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My friend Robb Wolov was my guest on a diving trip when he died on Sunday. I'm keeping to the facts as I know them in this report and leaving out the speculation. I bitterly regret that I did not do more to prevent this tragedy. My thoughts are with his wife Bev and daughter Sam, who are also friends. We had dived the wreck of the Breda together and had got back onto the boat. While I was breaking down my kit I heard a yell from Robb - his mask had gone over the side. I went to the rail, and the mask was sinking, but very slowly because it had a neoprene strap cover. Robb was desperate to recover it because it had prescription lenses, and quickly got his kit back on. He had been taking his time dekitting but I had already broken my stuff down and couldn't get back in the water immediately. We were moored in about 28m (90ft) of water and Robb didn't have much more than 50 bar (750 psi) in his single tank, but he thought he could catch the mask if he chased it down straight away. I let him borrow my mask and go for it. I expected him to bounce down, probably not all the way to the bottom, and then come straight back up either with or without the mask, but as a precaution I got ready to go after him, intending to follow his bubble column down if he had not surfaced. Others were watching his bubbles, but they were moving away from the boat and hard to see in the surface chop. The picture was also confused by other bubbles coming up from the wreck nearby. By the time I got in the water and started out on the surface towards where the bubbles seemed to be, the spotters had lost sight of them. I took stock and realised I had next to no chance of finding him on my own and that I should get an organised search going without delay. He was found on the bottom after a short search, 100-150 yards from the boat. His tank was empty, his regulator was out of his mouth and his weightbelt was still on. The mask he had been trying to retrieve was a few feet away. The search team brought him up, gave him AV on the surface and got him onto another boat that had come to assist. Others on that boat continued with CPR until they were met by the Oban lifeboat with a diving medic on board. Robb never showed any vital signs, and eventually was pronounced dead. We don't yet know what went wrong. His equipment is with the authorities and there will be a post mortem. Wilson -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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