Well, it wasn't really that funny, but anyway.

TSMV Coralita, sadly no more, January '91 (I keep a log if
liveaboarding) and we'd overnighted from North Horn to the Cod Hole
where we arrived early in the morning, real early so we got the best
mooring buoy.

Now I'm an early bird and, as usual, decided to do a pre breakfast
dive. The others were getting sated (it was the home leg of the trip)
so I enjoyed the site all by myself since there was no other boat there.

About halfway through my dive I heard another boat. Just as I was
approaching Coralita with a view to ascending I saw a line of two
abreast divers going south to north. This column of divers, some
holding hands, all keeping station, was quite a sight. I don't think
any of them saw me since they all appeared to be looking straight
ahead, I was to their right about 10 metres away, in the lee of a
bommie and in excellent viz. I don't think I've seen anything quite
like it before, or since.

There was a current going north which these divers were dutifully
following. I reflected that we might have a problem as I surfaced and
told the rest of the troops as they were breakfasting. The Coralita
crew consisted of the owner, Albie Ziebell (helluva photog and his
sensahuma had us in stitches/tears) and the cook/kitchen
hand/DM/model/you name it. That's how it happened in those days on a
"serious" liveaboard, or at least so on Coralita and everyone
understood it. So everyone helped as needed and that was an accepted
(and mostly fun) part of the deal.

Sure enough, not ten minutes later we had deployed our tender and
picked up the stragglers. Most had made it to Coralita on their own,
quite exhausted. Eventually the other boat had also deployed its
tender but by then it was too little, too late.

They were in time to take one load of our visitors off our hands, our
tender took the rest (two trips).

I _did_ hope that some of them might accidentally forget their camera
gear (and maybe some of the dive gear), most of which I lusted over,
but no luck. At that time I was using a Nik V with Sunpak Marine
Strobe which weren't bad for those days but what some of _those_
people had, well. IIRC one had a video mounted in the nose cone of a
scooter (or maybe it just looked like one) when videos were pretty
exotic just for themselves. Dunno exactly, video is not my bag.

No they weren't Aussies, no they didn't have a DM with them (that we
saw). I leave it to you to guess their nationality.

Of course if we hadn't been there, they could well have scattered all
over the relatively open ocean north of the Cod Hole. That current was
not insignificant.

Christian