Lost at Sea

Blue Marlin Diving Center, located here in Gili Trawangan, Indonesia, specializes in a range of technical diving courses. One of its offerings is the Advanced Nitrox course, which teaches how to use different mixtures of oxygen and nitrogen to allow you to safely dive deeper and for a longer period of time. A really intense and technical course that gets into some of the more esoteric areas of diving like partial pressure of gasses, oxygen toxicity, calculating surface air consumption, etc. Many formulas make the four days a real head trip. So a couple of dives into this course, and the eight of us were heading out to Shark Point, a site renown for its ripping current, magnified that day by the effects of the full moon. The topography consists of a slope on the north side of Gili Trawangan with a bit of a sandy plane at 30 meters (100 feet) where the sharks will generally come and hang out and are often caught sleeping, and after this the land drops off steeply into the deep ocean. We all strap on our tanks and do back rolls off of the outrigger dive boat, quickly descending to 30 meters so that we are not separated by the current. Then we were all just flying along at mach 7 and I wasn’t even attempting to take any pictures of the scenery zooming by us. An interesting by product of diving is that as you dive deeper the air you are breathing compresses, causing you to breathe a much higher concentration of Nitrogen than at the surface. At a point, generally around 30 meters, you often begin to experience a “high” sensation called Nitrogen Narcosis, when everything is just a little more in the now, a little more “Woo Hoo” with capital letters, and nothing really matters all that much. So right about then, when my self-monitoring kicked back in I realized that all eight of us are swimming hard to stay along the 30 meter shelf, and are getting pushed out into the ocean. Fighting it hard, pushing, then clearly realizing that there is nothing that I can do and I am simply getting sucked off the shelf and DOWN …. Looking at my gauge, I realized that I am suddenly at 37 meters, getting close to the safety limits of the Nitrox mixture where the excessive concentration of oxygen can cause toxicity that can quickly put a person into convulsions. Yikes, so I inflate the BCD to increase buoyancy, and swim swim swim up to maintain depth – all of us are pushing hard to stay afloat as we are being thrust out into the deep waters. The land drops off quickly and the surroundings fade from aqua to indigo to simply black, and the eight of us huddle together drifting like astronauts lost in space. One lady panics clawing her way to the surface, and I can’t say that I blame her – it was a bit of a mind game. Two of the divers helped slow her ascent to a safe rate so that she would not get decompression illness. And the rest of us follow – no point in staying down there in the infinite void. We surfaced to realize that we were a long ways off shore, and inflated all four of our bright orange “Safety Sausages” in hopes that the dive boat would see us. But we were so far off, farther than was logical to look to search for missing divers, and even more the bright afternoon sun was setting behind us making it difficult to see our tiny silhouettes. So we waited and waited.



An hour passed. Some people started getting stung by jellyfish – nothing too bad, but it didn’t help to make the wait any more pleasant. Luckily I am in the habit of diving with a full wetsuit and hood and gloves, so only a tiny bit of my face is exposed. Finally we were able to flag down a local fishing boat, and he picked up one of the divers to go back to get the Blue Marlin boat. After 2 hours drifting we were safe, and came back with a new respect for the power and unpredictability of the great mother ocean.