June 2012    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 27, No. 6   What's this?

Those Deadly Downcurrents

do you ride it out or react in the worst way possible?

from the June, 2012 issue of Undercurrent  

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Riding along in a current is a great diving thrill, but when it suddenly yanks you upward or downward, the thrill can become frightening, and sometimes tragic. How you react is a matter of life or death.

Subscriber Jonathan Blake (LaVerne, CA) had his first rogue current experience in the Arborek area of Raja Ampat. "I was finning along the edge of a cliff at about 45 feet, enjoying the pygmy seahorses on the sea fans. I was experiencing a little surge, when the downcurrent hit with no warning. At 90 feet, my dive guide and I managed to grab on to a small outcropping of the wall. We saw another diver, a small Japanese woman who probably weighed 100 pounds soaking wet, and her dive guide, holding on to her BC, shoot past us. I thought they were gone for good. While the downcurrent lasted less than 30 seconds, it seemed much longer. Miraculously, the other dive guide and the diver appeared. He had managed to pull her under a crevice in the wall at 120 feet and out of the downcurrent. It happened so fast there really wasn't any time to be terrified. I think discussing during the briefing the possibility that it could happen, and how to react if it did, helped save us from disaster."

David Hill (Ipswich, MA) got caught in a "washing machine" current in Bunaken National Park in North Sulawesi. "I was working along a wall at 40 feet, when suddenly, the current picked up strongly. For 30 seconds, it would howl in one direction, switch to the opposite direction, then howl straight down, then straight up. The current was far stronger than I could swim against. My group was instantly scattered, and I ended up clinging to the wall with two other divers. It was one of the strangest sensations of my diving experience to be looking at my buddy clinging to the wall next to me and watching his bubbles streaming straight down. Eventually we worked our way up the wall to 20 feet, waited until the current was going sideways, and finned to the surface. But even on the surface, the currents and whirlpools were so strong, we were swept in different directions. The three dive boats ran around picking up any divers they could find, then rendezvoused. Everyone was OK, but it was a harrowing experience for some of the novice divers. We checked one poor woman's computer, and found she had started at 40 feet, been blown to 10 feet, sucked down to 90 feet, and then blown back to 20 feet. She was fine, but more than a bit shaken."...