A Canadian diving instructor who died in Lake Ontario earlier this month has been named as 47-year-old Chris Haslip – and his father has been explaining what he considers the likely cause of his son’s death.
The fatal incident on the afternoon of 13 April was reported on Divernet. Haslip and an older buddy had been diving a site they had often visited, the wreck of a barge close to where the lake meets the St Lawrence River.
The two divers had both surfaced about 15m from shore but Haslip had slipped back under water. The buddy was picked up in a boat by emergency responders and taken to hospital with minor injuries, but Haslip’s body was not found until the following morning.
Chris Haslip and his father Daniel had learnt to scuba dive together in 1996 and, nine years later, they had opened a dive-shop, Explorer Diving, near the city of Kingston.
Daniel has now told local newspaper the Kingston Whig-Standard that his son had been a type 1 diabetic.
“That’s what I think did him in,” he told the paper. “He had a sugar low under water, I believe. The guy that was diving with him, who is also a dive master, very experienced, also a military buddy of mine from the old days, he tried everything he could to save him, but he had a heart attack from the stress of it all.”
Daniel described the efforts made by his son's buddy as heroic, “but when you reach the end of that line, somebody upstairs wants you – it doesn’t matter what we want down here.”
Father and son had advanced to obtain SDI instructor as well as technical qualifications and had travelled together to various countries to dive, but for Chris, a keen wreck-diver, Lake Ontario was said to have remained his favourite location, with some 200 shipwrecks within an hour’s drive of Kingston.
Chris had lost his left leg as the result of an illness and wore a prosthetic, though his father said that this had done nothing to limit his ability to dive, or to help others to do so.
“He never let his ailments hold him back, he tried and he was good at it, too. I think he was happy doing the diving thing. It was his passion – and it’s hard for us.”
Another death in Ontario
Meanwhile another Ontario scuba diver, an unnamed 61-year-old man, has died, only 10 days after Haslip. The incident took place on the evening of 23 April, at a dive-site further east along the St Lawrence River towards the city of Cornwall.
Police responded to a report at about 7.45pm that only three of a group of four divers had resurfaced from a dive on a lock forming part of a submerged canal system at the west end of Macdonell Island.
The diver’s body was recovered at about 11.30am the next day by the underwater search and recovery unit of Ontario Provincial Police, which is investigating the incident.
Also on Divernet: Instructor dies on Ontario wreck-dive, Canal diver trapped under ice, Quebec divers find 7 shipwrecks – in 3 months!, 2 ways to make a Canadian splash
Wow, this is o very sad and infuriating at the same time. I have been an active dive instructor since 1983 with over 13000 dives – during that was also a tech instructor for a time. I also developed protocols with DAN to develop Guidelines for Diabetics to dive safely. This is my area. We developed protocols for blood sugar levels and for general diabetic success in care of oneself in order to qualify for diving in the first place. Each diabetic diver has a big responsibility to make sure they are safe divers as this reflects on all divers with diabetes. Especially for tech diving, there is very little room for error and the responsibility is much more. I do not know the personal history of this diver or his general care of his diabetes. I do know that paramount in diving safely as a diabetic, is you must take steps to avoid low blood sugar while diving. If there is a history of being unable to recognize low blood sugar then diving should not happen. A quick acting carbohydrate must be carried by the diver to be taken as soon as safely possible. I feel for the family and friends of Chris and hope that divers with any special needs go to the effort to learn all they can about being a safe diver.