[John N]

Thought this trip report from my sister may be of interest:

"Poor Charlie got a cold on our honeymoon and missed a few days diving. The day he got back in the water the current was quite strong and outgoing, and since the dive site was at about 20metres we needed to descend quite fast. Unfortunately, although his ears were fine at the surface he couldn't get below 5metres, so after a few minutres of determined trying we sent up the SMB and surfaced.

We weren't far from the boat, a couple of hundred metres at most, and did big OK's for a while. When we realised they weren't seeing us (looking for us??) we started whistling and waving madly, Charlie put his strobe on and we inflated the second SMB. Still nothing.

We were finning hard against the current but still were drifting further and further into the blue. The water was very choppy, so we could only see the boat when we were on the crest of a wave (and so we supposed, they could only see us then too). Still nothing.

EVentually we realised that the boatcrew were not going to see us, they were waiting 45mins to an hour for the divers to surface at the reef, and not providing any surface cover in the meantime. Still we kept on finning at waving our buoys just the same.

After an hour we saw the boat, now looking like a speck in the distance, circling the reef picking up divers. Well, to cut a long story short, eventually they realised we were missing and headed off quite fast in the direction of the current. We saw them coming, now from perhaps 2km away, and kept waving our bouys and our arms. We didn't get a big OK from them until they were about 100m away. People on the boat afterwards told us that even at that distance we looked like little red specks in the choppy water.

If the wind and the current had been going in different directions it could have been a different story. Fortunately they weren't so our drift course was quite straightforward. A very scary thing nonetheless.

We are never ever diving without SMB's in the future. Anyone know of other useful safety devices we should consider (suddenly high on our list)?

Charlie had told the dive leader he may have problems descending but the dive leader hadn't relayed to the boat crew that they should look out for us specifically. Anyway, what if one of us had been injured? There are lots of reasons for aborting a dive early and if we had been in trouble, an hour in that water could have been much more of a nightmare than it was.

The dive school were horrified that this could happen and are reviewing all their boat staff and going over boatcrew requirements. We suggested emergency drills. "

"The dive centre was run by Ocean Pro on Velavaru who operate a lot of the Maldives diving. On the whole they were very professional and friendly and fun. For our check dive they made us do skills (mask flood, out of air drill) at 5m before continuing the descent, no-one's ever asked us to do that before.
The problem we had was due to the boat crew not maintaining surface cover. Arguably this shouldn't be a problem that you just stumble across by accident, but Patrick who runs the centre told us he would immediately review the crews contracts and ensure they sign up to all necessary duties. So I suppose you can decide if that makes you feel safe."