My grandfather always told me about this buddy of his when they were growing up who lit a match to look in his gas tank to see how much gas was in there....
About 8 yrs ago I was out diving off Ft. Lauderdale beach in the summer w/ a bunch of my friends on a 6-pack charter. There was a call over the radio that one of the other boats (another boat I worked on - a 45 ft Burpee - sort of a big tub of a boat) had a diver who should've come up an hour earlier and the Marine Patrol was out looking for him. We were in the area & all rescue or dive master certified so we started swimming search patterns for the guy. Mind you, I've never done an underwater body search before - the visibility was around 70-80 feet but with the reflection of the sun off sediment floating in the water, etc. hard to say if a shadow was a body floating midwater or what. Anyway, we didnt' find the guy on our first dive. During the surface interval between the two dives of the morning trip the other boat captain called back & said they found the body floating mid water within 50 ft of where they last saw the guy.
What they guessed happened was this guy had been diving w/ his g/f - she wasn't an experienced diver, he was - so she had been panicking a bit during the dive. He brought her back to the boat and while the divemaster was helping her back on board, he must've drifted forward and gotten hit on the head by the boat rocking back & forth in the waves. Knocked him unconscious and he drowned right near where they picked up the girlfriend up. Everyone assumed that he had gone back down to finish the dive. They didn't start worryign about him until it was clear that he should've gone thru his whole tank of air by then and then they started the search.
Normally the captain of the boat would be in deep shit, the family would be suing the bejeezus out of the boat, the owner, the dive master and anyone else they could go after. Except when they did an autopsy they found cocaine in his system and that immediately freed the boat staff of all guilt.
It sucks tho -- of course its no fun to die while diving, but the liability to the boat staff is brutal when something like that happens. You have no idea what the divers were doing the night before - drinking? no sleep? drugs? And then they come on your boat and jump into the ocean to have fun.
Here's another diving death - my uncle had been diagnosed w/ heart problems and was told he needed a triple by-pass. Uncle Jim didnt' like doctors at all. So he basically researched the subject, changed his diet to be as healthy as possible, etc. And lived a very active life. Then one day he was scuba diving on a lake on some property he had just bought in Tennessee or somewhere. Uncle Jim was a very down-to-earth guy but who did things always on his own terms and his own way. He had a heart attack under water while exploring his property.
Here's another family experience. My mom's cousin & her 25 yr old son lived in S. Florida when Hurricane Wilma came thru last fall. For some reason her son, who was an epileptic, had not been taking his medication. Then when the hurricane hit, he managed to experience a seizure and died from it - heart attack or something. In the meantime the rest of the family is stuck sitting in the dark after the hurricane waiting for the power and everything else to come back on. While they are attending the funeral, my cousin's father has a heart attack from the stress of it all. He's still alive.
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