Not exactly the best dive of my life, more of a “don’t do this dive” but at least I didn’t die.

To set the scene - I was working on a tall ship as deckhand/dive instructor. It was shit pay but a lot of fun especially with the captain we had on this trip. He’d seen Pirates of the Caribbean and really taken Captain Jack Sparrow to heart, complete with random stuff in his hair and beard. We’d engage in piratical behaviour such as hoisting the colours, sailing past one of our sister ships and broadsiding them with stale breakfast pastries.

So, late one afternoon we sailed into Cateran Bay and as we were getting ready to drop anchor the deckie in the bow calls out “the anchor fell off!” Everyone including the Captain is like “what do you mean the anchor fell off?” That is exactly what happened, the anchor had literally fallen off the chain in the middle of the bay. We rigged up a buoy with a weight and dropped it roughly where the anchor sunk.

As the more experienced diver on board, I prepped to go on a salvage dive with Captain Solo (Don’t do this number 1).
I dropped down on the marker float to about 12m, with a second inflatable marker and a coil of line for a spiral search. Visibility is about 3-4m.
So I’m circling the the start point, slowly paying out line, spiralling out slowly over a pretty boring sandy bottom. No anchor. I keep going, slow and steady, watching my air. No anchor. I’ve been down about 45-50 minutes and my air is getting towards the time to surface point when suddenly I see…not the ship’s anchor but the marker buoy. Oh shit. Turns out my line had got caught up on random pieces of coral sticking out of the sand and my spiral was not a spiral at all. With my air getting low, I try a last ditch trust to lady luck approach (Don’t do this number 2). Kneeling on the bottom, I close my eyes and slowly turn in a circle thinking choose a direction, any direction. Then the weird thing happens, there’s a flash of green light through my closed eyes. I head off in that direction and almost immediately find the anchor. WTF? I attach the marker and begin my ascent with approximately sweet fuck all air left (Don’t do this number 3? 2b?) which is not great but gets worse when I realise that there’s a bunch of large nasty stinging jellyfish passing by slowly right above me. So I have the fun choice of wait for them to pass and hope my air lasts or get stung to shit. I wait, yes I’m a big baby. Finally I surface, hand my gear up to the deckie in the tender and crawl aboard. The deckie looks at my guages, grabs the reg and takes one breath, then takes another half a breath before the tank is dry.
Eek. That was close. Back aboard the ship we head over to the anchor and drop down to reattach the anchor - bounce dive - also don’t do this, usually. Once we’re all safely anchored up for the evening the Captain brings out a bottle of rum (of course!), opens it and chucks the lid overboard. “Oh well, we’ll have to finish the bottle now!”

So the moral of the story is “If you can’t be good, be lucky but really you should be safe and don’t do stupid shit underwater”