I went diving with the seals today @ Pam Rock, BC. There are a few rock formations that surface up; above the water levels and it’s a place where lots of seals seem to gather around. Unfortunately, the visibility (in the water) was horrible that today. One could barely see any more than 3 feet away. Half way through the dive, after keeping losing one another, we decided to cut that dive short, and go somewhere else; hoping for better visibility. While our dive was short with the seals, we did see quite a few of them. When we’d be at the surface, the seals would stick their heads out of the water, and keep staring at us, in a rather funny way. For all I know, may be there were dozens of seals swimming around us, while we were diving, but we just couldn’t see them; due to the poor visibility. A fellow diver had taken a few snapshots. If I get my hands on a few; I’ll make sure to post them up here.
So, we left Pam Rock and went to our usual spot around Bowyer Island. There, the water was brown, and there was a very strong current. We waited about an hour or so; hoping for the current (The tide was coming in) to get weaker. The current was still a bit strong, but we were determined to dive anyways, as we didn’t want to waste the day. We ran across another charter boat of divers. Them too seemed to have a disappointing day. Nevertheless, we got ready and we went down. Once we got to about 50 feet, the visibility had cleared up; to ~15 feet or so. As we were diving around, my buddy’s weight belt slipped off his waist, and slid down to his knees. I swam towards him to give him a hand to place it back up on his waist. We tried to do things quickly, and we failed. We just couldn’t get enough grip to pull the belt through the buckle. Also, the weights on the back of the belt kept getting displaced by the bottom of the tank. So, the buddy diver, just signaled to go up. At that time, we were near the end of our dive anyways, and I was starting to run low on Oxygen. In retrospect, what we should have done is to go down to the bottom; which was ~10 feet lower. Thus, we’d be able to knee on the “floor” and adjust things properly, instead of trying to work while floating, and not having anything to “anchor” ourselves against to adjust/tighten that weight belt. Good on that the diver (who had only 7 dives under his belt, no pun intended!) for remaining calm during this mishap.
