A short time into their dive some 90 feet under the Coral Sea, Michele Turner's buddy made a "T" with his hands.

He needed a time-out.

The California man had breathed nearly half the air in his tank and needed to swim back to the boat, moored off the coast of Australia near the Great Barrier Reef.

So he surfaced, to get his bearings.

And what he saw alarmed him.

"I assumed he was going to go up, come back down, tell me where the boat was, we would swim and boom — we'd be there," recalls Turner, a 43-year-old Lititz-area woman. "But he gave me the signal to ascend, a thumbs up."

The divers had been swept away in a strong current — and their boat was more than a football field away.

"You're looking at it like, 'Oh, boy,'" recalls Turner. "We could see the boat. We just couldn't swim to it."

So began an ordeal straight out of the 2004 thriller "Open Water:" Turner, who had notched 85 previous dives, was stranded with her partner in open water known to be shark-infested for more than seven hours Feb. 5 as a storm lashed them with rain, waves crashed over their heads and the sun sank farther toward the horizon.

Her two-week dream vacation had suddenly turned into a test of survival. In her first interview about an ordeal that made international news, Turner says she and her diving buddy were on a mission.

"I prayed. I thought about my family. I had sent my husband, on Day 1, a Valentine's card," Turner said. "I was hoping it would get to him by Valentine's Day. I thought, 'Please let me come back. Let that not be the last message from me.'"

* * *

Usually a first dive on an excursion such as this is the easiest. But on Feb. 5, the wind was gusting and the visibility underwater poor. Turner's first diving buddy entered the water and quickly got out. The current was strong and she was fatigued.

"I still felt good at that time," recalls Turner, an environmental manager at Lancaster Laboratories who lives with her husband, Harry, in Clay Township, north of Lititz. "I went and talked to the head people, I said, 'I can sit this one out but if there's somebody who's ready to go, I'm still OK to dive.'"

She buddied up with a man named Bobby from California.

"I didn't know him at all. I thought he was at the same skill level or greater but we didn't really have a big discussion about who was leading the dive," Turner said. "He thought I was leading and I guess I thought he was leading."

They slipped down the mooring line into the sea at 10:10 a.m., swam into the current and toward an outcropping of coral in hopes of eventually getting to the reef. They got only to the first outcropping of coral, though, when Turner's buddy signaled the time-out.

They had been about 10 minutes or so into what was to have been a half-hour dive.

"We turned around to go back the way we thought we had come, not realizing we had been drifting with the current away from the boat and not toward the mooring line," Turner said.

The air in their tanks was dwindling.

"We were both signaling, 'I don't know where the line is, I don't know where the boat is.'"

Then they saw it, about 100 yards away. They blew whistles, to no avail. Turner and her buddy inflated large inflatable "safety sausages" and tried to swim to their boat. "It was a futile effort," Turner said.

Then they saw a second boat, which was larger and appeared somewhat closer. "We started to swim to that boat, but that was a hard swim," recalled Turner. "It was pretty wavy. It was windy."

And, soon enough, that boat motored away, not seeing the two stranded divers.

"That's a very deflating feeling, I've got to tell you," Turner said.

* * *

Turner and her buddy were now stranded. They kept cool. "Basically, it's just hanging out and keeping your safety sausage up and hoping somebody finds you," she said. "There's no swimming at that point.

"You can kick your legs, but it really is a futile effort. You can't kick hard enough to not float with the current. It's weird. At the time, it doesn't even feel like you're in a current. But it really wasn't the boat that left us. We were leaving the boat.

"That's how fast we were floating away," Turner said.

The waves tossed the two divers as the wind picked up, and they decided to link elbows, side-to-side, facing in opposite directions. At some point, it started to rain.

The two rarely talked.

"We were on a mission out there. We looked at each other, and neither of us had those deer-in-a-headlight eyes," recalled Turner. "We were two people hanging out ... unfortunately in the ocean.

"We didn't talk unless we needed to talk. We didn't say, 'Hey, what do you do for a living?' We did that all later on the boat," Turner said. "Our job at that point was to scan the horizon, scan the air, find somebody to signal to. That's what we did for hours and hours."

The hours slipped by.

"I don't have a good accounting of what happened in what hours," Turner said. "I do know the concern, for me, came between the 4 and 5 o'clock hours. You're looking at your watch now and then, thinking, 'It's been a pretty long time. Oh my god, we've been floating here for five hours and nobody's found us."

The Coral Sea near the Great Barrier Reef is notoriously infested with sharks. But neither Turner nor her buddy saw any.

In fact, she had previously joked with friends concerned about such things, "If I get eaten by a great white, at least I went out doing something I love."

But as daylight began to fade, Turner began to have other thoughts. "What if they don't find me?" she says she asked herself. "At least I'm going out doing what I love."

And then the two saw something in the distance.

* * *

Turner saw the airplane and thought she was about to be rescued.

"You're waving and all kinds of stuff," she recalled.

But the plane was far from them.

"There was no way he was going to see us from that distance, but at least you get these glimmers of hope that somebody's looking. Then it goes away," she said.

At some point, they saw a helicopter and another airplane and tried without success to flag them down. "I was praying. I prayed quite a bit," Turner said. "It was getting late. The sun sets around 7. If they didn't find us by sunset, that was going to be a little alarming. I wasn't worried about sharks. Any ocean has sharks."

Little did they know that the second airplane had seen the two divers and radioed back to the three boats searching for Turner and her buddy. The plane also sent the coordinates to a helicopter.

As the copter approached the first time, Bobby waved his orange safety sausage. But the device broke, and the copter apparently didn't see it. The two divers grew frustrated — "Expletives were issued at that time," Turner recalled.

They knew, though, that the copter would make a second pass. "I said, 'We have one more shot at this. He's going to come again. I gave him my sausage, I said, 'Here, take mine,' and he kept it high in the air.'"

Turner, meantime, pulled off one of her bright pink swim fins and waved that. At last, on its second pass, the helicopter saw the two divers and radioed the coordinates to one of the boats, which picked them up about a half an hour later, at 7:30 p.m.

"They asked me, 'How do you feel?' I said I'm water-logged. I'm tired. I'm thirsty and I'm hungry," Turner recalled.

She got some sunburn and blisters on her toes, but was otherwise healthy. She also called the rescue effort heroic.

Turner said she didn't dive the following morning. But she did the next afternoon, and more than two dozen more times during her trip to the reef.

She says she is surprised at the amount of attention she's gotten after being swept nine miles from her boat.

"I'm going to be so tired of telling this story," she laughed. "I need to figure out a shorter way to tell it. 'We hung out in the ocean for a while. We got saved. That's it. No sharks. We didn't get eaten.'"


Staff writer Tom Murse can be reached at tmurse@LNPnews.com or 481-6021.