Probe Focuses on Gear After Diving Death

Investigators are looking at the diving gear used by a Redding woman who drowned Sunday morning in calm waters off Santa Cruz Island.

Officials believe Diane “Kooki” Kunst, 44, drowned after running out of air about 9 a.m. while ascending from a depth of 70 feet about 150 yards from an outcropping called Potato Rock near the island.

Kunst, who went by her maiden name of Schmeidl, was on the first day of a three-day dive trip on the 65-foot dive boat Peace out of Ventura Harbor, said boat captain William Magee.

“It was the first dive, and just perfect conditions,” Magee said. “Her dive partner said [afterward] that at approximately 50 feet she noticed [Kunst] with her face mask half off her face and in a panic.”

The dive partner shared her extra regulator with Kunst, but Kunst began to flail about and spit out the regulator after taking just a few breaths, and then sank to the bottom, Magee said. Kunst, who was an advanced diver just short of getting a master diver certificate, had only about 100 pounds of pressure remaining in her air tank, he said.

*

“It seems like she should have been able to make it up on that. . . . It would be compressed at that depth and harder to suck, but it seems like she should have been able to use it,” Magee said. “I don’t know, she might have gone into a state of panic.”

She had a full tank when she entered the water, usually about 3,000 pounds of compressed air, and her partner successfully surfaced with about 1,000 pounds of pressure left in her tank, Magee said. Authorities are trying to determine why Kunst ran out of air so much sooner than her partner.

By the time divers from the Peace got down to retrieve her body, Kunst had been under for at least five minutes.

A registered nurse on the trip began to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and two park rangers, who came from Santa Cruz Island on a small motorboat, also helped.

The park extends about a mile out from the shore of the islands, so she was within park territory, said Carol Spears, a Channel Islands National Park spokeswoman.

A Coast Guard helicopter from San Pedro rushed to the scene and picked up Kunst, who never regained consciousness, officials said.

She was pronounced dead about 11 a.m. at Goleta Valley’s Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara County.

Magee and investigators with the Santa Barbara coroner’s office, which is handling the inquiry into Kunst’s death, have a lot of questions about what might have prompted Kunst to panic and why her dive partner was not able to save her.

“It’s hard to understand why this could happen to an advanced diver,” Magee said. “It seems that she was low on air, that she panicked, and that other decisions were made in a state of panic. . . . There were mistakes made. . . . She had a lot of weight on, for instance. It was preventable.”

The name of Kunst’s dive partner, who has returned to Northern California, was not released by authorities.

*

This is the third time in 14 years that the dive boat Peace has had a drowning, Magee said.

“And every one of those could have been easily prevented if simple mistakes were not made,” said Magee, who spoke Monday morning from a shipboard cellular phone.

Magee remained on the boat Monday with about 22 other divers, who all chose to stay at sea diving until late today. The boat, which is booked by dive groups on most weekends from May through November, has two compressors on board to refill tanks and several trained crew members with thousands of hours of diving experience, including a dive master trained in first aid and administering oxygen during emergencies.

Magee returned to shore on Sunday evening to drop off four of Kunst’s friends, including her dive buddy. All were from Redding and Yuba City.

Kunst’s mother, Sheri Schmeidl, said the family was still searching for answers.

“How unusual is this for that boat?” Schmeidl asked. “They’re looking at her equipment, but I know she checked it before she left.”

Kunst also had a small reserve tank of air, her mother said.

Kunst, a trainer for Chevy’s restaurant, had been diving for seven years, mostly taking trips off the coast of Mendocino north of the San Francisco Bay Area, her mother said.

“She had not gone on dives in the Channel Islands before, and she was excited,” Schmeidl said from her home in Shasta County near Redding.

Santa Barbara coroner’s investigator Sgt. Tom Nelson said a retired U.S. Navy dive master was inspecting the equipment, looking for defects. He did not spot a reserve tank among Kunst’s gear, and when he examined her tank it had no air in it.

“I still have to talk to the crew about that because when I looked at the tank they had zero,” Nelson said.

The last diver to die off Santa Cruz Island, a 45-year-old Huntington Park man, was the victim of a combination of decompression illness and drowning.

*

Nelson said it does not appear that the bends--also known as decompression sickness--contributed to Kunst’s death. The condition strikes divers when they return to the surface too fast to allow the dissolved nitrogen in their bloodstream to be filtered out through the lungs.

When the pressurized nitrogen expands into bubbles, it can cause severe pain, disorientation or even paralysis and death.

Kunst, who was divorced, is survived by two sisters and both her parents. She will be buried in the Redding area.