Scramble to Save Divers Led to Diplomatic Snafu caught my attention as I read the Los Angeles Times before work on the morning of July 7, 1987. The article reported on the plight of three divers south of Ensenada, Mexico. The story described how on the Fourth of July, two of the three divers, Daniel Lavin and George Spaulding, found themselves drifting in a current after a shore dive. The unnamed third diver made it to shore and asked a bystander to call the Coast Guard for assistance. He then rented an inflatable boat and went in pursuit of his drifting buddies
Apparently, someone contacted the US Coast
Guard. An overflight from a USCG Falcon
jet spotted the divers but could not stay as the aircraft low on fuel. A Coast Guard helicopter was dispatched. Just
as it was arriving in the area, Mexican authorities said that it could not
enter that country’s airspace. The Mexican
authorities said two of their naval patrol vessels would respond. Lavin watched all the activity from the
safety of the shore. “By the time they
got out there, we had already been rescued by the Mexican fishing boat.”
As Lavin notes, “when I came into work this
morning (July 6), I saw the newspapers that I was dead. So I called the Coast Guard.”
The report of their death resulted from a
miscommunication. When the Coast Guard
called the Captain of the Port in Ensenada, which is 20 miles north of the
divers’ location, he reported that a private radio communication had been overheard
that two bodies had been picked up by a fishing boat. The USCG then issued the press release
documenting the “fatal” incident.
I did notice that the diver quoted in the
article, Daniel Lavin, was from San Diego.
I was friends with a David Lavin, also from San Diego. David and I worked at Delco Systems in
Goleta. When I purchased my home, he took
my place with my former house mates. We
played together on company sports teams and so on. I wondered if there could be a family
connection.
I picked up the phone on my desk and called
him. “Dave,” I said after he answered,
“I am reading an LA Times article about a couple of divers from San Diego
adrift south of Ensenada…” Before I could finish the sentence, Dave sighed, and
responded, “Yeah, that’s my crazy brother.
He was down there for the long holiday weekend. He gets into situations like that all the
time….”
“Wow,”I thought to myself, “remember not to
dive with this guy’s brother.” I never
did get to follow up on the conversation for further details. Besides, I got the impression from our brief
phone call he really did not want to talk about it. Also, I could never figure out why the
normally thorough reporting of the Times did not name the third diver.
This story highlighted just how quickly
things could go wrong. It also tapped
into a deep seated fear that some divers have of going adrift. In those days a
diver’s emergency signaling equipment consisted of a whistle attached to the
inflator hose of the buoyancy compensator.
I don’t recall anyone carrying a signal mirror, dye markers, or smoke/flare
canisters. Those items might be found in
the emergency kit on a boat, but no diver carried them into the water.
Not many divers carried any type of surface
marker buoy (SMB) in those days. The
primitive SMB of that era was a thin, long, roll up plastic bag open at one
end. A diver on the surface would deploy
the marker from a bcd pocket, fill it from the regulator and hold the end tight
to keep the air from leaking out.
Brightly colored gear, which could increase a
diver’s visibility on the surface, was rare.
Wetsuits, for the most part were black or dark blue as were many
buoyancy compensator devices. One
exception to this trend was the bright orange or scuba blue Scubapro “stab
jacket” BCD introduced in 1978.
Color accents on dive gear, following the
neon color trend in ski and surf wear, were just becoming available from the equipment
manufacturers. The change was driven by
marketing, in the belief that brighter colors might attract more women to sport
diving. (Tabata USA was a pioneer in in
these innovations.) We called it the “neon diver” craze. However, for the most part, you could have
any color you wanted, as long as it was black.
That maxim sticks to this day.
Tanks did come in a rainbow of colors. By far, the unpainted tanks with their
natural steel or aluminum finish were the most common. Yellow, red, blue and
black being the other color choices I recall.
Scramble
to Save Divers Led to Diplomatic Sanfu.
Gene Yasuda. Los Angeles
Times. July 7, 1987. Section 1, page 35. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-07-07-me-1464-story.html
For an example of the erroneous press report, which reported two deceased
divers had been recovered by the Mexican Navy, see “Mexico will not let US
search for two people. Escondido Times
Advocate, July 6, 1987. p. 6
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