my way of thinking, it wouldn’t have taken the world’s
best etiquette to have figured out a better solution to the problem.
— J.Q.