Surf and rocks

[Smiling Dragon]

This actually happened last year but I'd been a bit too embarrised to post it till now .

Sixsquid's post (the danger of little things) reminded me of this one - her's sounds a lot more serious than my little adventure of course...

A group of four of us decided to do a 'simple' shore dive to practice a few drills and get comfortable diving without an instructor around before we went off onto more challanging dives. We picked a spot that appeared relatively sheltered with a fairly shallow bottom (about 9m or so) and gentle slope.

We formed two buddy pairs and headed out on the surface before beginning the decent. As we started down, my buddy discovered she was insufficiently weighted so we had to abort the dive. So we sat on the beach and waited for the other pair to complete their first dive. By then one of this other buddy pair was getting very cold and was ready for a break so I teamed up with the last standing guy and we went out for a dive.

The swell was fairly enthusiastic but didn't appear too bad once we'd descended. After tooling round on the sandy bottom for a bit, I decided to go explore the rocks beside us so we headed over that way, peering into the silt kicked up by the swell.

Next thing I know, a rock went howling past me, far faster than I thought we were travelling. Followed by several more. Unknowen to me, the surge had picked up considerably and we were actually getting pushed around at some speed but couldn't tell due to the silt moving with us.

Suffereing from the over confidance of inexperiance, I happily swam along, enjoying the rush of flashing between the rocks at break-neck speeds, before I got that unpleasant heavy feet feeling of breaking the water with my fins. Surprised, I looked at my guage to see myself still at around 5m or so.

Confused I started to look around when the rocks under me suddenly rushed up to meet me and I found myself sitting high and dry in open air. Just as quickly, I was back underwater again. Realising that things were getting out of control, my buddy and I simultainiously decided it was probably better we were elsewhere and moved out of the rockery. Not nearly as easy getting out as in I discovered

In the end (with a few more dumps onto the rocks along the way) I made my way out by holding the rocks as the surge went one way then letting go as it moved back out.

Tired and confused we linked back up clear of the rocks, ascended and finned back on the surface while talking about what happened. About half way back, a shouted warning from the beach made us look up to see a mamoth wave bearing down on us. I had time to put my reg back in and hang on before it hit us, pushing both of us under and spinning us round a fair bit before letting us bob back to the surface. I'm told it looked pretty funny to those on the beach

Kind of obvious what lesson I learnt from this one - don't be a bleeding twit and stay away from the rocks in heavy surge!

[ShinyD]

No need to be embarrassed SD; we all make errors of judgement - the important thing is to learn from it

Sounded pretty scary to me!