Spending five hours in the water, drifting with the ocean current and waiting to be rescued could be a terrifying experience.
For Roland Mauz, though, it reinforced something he had always known - that when the chips are down, the close-knit community of KwaZulu-Natal's lower south coast will always come through.
When Mauz and his party of international divers went missing off Shelly Beach on Thursday, recreational fishermen and divers, as well as rescue organisations, pulled out all the stops to ensure they were rescued.
Mauz was the dive master, showing a group of German, Swiss, English, French and South African divers the bounty of the ocean off the Protea Banks. The group of eight included two women.
While they were beneath the surface, strong winds and choppy ocean swell caused the skipper of the Black Pearl, which had taken them out to sea, to lose sight of the bright-orange surface-marker buoys which indicated where the divers had entered the water.
Although they realised on surfacing that the skipper had lost track of them, the divers were not overly concerned and at no stage did they panic.
"In fact, we started off by making jokes, saying this was not a sequel to the Open Water movie (a true story which graphically portrays how a couple were killed by sharks, after inadvertently being left behind after a dive on Australia's Great Barrier Reef)," said Mauz.
He said none of the party had expressed any concern about falling prey to sharks.
After about two hours in the water it began to become uncomfortable, but they kept watching for passing ships, speculating whether they were on auto-pilot or possibly had a look-out on board who might spot them. They waved and shouted, but to no avail.
Mauz said he always carried a flare gun with him, and had six flares. "We had six chances to use this wisely to alert ships to our presence in the water. We tried to estimate which would be the best time to fire a flare, given the ship's location on the horizon."
After firing a flare, the group would grow quiet when it became obvious their distress signal had not been spotted, but kept trying with each new ship to assess whether there was any point in firing a flare.
Also on their minds was whether a search party had swung into gear or whether those on shore thought they had just extended their dive time, as sometimes happened.
The cloud cover, big swells and ripples on the water all counted against them, making it difficult to spot them, and when it got to late afternoon, they realised they might have to spend a night in the water.
"We took bets on what time we would be found and only slowly did it really sink in how dangerous it could be," he said.
But acting as a lifebelt for Mauz's own thoughts was how close-knit the lower South Coast community was.
Proof of this, he pointed out, was that fishermen, who by tradition often do not feel a close bond with recreational divers, had used their boats and petrol to find them.
"Visitors to this country need to know that if they get into trouble, South Africans will always be there to support and help them," said Mauz.