Diver Recounts Horror
http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?story_id=1020381&t=Local...
By Thomas Geyer
The first night of Scott Jones? trip to La Paz, Mexico with other Quad-City scuba divers was spent in the Hotel Los Arcos.
His second night was spent clinging to rocks in the Sea of Cortez. His third night was spent in a Mexican military hospital.
By Wednesday, two nights later, he was back home in the Quad-Cities, thankful to be alive, but also mourning the loss of his friend, Katie Vrooman,
who died while scuba diving.
Jones and several other Quad-City residents, including the 77-year-old Vrooman of Rock Island, had gone to Baja to scuba dive in the Sea of Cortez,
also known as the Gulf of California, located between Baja and the western mainland of Mexico.
La Paz is about 600 miles south of Tijuana, Mexico, which is just on the border with California.
The area is a virtual paradise for whale watchers, while scuba divers are treated to such sites as hammerhead sharks, manta rays, as well as a wide
variety of other aquatic life.
But the trip, booked by Baja Expeditions Inc. in San Diego quickly turned to tragedy.
?On Sunday, we took a three-hour boat ride south to our dive location,? said Jones, the owner of SCUBA Adventures QCA Inc., Davenport and a
Professional Association of Diving Instructors, or P.A.D.I., master instructor. There were seven people in his group, six divers and one snorkeler.
?The dive master gave us an orientation on the dive site, which is standard procedure,? he said Thursday from his business in downtown Davenport.
They were assigned dive buddies.
Jones? dive buddy was a friend with whom he would take some underwater video. Vrooman?s dive buddy was Marilyn Hoover of Bettendorf, he said.
Hoover was a close friend of Vrooman and a constant diving buddy with her on many other trips in the 13 years that Vrooman scuba dived, Ann Boaden, a
friend of both women, said Wednesday.
A call to Hoover?s home by the QUAD-CITY TIMES was not returned Thursday night.
?Marilyn and Katie were very in tune with each other,? Jones said. ?They were never more than five or six feet apart.?
Suddenly, there was sea surge, he said, which the dive master never warned them about. Suddenly Vrooman was separated from Hoover and Jones from his
dive partner, he said.
?The surge was coming in and out,? he said. ?I saw Katie by herself and I knew something was wrong. Katie was never by herself.?
And then, he said, Vrooman disappeared.
Jones said he went to the surface and inflated his life preserver. It was then that he saw the surge throw Vrooman twice against the rocks and
boulders.
Fighting the surge, he got to her, and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. As he did so, he said, the waves kept knocking him against the rocks.
Jones said he found a cove area that he thought would offer more protection, ?but it acted like a funnel. I?m trying to remove my equipment and give
her mouth-to-mouth and I?m still being banged up against the walls.?
In between breaths for Vrooman, he yelled for help, only to be muffled by the barking of the sea lions in the area, he said. After 1 1/2 hours, of
trying, he still could get no response from Vrooman.
As night descended, Jones braced himself for a long wait on the rocks, all the while trying to hold his friend so he would not lose her body. But the
tide came, and washed her out.
?I was cussing at God,? he said. ?I was wondering, ?why me?? But I kept thinking of my daughter and my significant other.?
A couple of hours after daybreak Monday, Jones, tired and dehydrated, once again looked out to sea to find help.
For a while, nothing happened. And then, he spotted a kayak with a single person in it and began yelling for help. The kayak, though, turned around
and went the other way. But soon, the kayak returned, and with it, a two-man kayak.
?They threw me a bottle of water and said they would get help,? he said.
About an hour or so later, he added, ?the kayaks came back. And way out on the sea there was a boat. They paddled toward it, waving their oars every
so often. And then the kayaks became specks on the sea.?
But on the boat came, he said.
Scraped, battered, bruised and in pain, Jones was pulled from the water, and placed aboard a Mexican Navy boat, which raced him to the military
hospital. Vrooman?s body was found later in the day.
Jones flew into the Quad-City International Airport near Moline late Wednesday.
?Katie was one sweet lady,? he said. ?She went on trips with my mother and father even before she was certified to dive, just to have fun.
?She was a wonderful friend, almost like a mother, who sent me birthday cards and dropped by the shop to say hello and see how I was doing.?
Vrooman was a very active woman who went of several trips a year, Jones said. ?She just loved to dive.?
For Jones, he said it will be some recovery time and then back into the water.
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