Mr. Ballin
speaker
33,221 appearances
155 recordings
11 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 6d ago
Mr. Ballin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 92 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 21.
Appearances
They all sat on the edge of the boat with their fins hanging off towards the side of the water.
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They clipped into that line, made sure their gear was good to go, they looked at each other, gave the okay symbol, they jumped into the water.
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As soon as they hit the water, they removed all the air from their compensators and their life jackets, and then when they were ready, they looked at each other, gave the thumbs down, and they went subsurface.
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One of these student divers husbands, a man named Hallett Smith, who had previously completed the dive master course, was in the boat as a safety observer.
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And he said as soon as the group got in the water and they went subsurface, immediately their buoy and raft took off at a rapid pace.
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Smith had to tell the boat driver to speed up just to keep pace with the divers, but after only a minute or two, the divers appeared to just stop suddenly in water, and the inflatable raft started spinning in circles.
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When they drove over to the raft to see what was going on, Smith looked down and realized what had happened.
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The buoy and the line attached to it that all the divers were holding onto had ripped off of the inflatable raft and been sucked under the surface out of view.
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It would turn out the lead instructor had gotten the tides wrong and nobody had noticed.
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When the divers jumped into the water, it was not high tide like the instructor said it would be.
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It was changing from high tide to low tide, which meant instead of there being a one or two knot current, perfect for a drift dive, there was a six knot current ripping through the waterway that sucked them under.
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And for reference, any current that's above three knots is basically physically impossible to swim out of.
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So all these divers could do was ride it out and hope the current spat them out.
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before pushing them into a whirlpool.
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But unfortunately, that didn't happen.
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All seven divers were pulled directly into the worst whirlpool of all, because it sat over Jacob's hole, and down they went all the way down to one hundred meters at the bottom of this hole where they were pinned until eventually the whirlpool began releasing them.
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Back on the surface, Smith, along with the other rescue boats he had called in once he realized this was an emergency, began hauling the divers out of the water one by one when they popped up on the surface floating face down.
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Six divers surfaced, four were badly shaken up but were alive.
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One of them was the lead instructor, two had drowned.
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That was forty year old Ricky McDonald and Smith's wife, thirty-three year old Norell Tapurry.
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Showing 2981–3000 of 33,221 · page 150 of 1662
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