When it all goes wrong
Posted: Tuesday, 30 October 2007 |
Things seldom go right in the world of boats. Throw divers into the mix and its a wonder we ever get out of the harbour without having to shout on the coastguard for some reason or another. This is an account of the incident we had in the summer. It was first put on my old blog which i suspect is about to be turned off....hence the new one here!
***************************************************
The wind seemed to whip the waves up from the very bottom of the flow, making us pitch and roll around the site. Plates slide and slip in the galley, my spidey senses were going haywire, somewhere deep down I knew the day was going to go pearshaped.
An earlier mishap with an octopus (a divers spare regulator to breathe from) seemed to settle them down, but on seeing a diver surface next to an Surface Marker Buoy - a sausage that can be sent up on a reel from the bottom - that had only been on the surface a few minutes, I knew there was something amiss. Seeing the yellow fins kick down away from the SMB I curse the diver for being so silly.
After a while you learn to read bubbles, Hazel the skipper had pointed out that the deeper the diver, the smaller the bubbles. I press the talk button on my radio and tell Hazel that I think those bubbles look deep – they seem to come to the surface in a bit of a fizz, the bubbles themselves are small and diffuse, not like the upturned soup plates you get from divers at 6m or 3m doing stops.
As we turn past the SMB three divers on our port side (away from the diver lift) surface and we manoeuvre to recover them and give them shelter in the lee of the boat and I climb into my warm floatation jacket to protect me from the biting wind. As we recover them a shout comes through the turbulent air, and the diver is back on the SMB and signals distress. Hazel turns the boat towards the diver painfully slowly, the wind making it hard to bring the bows around. Too much power at this point would be fruitless as it wouldn’t actually help the turn – you just have to be patient. If it had been me at the helm I would have got this so wrong, but with her experience H knows her stuff.
Coming alongside the diver she is sitting low in the water and I can see something is very wrong. I tear the throwline from behind me and the yellow bag lands inches from her hand. She makes no effort to grab it. Hazel appears on deck next to me and we both grab hold of the nearest diver to us, we explain to him in emphatic urgent phrases (the whole group is French, only a few speak English well) that he seems to only just understand that he needs to get in and help her – he is still in his drysuit. Just as she starts to slip below the surface he splashes in next to her and hauls her back to the top.
By this time they have drifted to the rear of the boat making moving impossible for risk of putting a diver through the propeller. I can see that he is making no effort to open her airway, white froth is coming from her mouth and her lips are blue.
Making the decision to do what I do next took milliseconds. In reality there was no question of me doing anything else. I climb over the railing and onto a fender. I then drop the bombshell. Hazel is running back into the wheelhouse to try to move the boat and I ask her possibly one of the hardest questions I have ever asked anyone - “do I go in?”. Ultimatley she is responsible for me as well as the divers, something that must have felt so heavy on her shoulders that day. I cannot even begin to think how she feels after saying yes. Hanging a foot above the water, I count. One. Two. Three.
The cold water takes my breath away, my clothes feel so heavy and I gasp for air but in the knowledge that it will pass quickly and I can get on with what I have to do. Swimming for the casualty I mange to get hold of her pillar valve and turn her face up again as the force of the waves had rolled her face down. Grasping her jacket shoulder strap I form a seal on her mouth as best I can in the waves and give five rescue breaths, painfully aware that these are nowhere near perfect. I press the button on her Buoyancy Contro Device but there is no inflation. I also try her drysuit inflator, but that is the same. She has no gas in her cylinder.
I feel around on her left shoulder for the inflate tube and find it, gasping for air I blow into it and feel her start to rise. Once her head is clear I release her weight belt and begin AV again, pinching her nose and struggling to get a seal around her mouth. The boat comes in as close as it can - there are SMB’s in the water very close to us an we are within the turning circle meaning we are around 5m away from the lift, I can see Hazel screaming out of the wheelhouse at the divers left on board “THROW A LINE”. A red and white lifebuoy lands in the water next to me, but the French divers on the boat have not kept hold of the line attached to it. I pass it to the diver in the water and continue to breathe into what seems to be a lifeless body. I will never forget the way her eyes looked. Blank, staring and unresponsive.
Hazel shouts “Line!” and I glance around to see the monkey’s fist throwing line splash down only 1m away from me, for some strange reason I thought it would float, even in the knowledge it contains a lump of lead and sinks like a stone. By the time I have completed the cycle of AV and turned back to face the boat the critical line is gone, another accurate throw from Hazel shows the distance to be too great as the line lands short. Painfully quickly, the boat is blown away from us in the gusting wind.
Hazel is unable to come in for another chance for the pickup as there are now other divers in the water between us and her, and since time is of the essence, she asks another boat to come in and help. The feeling of being utterly powerless in this situation must have been soul destroying for her, but with another boat lined up for the pickup, she powers out of the way.
The bow of the Sharon Rose surges towards me and I scream for a line to be thrown. A rope has never felt so damned good. Wrapping it around my arm and gripping her tight we are pulled towards the pitching hull. I can feel the muscles in my arm ripping, my elbow feels as if it is about to pop apart and I scream as my thumb is yanked by the force of the weight.
Alongside the boat we grab the ladder, but the rolling motion makes this a painful experience for me, I am slammed into the hull and into the rungs of the ladder with every wave. The rescue davit is lowered down and I find my hands are so cold I struggle with the clip, but manage to find a D ring and she is hauled clear of the water. At about level with the deck the D ring parts company with the BCD and she crashes back into the water. I yell and swear with fury that we got so damned close.
With the feeling this is still going totally pear shaped I feel my feet on the rungs and with some strange superhuman strength I haul her up high enough that a diver on the deck can grab a hose from her pillar valve. This gives me the seconds I need to clip the line to another D ring and try again. Finally she is gone from above me and I suddenly seem to struggle a little – the ladder is only a few feet away and yet I cant seem to make any headway. Jimmy the crew spots this and hauls me in close on one of the many ropes in the water. After what seems like an eternity I clamber from the freezing water.
Unclipping her gear and pulling it clear we can finally get things working properly. She is blue, her eyes unmoving and look so dead its unreal. A small voice in my brain says the words of an instructor deep in my past “you never stop until someone more qualified than you tells you, or rigor mortis sets in”. Getting a pocket mask from the O2 kit I press it to her mouth and nose and blow into it, making more froth and foam bubble from her mouth as the air rushes back out again. After several breaths it is clear I am getting nowhere and we begin CPR.
A fifteen to two ratio is started and we go through four cycles before I hear what I want – a breath being taken. Pressing the O2 mask onto her face she takes more breaths, her colour slowly returns but not her consciousness.
Twenty long minutes later we come in alongside the pier in Houton and the blue bow of the Stromness lifeboat comes into view, filled with friendly faces. Bags of medical kit are passed over and a big yellow jacket for me as I am all of a sudden aware that I have been in the sea for a while and have then been on deck in just a pair of trousers and a very soggy jumper for over 25 minutes.
The local diving doctor arrives on site and starts his treatment. I get into the shower on the Sharon Rose and start to defrost. Kevin asks me how many sugars I want in my tea, and I really don’t know. Six seemed like a good number.
*****************************************************************
Heading back to Stromness the boat is so quiet. We get the harbours guys to help us moor up as I am now starting to feel all the bumps and bruises so Hazel runs me up to the doctors to be checked over. I’m pretty lucky - some spectacular bruises on my legs and stomach from the ladder, a small split in my lip and an inflamed tendon in my arm where I was bashed around.
We had to make some hard decisions that day - do I risk becoming a casualty myself was a calculated one. In truth the only reason I went in was that I trusted Hazel to not let anything happen to me. Even if she could not help by picking me up, she would damned well make sure someone did.
Seeing the diver in hospital awake and talking was a very strange feeling, she has since returned to France to make a full recovery.
I can remember feeling while in the water that I was giving AV to a dead body. Sometimes it is great to be wrong
A few days later a huge bunch of flowers arrived from a group of my friends. Thank you boys....
***************************************************
The wind seemed to whip the waves up from the very bottom of the flow, making us pitch and roll around the site. Plates slide and slip in the galley, my spidey senses were going haywire, somewhere deep down I knew the day was going to go pearshaped.
An earlier mishap with an octopus (a divers spare regulator to breathe from) seemed to settle them down, but on seeing a diver surface next to an Surface Marker Buoy - a sausage that can be sent up on a reel from the bottom - that had only been on the surface a few minutes, I knew there was something amiss. Seeing the yellow fins kick down away from the SMB I curse the diver for being so silly.
After a while you learn to read bubbles, Hazel the skipper had pointed out that the deeper the diver, the smaller the bubbles. I press the talk button on my radio and tell Hazel that I think those bubbles look deep – they seem to come to the surface in a bit of a fizz, the bubbles themselves are small and diffuse, not like the upturned soup plates you get from divers at 6m or 3m doing stops.
As we turn past the SMB three divers on our port side (away from the diver lift) surface and we manoeuvre to recover them and give them shelter in the lee of the boat and I climb into my warm floatation jacket to protect me from the biting wind. As we recover them a shout comes through the turbulent air, and the diver is back on the SMB and signals distress. Hazel turns the boat towards the diver painfully slowly, the wind making it hard to bring the bows around. Too much power at this point would be fruitless as it wouldn’t actually help the turn – you just have to be patient. If it had been me at the helm I would have got this so wrong, but with her experience H knows her stuff.
Coming alongside the diver she is sitting low in the water and I can see something is very wrong. I tear the throwline from behind me and the yellow bag lands inches from her hand. She makes no effort to grab it. Hazel appears on deck next to me and we both grab hold of the nearest diver to us, we explain to him in emphatic urgent phrases (the whole group is French, only a few speak English well) that he seems to only just understand that he needs to get in and help her – he is still in his drysuit. Just as she starts to slip below the surface he splashes in next to her and hauls her back to the top.
By this time they have drifted to the rear of the boat making moving impossible for risk of putting a diver through the propeller. I can see that he is making no effort to open her airway, white froth is coming from her mouth and her lips are blue.
Making the decision to do what I do next took milliseconds. In reality there was no question of me doing anything else. I climb over the railing and onto a fender. I then drop the bombshell. Hazel is running back into the wheelhouse to try to move the boat and I ask her possibly one of the hardest questions I have ever asked anyone - “do I go in?”. Ultimatley she is responsible for me as well as the divers, something that must have felt so heavy on her shoulders that day. I cannot even begin to think how she feels after saying yes. Hanging a foot above the water, I count. One. Two. Three.
The cold water takes my breath away, my clothes feel so heavy and I gasp for air but in the knowledge that it will pass quickly and I can get on with what I have to do. Swimming for the casualty I mange to get hold of her pillar valve and turn her face up again as the force of the waves had rolled her face down. Grasping her jacket shoulder strap I form a seal on her mouth as best I can in the waves and give five rescue breaths, painfully aware that these are nowhere near perfect. I press the button on her Buoyancy Contro Device but there is no inflation. I also try her drysuit inflator, but that is the same. She has no gas in her cylinder.
I feel around on her left shoulder for the inflate tube and find it, gasping for air I blow into it and feel her start to rise. Once her head is clear I release her weight belt and begin AV again, pinching her nose and struggling to get a seal around her mouth. The boat comes in as close as it can - there are SMB’s in the water very close to us an we are within the turning circle meaning we are around 5m away from the lift, I can see Hazel screaming out of the wheelhouse at the divers left on board “THROW A LINE”. A red and white lifebuoy lands in the water next to me, but the French divers on the boat have not kept hold of the line attached to it. I pass it to the diver in the water and continue to breathe into what seems to be a lifeless body. I will never forget the way her eyes looked. Blank, staring and unresponsive.
Hazel shouts “Line!” and I glance around to see the monkey’s fist throwing line splash down only 1m away from me, for some strange reason I thought it would float, even in the knowledge it contains a lump of lead and sinks like a stone. By the time I have completed the cycle of AV and turned back to face the boat the critical line is gone, another accurate throw from Hazel shows the distance to be too great as the line lands short. Painfully quickly, the boat is blown away from us in the gusting wind.
Hazel is unable to come in for another chance for the pickup as there are now other divers in the water between us and her, and since time is of the essence, she asks another boat to come in and help. The feeling of being utterly powerless in this situation must have been soul destroying for her, but with another boat lined up for the pickup, she powers out of the way.
The bow of the Sharon Rose surges towards me and I scream for a line to be thrown. A rope has never felt so damned good. Wrapping it around my arm and gripping her tight we are pulled towards the pitching hull. I can feel the muscles in my arm ripping, my elbow feels as if it is about to pop apart and I scream as my thumb is yanked by the force of the weight.
Alongside the boat we grab the ladder, but the rolling motion makes this a painful experience for me, I am slammed into the hull and into the rungs of the ladder with every wave. The rescue davit is lowered down and I find my hands are so cold I struggle with the clip, but manage to find a D ring and she is hauled clear of the water. At about level with the deck the D ring parts company with the BCD and she crashes back into the water. I yell and swear with fury that we got so damned close.
With the feeling this is still going totally pear shaped I feel my feet on the rungs and with some strange superhuman strength I haul her up high enough that a diver on the deck can grab a hose from her pillar valve. This gives me the seconds I need to clip the line to another D ring and try again. Finally she is gone from above me and I suddenly seem to struggle a little – the ladder is only a few feet away and yet I cant seem to make any headway. Jimmy the crew spots this and hauls me in close on one of the many ropes in the water. After what seems like an eternity I clamber from the freezing water.
Unclipping her gear and pulling it clear we can finally get things working properly. She is blue, her eyes unmoving and look so dead its unreal. A small voice in my brain says the words of an instructor deep in my past “you never stop until someone more qualified than you tells you, or rigor mortis sets in”. Getting a pocket mask from the O2 kit I press it to her mouth and nose and blow into it, making more froth and foam bubble from her mouth as the air rushes back out again. After several breaths it is clear I am getting nowhere and we begin CPR.
A fifteen to two ratio is started and we go through four cycles before I hear what I want – a breath being taken. Pressing the O2 mask onto her face she takes more breaths, her colour slowly returns but not her consciousness.
Twenty long minutes later we come in alongside the pier in Houton and the blue bow of the Stromness lifeboat comes into view, filled with friendly faces. Bags of medical kit are passed over and a big yellow jacket for me as I am all of a sudden aware that I have been in the sea for a while and have then been on deck in just a pair of trousers and a very soggy jumper for over 25 minutes.
The local diving doctor arrives on site and starts his treatment. I get into the shower on the Sharon Rose and start to defrost. Kevin asks me how many sugars I want in my tea, and I really don’t know. Six seemed like a good number.
*****************************************************************
Heading back to Stromness the boat is so quiet. We get the harbours guys to help us moor up as I am now starting to feel all the bumps and bruises so Hazel runs me up to the doctors to be checked over. I’m pretty lucky - some spectacular bruises on my legs and stomach from the ladder, a small split in my lip and an inflamed tendon in my arm where I was bashed around.
We had to make some hard decisions that day - do I risk becoming a casualty myself was a calculated one. In truth the only reason I went in was that I trusted Hazel to not let anything happen to me. Even if she could not help by picking me up, she would damned well make sure someone did.
Seeing the diver in hospital awake and talking was a very strange feeling, she has since returned to France to make a full recovery.
I can remember feeling while in the water that I was giving AV to a dead body. Sometimes it is great to be wrong
A few days later a huge bunch of flowers arrived from a group of my friends. Thank you boys....
Comments
Brilliantly told. I felt I was there. Must be a real-life tale for Living Orkney...if it isn't in the pipeline already.
Flying Cat from Orkney Mainland
well told and well done!!!!!
carol from the usual place
Wow, if there was an Island Blogging award for courage and bravery, it should be awarded to you. Well done. Truly inspirational. (PS Anne, howz about an Island blogging award ceremony, categories for most exciting blog, most humourous blog, most controversial blog, most posted blog and last but not least the Lifetime Blogging Award, (Flying Cat and TWS are my nominations). lol
Squidgy the Otter from Coll
Squidgy, could you just clarify WHICH awards me and notthewhitesettler are up for?
Flying Cat from hilariously yours
Flying Cat, I think that you and notthewhitesettler should compete for the Lifetime Achievement of the most prolific island blogger of all time in blogging history. Who would win, well we will have to take a blogging vote on it !!.
Squidgy the Otter from Laying out the red carpet
I'm sick of competing with that bloomin' cat. This place is full of witches, that's why there's so many bloomin' cats. Fc wouldn't get into The Most Posted Blog though. Blog with most Photography in it, would be a good fight, between FC, Scallowawife, oops, sorry scrub SW, she's not got a digicam just now, and maybe Ruth(WRONG)odanort, that would be interesting.
Tws from It Only Feels Like A lifetime
Deckhand, Wow. I don't know what to say. I'm in awe. Thanks for sharing this story.
CVBruce from CA, USA
Bravo. Can't seem to find the right words to say 'well done'. That doesn't seem enough
Wiesmier from Lewis
Thanks for all the comments guys.
H from Orkney
Nice one mate!
KMR from Scalpay
I grew up in Houton, and saw the ambulance at the pier regularly in the summer months. Sometimes the outcome wasn't as positive. Great to hear what happens oot there on all those diveboats tho, thanks Deckhand.
Ruthodanort from Unst
God forbit you are in the same situation again, you may find you can get a better seal in water through the nose, holding the mouth closed with a pistol grip on the chin.
Ian Petchey from UK
After coming to Orkney in May 2006 for 8 months, somehow I am still here. Running the MV Valkyrie in the summer and helping on the farm in winter is now my life. 
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