TOBAGO (8 August 2004). Abandoned at sea, recreational diver Vivienne Slear could see the lights on the shore as she bobbed among the swells of the Atlantic. Desperately, she swam for the lights of the island, but the heavy current and swift tides pulled her out. Sharks were near. Barracuda, too. Ashore, fellow divers assumed she was dead and were planning to drop a wreath on the spot where she was last seen. It was March 1997 and Slear, then 45, was on an annual dive vacation off the island of Tobago with a group from Bucks County Community College. She said floating in swelling seas for 27 hours is the stuff from which Hollywood scripts are made. Sure enough, this weekend, theaters around the country premier "Open Water" the frightening story of a vacationing married couple on a dive trip who are left drifting at sea when a dive master screws up a head count and chugs back to port. ]In Slear's case, the screw-up came when the dive master didn't see her resurface. When a search turned up nothing, the worst was assumed. But she had resurfaced. "The currents were so strong that I got pulled away from the boat and the dive group. I was probably 80 yards from the dive boat, a football field's length," she said in a phone interview last week. She waved to searchers on the boat. They didn't see her. The ocean chop worsened. "It got rough, 6- to 8-foot seas. The ocean's a big place and there are big waves and every time I'd get to the top of a wave, I could see them circling looking for me, but they couldn't see me. The crew got concerned because it was turning stormy, so they returned to port," she said. Skies darkening, seas surging, tank air dwindling, she was alone bobbing in the Atlantic. Shore was distant, perhaps a half-mile from Tobago's lush and relentlessly rocky coastline. As waves grew, the current pulled her farther out. Though an experienced diver, she panicked. "I was crying a little bit, not knowing what to do. I knew nobody was coming to get me," she said. She must save herself. She focused on a landmark and kicked toward it, but the current pushed her out. Using a compass, she dove below and swam toward the point, but with little oxygen left, she was forced to surface. | | By 7 p.m., she had been in the water seven hours. She drew close enough to shore that she stood on a barnacle-coated boulder. The surf pounded and sent tons of water crashing onto her. She had no choice but to swim back to sea. Night came. She was splashing and kicking to get to shore. "I'd think about sharks and I'd think about my family and I'd think about drowning and I thought about dying. But in that situation, you can't really think about any of that. I had to think of surviving," she said. She kicked and swam all night, keeping shore lights in sight. Dawn came. A boat passed, but didn't see her. She swam toward a mountainside village, but the place was deserted. She came close enough to shore that a man picking bananas came down to the shore and signaled to her to head for a rock ledge. But the water was so choppy she couldn't make any headway. She had been in the water more than a day. "At that point I thought, I don't know how I'm going to get out of this. I can't reach land," she said. The current carried her around a point and ahead was one of the island's few sandy beaches near the town of Parlatuvier. She put her head in the water and kicked until she reached the shore. "It was just like the movies. I dragged my tank onto the beach and collapsed," she said. A fisherman came to her aid, gave her water and dry clothes and drove her to her hotel. "When I walked through the door of the hotel, they were having a memorial service for me," she said. "I may be one of the few people on Earth who has heard their own eulogy," she said. SOURCE - PhillyBurbs |
