The Great Pactola Debacle Dive

I know that some of you do not SCUBA dive and some of you do. It is a lot of fun but it is also dangerous if you are not careful and do not keep a cool head. Today we dove Pactola to practice our lost diver routine, gear reorientation and emergency procedures. This is all in preparation to our trip to Florida next week. My dive buddy is my son. Tyler is your regular 17 year old and like when a 17 year old does something you check it and double check it. The nice part about doing this while diving is that double checks are part of the program so no insult is taken. I have found that in most cases Tyler is more exacting than I am. We each brought 2 tanks with us and we planned on making 4 dives. The dives actually went pretty well, sort of. The first dive was planned to go to 60 feet but we never made it that far. It was a shore dive and the water temperature was 58 degrees. The air temp was 80 degrees. We wore 6.5 mm wet suits, hoods, gloves and boots. Our launch site was the north boat dock. Since it is a weekday the boat traffic was very light but we still used a floating flag.  We have had record rains over the last couple of months and the waters visibility was only about 5 foot (if you didn't kick up any mud). A wet suit that thick is very hot, in addition, it means you also have to use a lot more weight to get under the surface. Last year I used 38lbs and Tyler used 24lbs. This year I opted for 40lbs and Tyler used 28lbs on nylon waist belts. We should have integrated them in our BC but we had never used that type of weight system in the past and we just wanted to make this dive work. Moving between the shore and water was very difficult and hot to say the least. We opted to forgo the gloves and put them in our pockets. Because the visibility was so poor I tied parachute cord from Tyler's wrist to mine. That combined with the flag line and the muddy water made things challenging. When we got to 30 feet the temperature started dropping. We both stopped and put on our gloves. We continued on down to 40 feet and cruised along following a compass heading since we couldn't see anything. After 25 minutes I stopped, we faced each other and I signaled to rise to the top with a safety stop at 15 feet for three minutes. I got an OK from Tyler and I started up. I was releasing air from my BC on the way up to slow my assent when the cord between us tangled around my arms and pulled them together and down. Tyler was not coming up as fast as I was and was dragging below me upwards. My assent rate kept increasing and I wasn't able to stop at the 15 foot level. I kept rising till I broke the surface, very much like a breeching whale,and I was literally tied up. When Tyler broke the surface he said, in a smart ass manner, "What happened to the safety stop"? I broke into some colorful lengthy flight-line vonacular until he managed to get me untied. It still took 10 minutes to remove all the rope tangled around me. Over all, it was a good lesson learned. We floated around, talked, discussed the event and approached the next dive with a bit more attention and less entanglements. We removed the cord between us and did a good 20 minute dive back to the boat dock via compass headings and touching. We took an hour break, had lunch and talked to the dock caretaker about diving and what happened. We then took 2 new tanks from the car and did 2 more dives under the boat dock area in 30 foot of water. Both of these dives went very well and involved some pretty tough navigation via compass and known structures. Tyler to the lead on both of these dive and we hit our goals near dead on both times. So, it was a good day, a learning day and Tyler proved his mettle.  Tyler has a very cool head in crisis situations and thinks things through. I'm very proud of him and here is a picture I took today at the dock when we were finished. You might note that Tyler isn't so little anymore.