Dive of Dives

Early one Thursday morning I stood in the parking lot of Whytecliff Park looking out across towards Nanaimo. The wind was blowing gently and the sea made its way to the shore in little ripples. The waves were randomly pushing a large log back and forth.

I heard a car enter the far side of the park and that snapped me out of my day dream. I walked back over to my truck and grabbed my jacket; the wind was passing right through my fleece. The car made its way up the hill to the cut side of the park. My two dive partners pulled up with smiles on their faces and hopped out. We had agreed to meet for a Thursday morning dive at the cut. The mid-week dives are great for avoiding the weekend crowds; it's a nice time to be at the park. It was a good day for a dive, as the wind was calm and there wasn't any rain, yet.

Our group today was made up of diving instructors from the Vancouver area all with plenty of experience and hundreds of cold water dives. The first order of business was to start laying out the gear and checking that everything was in order. We had all done up plans from whatever computer program we might have at home so we needed to spend some time comparing them in order to ensure that everyone was on the same . Our overall planned depth was set for 340 feet with a bottom time of 16 minutes. For this small amount of time at 340 feet - about 10 minutes - we will be in the water for just over 120 minutes, or two hours.

We will need to bring four different breathing gasses and complete 27 decompression stops before seeing the surface again. The deepest of these stops would start at 270 feet. After our planning session and equipment check, we need to move the gear down to the water. Our dive called for a lot of gear and we would need to make at least three trips to the water's edge before gearing up and making the final climb down with our twins on.

As we all got ready the mood was light and most of the time we joked about what makes people think that putting on this gear and walking around until you want to pass out is a good idea? In the end it took us an hour until we were ready to start the short swim out from the cut.

The cut gets it name from the surrounding rock formation; the rock shoots out of the water - in the centre it looks like someone has taken an ice cream scooper and scooped out a large portion of the rock leaving what some might call a cut right through the centre. The cut in the rock is mimicked underwater, although smaller in size; as it continues down the side of the wall it leaves a four foot high ridge to the right of the cut.

We make one final gear check and I find that my argon tank has come loose at the bottom strap. I get John who's next to me to have a look. The strap has come loose and the tank has a slight swing to it. I have two choices, first is to get back out of the water and remove my gear to fix the problem while my partners wait. Or go ahead with the dive as is. I can't bear the thought of getting out of the water wearing 280 pounds of equipment and the tank is feeling stable again after John moves it back into place. I give the go ahead. No one has any other problems so we start off.

As we start to drop we need to breathe from one of our side tanks with a higher oxygen content in order to remain conscious. The oxygen in our back tanks won't support life until we have descended to about 17 feet. Most times this happens quickly and is not a big concern, except when something might hamper your descent, forcing you to take a breath from your back tanks, which in this case we have only 10% O2 in them. Not nearly enough to support us while under stress. I mention this because I've seen it happen, but that's another story.

As we descend past the 50 foot mark we start to pick up speed. This part of the wall is very steep and there's little need to do much kicking as we descend. We are all in a close formation, Jim and John are in the lead while I bring up the rear about 15 feet behind. As I pass 100 feet I can feel a slight current pushing me to the right. We have started the dive just before slack in order to take advantage of the slack high tide two hours from now when we want to walk up the beach in full gear. I make note of the current and turn my body to the left in the water column to compensate for it. We are making good time as I pass 250 feet - we are at the 3 minute mark and we should make our target depth of 340 feet on time, after a 6 minute runtime.

My team mates are about 20 feet ahead of me and to the right. The current is still pushing at me and forcing us into the wall. I feel my fin tips rub up against the wall first and then my knee touches. I give my fin a push off the wall to help and just as I push off my primary light goes. I am without a light!

At 250 feet there is no light whatsoever at the cut. You can't tell up from down unless you have a reference that you can see in front of you. I can hear the bubbles leave the reg, but I can't see them. As I deploy my back up light I realize that I have no reference to where I am on the wall. I stop fining and go prone for a second, thinking "where is the wall?" I then start a slow turn to the right so that I will hopefully be facing what I think should be the wall.

I can see my team mates' lights moving farther away down the wall. I turn the light on and at the same time my right shoulder comes in contact with the wall. I look up to see a large rockfish staring at me about 10 inches from my mask. It gives me a start and I grin at how she has startled me. The rockfish darts away as if to say "well I never".

I finish putting away the main light and look down towards my partners again. They are now about 50 feet away and still moving. I turn to catch up. As I pass 300 feet I realize that the team has stopped. They are now about only 25 feet away. I check my gauge - we aren't close to target depth yet - and I can't understand what the hold up is. As I move in I can see John hovering about 10 feet off the bottom, shining his light down towards the ground. Jim is just off to John's right and is also looking at something. As I move in closer I can see something lying on a small ledge. The ledge is at a 50 degree down angle and covered in dark silt. It's then that I see the tank half buried in the slit with a set of regs attached.

I can see stickers across the back side of the tank that read Pacific Pro Divers. My first thought is "who dropped a full set of gear off a boat at Whytecliff?" As I keep moving closer I realize that there is more than a tank with regs here. I can see the outline of a wet suit and a weight belt under the tank. I look back at John and signal. He just nods his head. We have found a body!

In 1996 there was an accident that involved four divers at Whytecliff Park. The four men decided to go for a dive at the cut, the very place we were diving today. At some point in their dive they ran into trouble. Out of the four divers, three died and one ended up in the recompression chamber: one member of the dive team made it to the surface but died minutes after, another made it back to the surface after trying to save his buddy, but had to be rushed to hospital, and the other two never made it back.

The police managed to find one of the missing divers but a local man from Surrey named Dave was never found. I wasn't there at the time but friends of mine were, and Dan gave one of the divers who made it to the surface CPR before he died. It was a tragedy in our diving community that was felt throughout. Never had an accident of this scale happened in our area before.

As this all flashed through my brain I realized I was looking at Dave. I had this sudden feeling pass over me; I wanted to reach out and try to help him. I was thinking "come on man, I'll get you out of here." Still to this day I think of how helpless I felt not being able to help this guy. I could still see his face through his mask which was still in place. It looked like he might have been taking a rest. In a way I guess he was. As I moved closer I thought to myself "don't touch him, you might knock something off the wall."

Just over this small ledge about 5 feet away the wall dropped another 100 feet or so and that would put it out of our range. I inspect the ledge and how he must have came to rest on it like that. The tides and currents must have been similar that day as today, moving their team in the same direction. Most diving the cut would have long ago turned and moved left along the wall, but most likely like us they were pushed to the right and along the ridge in the cut.

I suddenly hear a muffled yell from behind me. I look up to see - its Jim. He's yelling into his reg over and over again. His fins are pointed straight down as he starts to kick hard. I'm trying to understand what the hell he's going on about. John starts to head towards him to see if he can help. It becomes apparent that Jim is panicking. Clouds of silt from his fins are rolling down the ledge towards me and the body. I have just enough time to stick my hand in the mud next to the body before we are both consumed and everything around me turns black. My main concern was that I don't touch any part of the body, accidentally sending something over the wall.

I gently move straight up the wall and after I move about five feet, I'm out of the main cloud of silt. Once again I can see my backup light; it's like a small laser pointer hitting the wall. I check my gauge and it reads 335 feet. I look around to see how the others are doing. I see John moving in beside Jim; he's in full panic and is starting to fight his way up the wall. John looks back at me and signals me that he's going after him. I give the OK and by the time it takes to count to five they're both gone.

I look back towards the body but there's nothing but huge silt cloud all around the ledge. I start checking for some landmarks in hopes that I can retrace my steps if need be, but with only a backup light, it is hard to know for sure what you're looking at more than 10 feet away.

I check my depth gauge and I have one minute of time left to go. I think about tying a line in near the body in order to find our way back later, then I think that's a bad idea - what if I disturbed something? OK time's up, I just need to get going and worry about the rest later, putting my life in danger is not going to help Dave now. As I move up the wall I start thinking about the other two. I hope they are OK. I'll try and follow their path up the wall in hopes of lending a hand if need be. As I near my 180 foot stop I haven't seen anyone. I'm really starting to worry that John wasn't able to gain control in time.

I'm hoping to see some sort of trail of disturbed silt or a shadow above me indicating where my team has gone, but there's nothing. I keep looking for them, but in the end I spend the next 90 minutes alone in the water to reflect on what had just happened. The ascent passes without incident except for my 50 foot stop. As I switch regs I'm facing the wall and to my right something large and fast moving darts to the right of my vision. I just about leap out of my skin as I turn to see the local seal that lives at the cut shoot past and then turn towards me for a proper greeting. She moves to within 3 feet and looks me in the eye. She asks me if I need anything, I say "hey have you seen two other divers around?"

As she leaves I watch her go; she heads straight across the wall to my left. I start to think, "hey, what if she's paying a visit to the team as well, moving back and forth between us?" I have enough time to go and find out. I leave the cut and head over the ridge to the left. I fin along the wall for the rest of that deco stop, then move up to my next one. At the 40 foot stop I decide to look a little farther, but with no luck. As I make my way to the 20 foot stop I notice a shadow above me. I can make out more than one tank and a wave of relief washes over me.

I never catch up to them while we are in the water but back on dry land 30 minutes later we work out what happened. Jim recovered after he made his way up around the 200 foot mark. He said later that he's had dreams of dying while diving and seeing the body laying there sent him into a panic. He apologized over and over for putting us at risk and to my knowledge has never done another deep trimix dive again. Later, the next week John and I returned to help the North Vancouver Police search for the body using an unmanned ROV.

I know for myself I love being in the water. At the age of seven although I was unable to swim more than dog paddle, that didn't stop me from donning my mask that my mother bought me at K-Mart and pulling myself down to the bottom of the deep end of the pool. I have always seen diving as a recreation, a way to relax. "Hey, let's go and have some fun!" That's why it is so hard to understand a death. How, why? They were just trying to have some fun.

I have known a number of people that have passed while diving. I find myself thinking of them more often these days. I wonder is it when you start seeing people that you know around you die from diving, or other ways, like my father in a car accident, that you realize you own mortality? Or maybe it's when I became a father? You start to realize the importance of being around for someone else.

Well, what I do know for sure is that I miss them. I also know that I still get excited every time I think about going for a dive, even if it's just Whytecliff.