On a boat dive, you have time to look around at other people’s gear. Impressive? Showy? Who has the biggest camera set-up? I look for what is missing! One piece of gear is consistently missing. The signal sausage! Why should we care? Two brief stories…
We were diving at a site called Mwana wa mwana, off the east coast of Timbatu Island, off the east coast of Zanzibar, Tanzania, East Africa. (Pretend you can hear the Gilligan’s Island theme). Three divers and a divemaster. Perfect! We back-rolled in off a traditional dhow boat. Big splash! We dropped about 15 feet and followed the sloping bottom, crossed a small wall to 70 feet to look for seahorses. These were amazing, and we found several. Swimming back up the sloping bottom, we reached the edge of the small wall, and turned south to swim along the wall. We were the last group to drop in. The last group to return to the small wall. And the only group to turn south and swim against the gentle current. It was a great dive with 56 minutes of bottom time. And then we surfaced…
The boat followed the other three groups of divers. They went north. We went south. We were alone, with no boat in sight. Our divemaster had a small—less than 15 inches—orange buoy that he had towed during the dive. He waved it and waved it. We remained alone and at sea. I started looking at the nearby island 200 yards away and wondered what it would be like to cross the surf crashing onto the shore. Better than drifting off…
To my shame, I didn’t have a signal tube—a sausage. 🙁 My sweet girl didn’t either. They just weren’t all that relevant to the lakes we had been diving in Utah.
Fifteen long minutes passed…
Finally, the third diver exploded in German and, cursing the divemaster, inflated his 2 meter long bright yellow sausage. The boat captain, scanning the horizon with binoculars, saw it and picked us up.
I know only a few words of Swahili, but I can recognize the tone of someone getting chewed out. Our divemaster was. But we were safe—because that German dude had a signal sausage! Done. I vowed I would never dive in the ocean again without a sausage.
Some time later, I found myself bobbing in rough seas off the north coast of Bali, Indonesia. I was a divemaster intern and being careful not to second-guess the Dive Instructor leading the dive. We bobbed and bobbed. I looked at him, waiting for him to deploy his DSMB (delayed surface marker buoy). He looked at me and shrugged. This time I was ready! I inflated my bright orange signal sausage, and the boat found us a few minutes later.
Hear this carefully: I will never dive in the ocean without a signal sausage.
What about you?
It’s so small and so important. I take it even in our Utah lakes.
Thanks Dave. I don’t use one at places like Blue Lake. I won’t surface at Sand Hollow without a DSMB. I’ve seen Waverunners even in the protected zone. 🙁
Oh hell yeah! I learned from diving with Tracey Winholt in Cozumel: Never dive without your safety sausage, and never ascend without your safety sausage inflated above you at the surface!