The diver on the boat who needs to tell everyone else on the boat how great he is at diving and anything else. That sort is always scary.
The diver on the boat who needs to tell everyone else on the boat how great he is at diving and anything else. That sort is always scary.
lol, that was funny.....
How about having a huge Tarpon slam you on the side of the head during a night dive? It took my breath away for a minute.
We were in Bonaire this past September. There are a couple of enormous Tarpon that hang around the reef out front of Captain Don's. They love to cruise in the dark alongside divers and use the lights for night hunting. Most of the time you don't even know they are there.
On this particular dive the Tarpon must have been inches away from my side. I was just cruising the reef when this little fish swam into my beam. I never even got a good look at it because I was focused on something else. But the Tarpon saw him and decided it was time for a snack. He blasted right past me so close that his tail actually thumped me on the side of the head. It kind of felt like getting thwacked by a wiffle bat.
Of course, once the initial shock wore off, I began to laugh so hard that I almost dropped my reg.
On another night dive during that trip, it was a squid that got the s*^t scared out of him. Ladydog and I spotted this squid putting on a color changing show for us. We were just hanging there, watching him. All of a sudden we saw him kind of tense up and start acting weird. Then in an instant, he inked and squirted away at the speed of light just as a good sized schoolmaster came roaring into our light beams with his mouth wide open. It was life and death to them, but we thoroughly enjoyed the show.
Mountain Dog
It's not the destination, it's the journey.
Originally Posted by Prostar
reminds me of a guy I once met who had the PADI Instructor badge sewn on his ball cap, his logbook, his sports bag, his dive bag, his jacket (front, back and on BOTH sleeves!) & I kid you not, on the butt of his speedos. To top it all off, he was doing his best Gaston (from Beauty & the Beast) meets Zoolander impression with blindingly-white too-straight teeth. While pulling out of the carpark (making our escape), we saw "Instructor" stickers on both the front and back bumpers of a Don Johnson wannabe convertible - no doubt his.
Last edited by littleleemur; 01-20-2008 at 05:10 AM.
Things that scare me:
1) Currents - don't like the feeling of being out of control on a drift dive. This happened to me on our very first ever night dive. We were in the Maldives and the DM had told me not to be nervous about night diving that he would look after me! Well he then signed up some very new divers to our party during the afternoon so natrually I was on my own with my husband as he had to help them in the water!!! Scary being with my husband LOL. Well before getting in the water the DM told us that there was no current at all as he had checked it 10 minutes earlier and that unlike daytime diving we wouldn't be seeing the whole reef we would just be poking around a few coral heads near the jetty. Well no sooner had we got to these coral heads when this verocious current took the whole group on an express train ride to the far end of the island. I'm not sure if I had time to think about what was happening as we covered what we had done during daylight hours in 45 minutes took us about 5 minutes and we were all left clinging to the last entry rope at an angle of 90degrees with the rope desperate to hold on unless we were swept out into open sea! On surfacing the DM casually said 'glad we are all still alive' before admitting he didn't know where the current had come from but it was a very strong one! This experience has left me rather nervous about diving in Cozumel in July where I hear it is all drift diving. Any tips?
2) Sharks - I always worry what is beaneath me when waiting on the surface for the boat to pick me up!
3) My husband!When in Jamaica last year he kept shouting 'ow something bit me' everytime we went for a swim. This cleared the water of many other swimmers and he said he was doing it on purpose so that we could have the water to ourselves but he certainly made me nervous
Bubbles, that reminds me, when we were teens and some tall guy or girl with big hair tried to sit down in the movie theater seat in front of me and block my view, I would tell them as they spied the seat that someone had just thrown up there on the seat but not to worry, they did their best to clean it up. It ALWAYS worked.
I disliked descending feat first a mile or more off shore and having my finds hit the murky, mucky bottom before I could see it.
LOL I should try that one.
I think my spookiest dive this year was on the Carolina, one of the "Black Sunday" wrecks off the coast of New Jersey. We got out there and unexpecedly, our window of supposedly good weather dissolved. An evil East wind cranked up and it was 4-5 ft when I jumped in. I was the only passenger on the boat to do a dive and I was down there by myself. It was freezing and I was thinking about how rough it was getting up on the surface and how cold it was, and how long my deco was going be after a 25 minute dive to 230 feet. I was happy I did the dive, but it was definitely one that freaked me out a bit.
Another thing that totally got me was my rebreather mouthpiece has two check valves in it. One completely failed even though newer, and I had a massive C02 hit after 15 minutes.......the typical 5 minutes of scrubber warm up time is not long enough for me to recognize and feel C02.
When it comes to creepy nothing can touch (at least for me) deep night dives in some of the small volcanic lakes in Nicaragua. There's an entirely different night fauna, with both pink and black fresh water eels, the water is crystal clear below the themoclline and the sides of the caldera are huge crystalline facets. The bottom is unknown but with a good light you can
see down another 200 feet.
And you just know that there is something very large and very creepy living in those depths ... or maybe I'd just been reading too much H.P. Lovecraft back then.
As for scariest: On a trip to Rhode Island years ago I was diving with an old friend who was (and is) a shark reseacher ... Wes Pratt. We where at about thirty feet on a day when the visibility was, maybe, five feet.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and as I turned my entire mask was filled with SHARK!!! There was a mild "boink," and the shark stopped, and slowly settled in a distinctly non-swimming posture to the bottom.
As my vision adjusted to the visibility and my depth perception took hold I realized that the SHARK was a rather small dead dogfish that Wes had launched at me like a glider.
But it scared the bejessus out anyway.
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