Ok, so I may have overreacted here, but frankly drifting out to sea alone made me cr@p myself.
We went diving in Zanzibar. It started off a little strange. Some of the masks had mould in them which made us wonder about the gear. The BCDs were pretty shot and the divemaster said "I'm surprised the place is still running." Hmmm...
So we went out on the boat which wasn't a dive boat. We had some recent PADI learners with us. The divemaster put the gear on them and tried to put them in the water. One of the girls, correctly, wanted to check her regs but the divemaster was rushing her which was making her flustered. Not good.
It was a 15m stingray dive and our divemaster was going to try and take Olya with us. She hasn't done her PADI and couldn't use the equipment properly. This was pretty dangerous. Luckily for Olya she had trouble equalising and had to go back up.
The divemaster swapped around the dive buddies three times so no one knew what was going on.
Three of us didn't have enough weight for correct buoyancy. They didn't even have enough weights for us to use!
Eventually we start diving most of us floating upside down, paddling to counter the buoyancy problem.
During the dive my depth gauge goes up to 9m, another one shows 17m and a third was stuck on 6m. F$%ked basically.
There was a really strong current, so it was actually a drift dive which they forgot to mention. We didn't have the equipment for this, and the next part of the story is where I lose it.
My tank wasn't filled properly, so I ran out of air earlier than the others. I warned the divemaster before the dive and all he said was "I'm sorry. What can I do?" In retrospect I should have suggested something involving the tank and his rectum.
Anyway, I tell the divemaster during the dive that I am running out using hand signals and he instructs me to surface. But get this, he doesn't send my dive buddy with me!
I surface and am alone. The current is pulling me out to sea, and our dive boat is about 100m away. It doesn't seem a great distance but the water was rough enough so
I could only see the boat when I reached the crest of a wave, and the current was too strong to swim to it.
I was signaling for a couple of minutes but they couldn't see me. After that I started to do the emergency signal. This went on for another five minutes without anyone seeing me.
It is this point that I have to admit that I lost it. The prospect of slowly drifting out to sea alone is bad enough; the real chance of it at that time was bloody terrifying.
I started shouting for help and paddling as fast as I could, to no avail. No one could see me at all.
Fortunately the wind was behind me and someone heard the faint cries. They looked around and then eventually saw me pop up, doing the emergency wave and then disappear behind the waves.
In a small twist of irony, the emergency wave is a single handed wave of the arm, so unbeknownst to me (because I was on my back, waving, paddling and crapping myself), I had a group of people on the boat waving back at me thinking I was being friendly. When they heard the panic in the cries they quickly sent the boat over.
I refused to do the second dive. This was the worst diving experience I've ever had. It even beats when I was doing my PADI with a Brazilian navy instructor who was a lunatic and made me do the emergency surface procedures at their maximum allowable depth.
All I can say is - check out the dive operation before trusting them with your life. This company left a little (!) to be desired.
