The sea was calm that morning at Pulau Redang. We head out in the dive boat in anticipation of another great dive. It was the first dive of the day. The divemaster had told us that it was going to be a deep dive, and that we were going down to 30 metres. No problem man!! Sap sap sui (in Cantonese)! I was used to doing deep dives. My deepest was down to 50 metres on the wreck ( name seemed to escape me at the moment...) near Oban in Scotland; where I was............never mind, that is another story.....!
My buddy for that dive was a Singaporean chap.. He was by now a French citizen from Nice. He was working for a computer company and was being seconded back to Singapore for a couple of years. We did our usual buddy checks, and was raring to go. As soon as the divemaster gave us the signal, we did our backward rolls from the boat and glided smoothly down toward the pre-determined depth. Plan the dive, and dive the plan!! That is one of PADI's mantras. The visibility was not as good as it had previously been. It was only about 15-20m. This must have been because of the storm overnight which had churned the sea up a little. Nevertheless, there were still plenty to see, and I was settling into the dive nicely. I turned to look, and my buddy was about 5 metres away from me looking under a rock.
Fifteen minutes into the dive and what the ..........(fill in your own obscenities)....!!!!! My regulator was almost yanked out of my mouth!! I thought, " What the hell is happening??". I turned to discover that my buddy was trying to pull it from me. Chee sin!!! Instinctively, I pushed him away and quickly assessed the situation. His own regulator was missing from his mouth!! My diver training immediately kicked into motion, and I quickly reached for my alternate regulator and shoved it into his mouth and purged it for him. He was in a right state of panic and kept gesturing that he wanted to surface. I had to calm him down immediately. Whack! I hit him straight on the head. It did the trick and he jolted out of his panic. On examining his regulator, I found that his mouthpiece had fallen off. His alternate regulator however, was working fine. So, as he was fast depleting my own air supply, I quickly switch him back to his own alternate regulator. After a further few minutes of swimming around, I decide that it was time to get up. After signalling to the divemaster, I deployed my delayed surface marker buoy, to alert the boatman, and slowly ascend to the top with my buddy. He was indeed, very grateful that day.
Moral of the story is that, it is better to have you own kit when diving, and make sure that it has been serviced regularly. My buddy rented his from the dive shop. As it was nearing the end of the season that year, the equipments were also getting worn out.
Another PADI mantra, if you encounter problems....STOP....BREATHE....THINK......ACT........! Happy Diving!
2 comments:
Bravo to you! :)
Thanks, Asther.
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