Down Draft at Villa Blanca Wall

Villa Blanca Wall is a sloping wall just offshore Cozumel with a ripping current. Before Hurricane Wilma, in 2005, it was peppered with huge sponges and gorgonians. Wilma pretty much wiped these out and covered everything with white sand. This is still a great dive and the changes to the reef don’t seem to have reduced the number of fish and critters, quite the opposite, for some reason there seem to be more.

Mary and I have been diving Cozumel for years and have both fond and frightful memories of Villa Blanca Wall. My most memorable dive there was with a young dive guide that, for some idiotic reason, decided to go against the current. Mind you Cozumel diving is pretty much all drift diving and to go against any strong current, much less one at Villa Blanca Wall, is insane.

The young dive guide quickly realized his mistake and was trying to ascend the wall with two inexperienced divers in each arm that were apparently exhausted and almost out of air. Mary and I had moved away from the wall and to the back of the group to make sure everyone was okay. I motioned for Mary to move up the wall and go with the current. As soon as she turned around I took an unexpected elevator ride from about 45ft to over 60ft in a matter of seconds. I was caught in a down draft.

Looking at my depth gauge I saw 80ft go by, then 90ft, and I was still descending at a rapid rate. I looked up and saw Mary was watching me descend with not a little concern and she pointed at me as if to ask what the hell I was doing. I hunched my shoulders and flared my hands in an attempt to say if I knew what the hell I was doing I would not be here.

Coming to my senses I grabbed the inflator hose to my BCD and let in a few squirts of air. It is amazing how training takes over in an emergency and I remembered to not add too much air because if you popped out of the down draft you might just as quickly shoot to the surface.

After a couple of squirts of air I slowed but the descent continued. For some reason I remembered that another way to escape the down draft was to swim perpendicular to it. I flattened my body and kicked with my fins and finally broke the grip of the draft. By this time I was just short of 100ft and the current was taking me away from the wall and out to open sea.

Mary had watched the whole episode and as I ascended she found her way to me at about 40ft. We inflated our safety sausage and after a safety stop at 15ft. broke the surface in open water, a considerable distance from the reef, where we were picked up by another dive boat and returned to our boat.

As we boarded our boat I saw the embarrassed dive guide called him over and made sure that he had a robust post dive briefing. Several boats around us spent the next few minutes picking up other stranded divers scattered like flotsam in the open ocean. Luckily we got everybody on board; all were safe. The dive guide had a really good life lesson and we divers another story to tell.