My buddy and I blinked, and then blinked again.  We had carefully followed our navigation line back to the anchor line’s tie in point on a deep, dark wreck off the New Jersey shore.  We needed to leave the bottom NOW, as we already had racked up a good bit of deco obligation.  So all we had to do was to grab our strobes and head up that anchor line, back to sunshine, like we had done many times before.
 
Unfortunately, the anchor line wasn’t there.
 
Wreck diving in the NYC area has a well established culture, with protocols and gear optimized over decades for this environment, at the cost of many tragedies and near misses.  So if you haven’t been diving here before, please listen when the boat captain goes over standard practices, even if you have tons of technical diving experience in warm water or caves.  And if you’re a new diver, learn these skills and practice them – you never know when they may save your life.
 
We dive in deep cold water with often limited visibility.  We dive in shipping lanes where heavy commercial traffic is frequent.  And we may be diving on days with heavy seas, strong currents, or fog.  Unlike locations where divers drift to and from the dive site and the boats follow them above, the boats here are tied into the wreck with a heavy rope and chain (the anchor line). They will have limited maneuverability, especially if there are divers in the water on long deco. 

We recently had an incident over the wreck of the Arundo, which highlighted two things.  One, how important it is to know your emergency procedures.  Two, how lucky we are to have such excellent and well trained captains and crew.  The old idea that a dive boat is “just a taxi to the wreck” is not true.  While of course, the diver is ultimately responsible for running a safe dive, having calm and experienced topside support has on many occasions made the difference between life and death.  Whether it’s a bent diver requiring emergency air evacuation or a drifting diver lost at sea, the surface team is critical.  I don’t want to trust my life to just anyone with a boat and a stack of waiver forms.
 
One of the main requirements for local wreck diving is that you ONLY descend and ascend while maintaining physical contact with the anchor line (or other attached lines of the “Carolina rig”), to ensure that you get back to the boat safely.  Free ascents are not acceptable and may get you on the “boat is full” list.  Of course, anything is better than drowning, and sometimes free ascents happen, but anyone in our area should do whatever they can to avoid them.

So we stay on the anchor line.  Once we are on the wreck, unless it’s small, intact and in relatively clear water, it’s a good idea to run a navigation line.  This is thin “cave line" – essentially heavy duty string -  that the diver places on the wreck from a reel, securing it to fixed points at intervals, to make sure that they can find their way back to the anchor line.  And when you start running that line, it’s important to tie it off NEAR the anchor line but not directly to it, as we shall soon see.

My buddy and I descended onto the wreck.  As usual for this site, it was very dark.  We did see another diver at the tie-in point (where the anchor line is secured to the wreck).  He was trying to tell us something, speaking through his regulator, but we couldn’t figure out what he was saying.  Since he didn’t seem to be in distress or needing assistance, we just started on our dive (spoiler alert – we shouldn’t have done that!).
 
We tied in near the anchor point, using a wreck reel to run our navigation line and swam off, spending a little over 30 minutes at 115 feet.  We then followed this line back to where we started.  And we didn’t see the anchor line. 
 
For a few minutes, we were second guessing ourselves.  Maybe we tied our navigation line too far from the tie-in, and we just couldn’t see it in the dark water?  But after looking around for a few minutes, we realized what had happened – the anchor line had broken free.  We couldn't tell exactly how that happened at the time, but another diver later told me that he had seen the chain pull through the portion of the wreck that held the tie in  This can happen when it’s holding a dive boat bobbing up and down in heavy seas.  It’s rare, but that’s a lot of pull, and on that day it happened.  You can see why you don’t tie your navigational line to the anchor line itself!
 
Now we had a problem.  We had to ascend.  We already had a good bit of a decompression obligation.  And for every minute we spent at 115 feet, that number was going up.  My buddy “shot a bag” – she sent a submersible marker buoy (SMB) up to the surface by attaching it to a line and filling it with gas, and then securing that line to the wreck.  That gave us our own anchor line, and we could start our ascent on it. 

This did three things – it helped us make a controlled ascent with deco stops, it kept us from drifting away from the wreck (and the dive boat), and it alerted the crew as to where we were.  This was especially useful in my case, since I was on a rebreather and therefore, I wasn’t sending as many bubbles to the surface as the other open circuit divers.  The boat crew watches for these “boils” as a sign of a diver below.
 
I had about 23 minutes of decompression, and it was not easy.  Unlike a heavy anchor line tied between the dive boat and the wreck, this thin piece of cave line bobbed and swayed in the current, especially once three of us were doing decompression on it (another diver used our line to ascend).  I finished my deco, but then I found that the top of the SMB was about 5 feet under the surface, due to heavy current pulling it sideways.  I didn’t want to just leave it and head for the surface, because I didn’t know where the boat was, and once I did that I would have been at the mercy of the current.  I could have shot a second SMB from that point, but instead I just swam the line in the direction of the current, straightening out the angle from the bottom until it was straight enough for the SMB to be above the water.  Then I surfaced.  The crew knew exactly where I was and threw me a line to get me back to the boat.

Some of the newer divers did not ascend on a line, but made a free ascent, surfacing significantly downcurrent from the dive boat.  I was told that they did not have adequate signaling devices (such as a whistle or a GPS/radio unit).  They did have SMBs, but only one of them deployed it on the surface as a “safety sausage”, and one diver used a signal mirror.  Fortunately, the crew was able to see them (having realized that the anchor line had broken) and were able to maneuver to pick them up.
 
These divers had no deco obligation, and they made a direct, free ascent (hopefully not too fast!).  But even with this direct ascent, the current was enough to blow them far from the dive boat in the few minutes it took them to hit the surface.  Now imagine if I hadn’t been able to maintain contact with the wreck through the SMB line.  Unless I was willing to skip deco and take that significant risk of injury or worse, that would mean drifting in a strong current for 23 minutes!  I would have surfaced far from the wreck and the dive boat, with a good chance of being lost at sea.  I do carry a GPS device, two whistles, a signal mirror and a surface dye marker for such a possibility, but it is MUCH better to ascend on a line.
 

One final point - it is CRUCIAL to follow crew instructions when reboarding the dive boat in this situation.  Unlike the usual process, the boat’s engines will be running and the propellers may be turning.  Do NOT try to swim to the boat when they are picking you up, but wait for a line to be thrown to you.  The crew will likely be maneuvering while keeping their eyes on multiple divers, some of whom may be untethered.  If you are on an SMB, just stay there until the drifting divers can be recovered.  Don’t make it more difficult for the crew during this process.
 
So here’s to the captain and crew of the Gypsy Blood for knowing just what to do in that emergency.  And here’s to my buddy for shooting that bag and tying it off well to the wreck (I also carry two SMBs, a reel and a spool).  In retrospect we did make one mistake – not figuring out what the diver was trying to tell us on our descent.  He later told us that he was concerned about the line breaking, and he was trying to tell us that.  This was a lack of situational awareness on our part, so something to keep in mind for the future.  We were fortunate that everything worked out well, but there is always room for improvement.