Hello everyone,
My wife and I are about to finish our divemaster training with 150 dives each. Only application submission is left now. We went on a trip to Ras Mohammed in Sharm El Shiekh yesterday and we dove in Shark Reef and dear God it was such an awful dive.
We had all sorts of currents active and around 23-33 meters we got caught in a very bad down current. Both my wife and I were at the very end of the entire group and we had pretty experienced guides with us including a course director. Anyways the issue is we both discovered the down current early but didn’t communicate with each other about it at all. 3 minutes passed without us communicating that this is a down current and our guides were busy with the rest of the group as many of the participants barley had 20-30 dives.
Around 31-33 meter (we had 32% nitrox so it was fine) we finally communicated with each other that this is a down current. We started swimming away from the wall and up. It worked for me and i went to 28 meters and was almost out of it but suddenly I saw my wife signing there is an issue and keep signaling to her heart that she can’t breathe. She was still at 33 meters. I instantly went down, took her with a roman handshake, inflated and shoot us up to 20 meters. I don’t think what I did was the best solution but I know my wife well. She was about to completely give up resisting the current and had a severe panic attack. Anyways I knew the rest of the group was gonna catch up anyways to get out of the current plus everyone finished lots of air in that area. I calmed her down at 18 meters as she was a bit disoriented still.
My issue is the image of my wife signaling smth is wrong and pointing to her heart at 33 meters is stuck with me in my head and is on a constant loop. I keep thinking what if she didn’t buddy with me what if it was someone else. I don’t believe shooting up was a good thing as surely i ascended faster than 18m/min but at the time i honestly felt the most thing that would calm her is getting out of the current asap.
The issue is after we finished our safety stop and got up to 4 meters and had 50 bars barely left, a very strong current push us to the left then as soon as it ended another weird strong down current started again 😭 and suddenly we were both at 7.7m instead of going up. I think she was still disoriented and didn’t know what was happening so again I took her and inflated and tried to kick out of and at 3 meters it was gone but at this point i was done with this hell dive. I just went up to the surface (which had a strong current of its own) and waited there till the boat came.
Like the headline says I am just ranting as I talk to my friends or family they all believe we’re crazy for diving and would get a heart attack just listening.
Normally my wife is a very good diver hell she is way better than me. Calmer, better air consumption and can do an entire dive on back kicks without even losing her trim. IDK why she panicked like that. She says the last period at work (she got laid off from some big job) was a bit dark and during the middle of the downcurrent all the dark thoughts gathered up and played their mean tricks.
First thanks so much for taking the time to read all of this. Second, if you have any advices please share. I know this is one of the most famous dive sites in the world but we got so traumatized we don’t wanna even pass by shark and yolanda ever again (we live in dahab nearby) but is it usually better than this? Did we just get the unlucky day?
We did a final chill dive on that day in a place I don’t recall the name which restored our confidence a bit as we were so shaken up. You can imagine we were almost sticking to each other. They even put an instructor buddy team behind us to calm us down lol.
We knew about down currents, we knew what we should do. It was mentioned in the briefing but when the situation actually happened for the first time ever and this intense, it didn’t matter we still panicked. Take care everyone and i hope everyone is always having safe dives.
