... Well this was to be an exciting one Son Fletcher had recently attained his PADI Advanced Open Water and Enriched Air Specialty qualifications, so this was to be a deep(ish) dive on Nitrox. Conditions were surgy but not too unpleasant on the dive boat ...
Ask any scuba diver what is the one thing they fear most when diving and they will tell you it is the bends. However, if you get a group of divers together they will no doubt joke that '... we will probably all end up bent sooner or later!'. I myself often joked to friends and family that 'I'll probably just end up bent ...' and like most divers I used to think that it would never happen to me ... but it did. I got bent.
A useful safety device for most divers is the surface marker buoy. In essence it is an easily seen surface float which is connected to the diver by means of a thin, strong line, usually carried on a reel.