Marv’s Drive and Dive
By Dale Ghere
July 24, 2004
Who wouldn’t want to be able to wake up in the morning and see written on the wall, “This is what you will encounter if you decide to accept today’s assignment.” That way if you thought the events of the day were not to your liking you could just rollover, go back to sleep and wait for a better day to occur. Who would not want to be able to see into the future?
I have thought about this a lot over the years and I have come to the conclusion that I would only like this ability if it were limited to the good things of life. In my thinking if you could predict the future then you would just know ahead of time what was going to happen, you wouldn’t have the ability to change the events so it wouldn’t happen. I think that it might be nice to know the good things that were about to occur, but to know that something terrible was about to happen and have no power to stop it would be devastating. There is comfort in taking life just one moment at a time. It causes you to plan and prepare. It provides a sense of anticipation to one’s life. We can live a life of adventure. We can think that we are in some control of our destiny, but at the same time know that we are not in total control.
I guess that is why we are taught at a very early age to begin to weigh our decision and calculate the consequences of our actions. Our parents try to impress us with the idea that if we make good decisions we will be rewarded with a full and meaningful life. However, if we make poor decisions then we will pay for it, one way or another.
Every morning can be filled with great expectations, but in reality some days do not go as well as expected.
I have forgotten what year this story took place. It was probably some time before 1965. I think that it was just after summer officially ended, but we were still keeping a skeleton crew. Guards would have been at Crescent Bay, Diver’s, Main, St Ann’s, Mt. Road, Wood’s and Victoria.
I was guarding at St Ann’s, which meant that I had to cover everything from Sleepy Hollow to Mt. Road. The problem with that situation was that all areas could not be seen all of the time from any one position. Because there was no single point to guard from, a lot of my time that day was spent walking up and down the beach. The surf had been red flag throughout the previous week, but by Sunday it had dropped considerably. There was a fairly strong wind chop and the water conditions for diving were terrible. There were few people on the beach and hardly anyone was in the water so when I saw three guys coming down the stairs at St Ann’s with all of their dive gear on all of the warning flags started to wave immediately. Who were these guys? I didn’t recognize any of them. Where were they from? If they had all of this dive gear and knew how to use it then why were they coming down the steps? One look at the water would have been enough to tell any experienced diver that it would be a better day to mow a lawn or paint a house than it would be to take a dive. The water was rough, there were still rather strong rips and the visibility was less than two or three feet.
As I approached them it became obvious that these guys didn’t have a clue about what they were doing. My first question to them was, “Are you certified divers?” They assured me they were, but they had left their clothes in the car so they could not prove it. I tried to point out all of the danger signs I saw when I looked at them and explained that if they really knew what they were doing they would have just gone home when they saw the water conditions. I suggested that they should just go for a free dive first and then they would see for themselves what I was talking about. Going for a quick dive without their tanks seemed like just a lot of extra and unneeded effort to them. They tried to argue with me and then they threatened to go in the water against my advice. I told them I would call for a back up and have the police arrest them if they insisted on going diving. This was a bluff, but it worked.
They eventually agreed to not go diving. They removed their dive gear and took some of it back to the car. They returned to the beach with their clothes on to get the last of their stuff. I was happy to see them going and figured that I had done them a big favor. They would have gotten in the rip at St. Ann’s, been thrashed around for a while and would have had a terrible dive experience. I figured that there was a good chance that one or more of them could have gotten into real trouble. I didn’t need to deal with that possibility. Now they could come back on a nice day, know what water conditions to look for and experience a good dive. I felt that all of Westgaard’s training lectures about keeping inexperienced divers from getting into a bad situation had paid off that day.
The next three hours were pretty uneventful; lots of patrols, few people and little to do. I was back at the tower when I saw two of the morning divers walking towards me from Thalia Street. As they got closer they started to run. I got out of the tower and asked them where their buddy was. That is when the day took a big turn.
They told me they had planned on going home when they left the beach. Then they stopped to have something to eat. While eating they decided to go to another beach to go for a dive. So they drove around looking for a beach where there was no guard. . They had decided that they didn’t want to waste the money they had spent renting their dive gear from a place called Marv’s Drive and Dive in San Bernardino. All of their dive gear had been rented from a gas station that doubled as a dive shop. They said that they had seen me walk down to Oak Street and had waited until I left before they went down the steps to get in the water at Cress Street. They then told me about getting thrashed by the waves. As they got out of the water they recognized I had been right. The two boys had thought at the time that their friend had been able to get through the rough surf so they had taken their equipment back to the car and had gotten dressed while they waited for him to finish his dive. They waited an hour before they really started to worry. Then as the time lengthened they figured that something must have gone wrong. They waited another half hour hoping their friend would show up. After all of that, they decided to ask for help.
I called for a back up and we spent the rest of the day walking up and down the beach looking for the lost diver. I asked everyone that came to the beach to keep an eye on the water so we could recover the body. The tank he was using would have held less than an hour of air so we had no hope of finding him alive. There was no sense in any of us getting in the water to look for him. The visibility for us would have been less than an arms length. We would have been feeling for him more than looking for him.
Look as hard as we may, nothing came ashore. Not a fin, a faceplate or anything that would indicate the boy was there. We all went home that evening knowing that there was a young man drifting around the bottom somewhere.
Eugene dePaulis found the body Thursday morning near Anita Street. The boy went in the water looking like any typical 16-year-old boy; four days later he came out of the water looking more like a 60-year-old man. Eugene said when he checked the air tank and it was still full. Like the others, he had gotten in trouble as soon as he entered the surf. He never did go for the dive and he was too inexperienced to be able to get himself out of the turbulent water. The boys had come to beach for an adventure and because of a series of poor decisions the day had turned into a hardship. Not only for all of the boys, but for me too. Forty some years later and I still question myself about what could I have done differently that might have made more of an impression on them in order to keep them from deciding to dive that day.
