Thank you Max Bottomtime for pointing this article out.

This may have happened on the Bottom Scratcher as a lot of people have found my site yesterday searching for “Bottom+scratcher+dive+accident;” that is purely my speculation, though.
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An amateur fisherman participating in the opening weekend of spiny lobster season drowned off the coast of Santa Catalina Island early Saturday morning, authorities said.

The man was night-diving with a charter boat group in 30-foot-deep water when he floated to the surface, unconscious, shortly after 4 a.m., said U.S. Coast Guard spokesman Tyler Stutin.

Authorities rushed him to Catalina’s USC Hyperbaric Chamber but he was declared dead a short time later. The Los Angeles County Coroner identified him as Jesus Marti, a Long Beach resident in his early 30s.

Stutin said the Coast Guard and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department would investigate the death.

At the time of the accident, hundreds of novice fisherman were swarming the waters three miles off the western coast of the island searching for the lobster. Many of them were inexperienced and struggled under bad weather and gale force winds.

“We are running into a lot of problems. The weather is picking up,” Stutin said.

— Garrett Therolf

The original story can be found here.

A diver named Crazy Ivan sent this to me.

This story sounds similar to the story that I was told on opening night, but with a different outcome.

Forgive the author when he states “respirator” instead of “regulator.”

SAN DIEGO – A scuba diver who somehow got separated from his underwater breathing equipment during an outing off the coast of Point Loma today was found dead an hour later about 65 feet below the surface.

The 26-year-old man was diving from a charter boat with five other people in the ocean west of Sunset Cliffs when he went missing about 12:30 p.m., city lifeguard Lt. Andy Lerum said.

Lifeguard divers searched the sea in the area and found the man shortly after 1:30 p.m., Lerum said.

They brought the diver, who had no vital signs and was missing his scuba tank and respirator, to the surface and performed CPR while transporting him to the city’s lifeguard headquarters on Mission Bay.

After the personnel got the man to the Quivira Basin station, city paramedics took over the ultimately futile attempts to resuscitate him, Lerum said.

The man, whose name was not immediately available, was pronounced dead on a dock at the lifeguard facility.

The original story can be found here.