45m underwater, in the engine room of Rosalie Moller got snagged, couldn’t move forward. I could see my buddy above but with even more kit than me (Rebreather) he wasn’t getting any closer. Carefully reversed, but there was a brown tinge to the Red sea .
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That is my nightmare.
I have led the dullest, safest life possible so far. 
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A few folk have had near death experiences when standing near me…can’t think why 
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While riding pillion on my mate’s Katana, a flat bed pulled out in front of us. He laid the bike down and I bounced off one of the lorry’s wheels. Scrapes and scratches and a broken finger. My mate Shane died two days later. I owe him my life.
Got T-Boned by a car coming out of a side road into my passenger side door whilst I was driving at 70 mph. Rolled twice. Have ongoing back and neck issues ever since.
Wet weather pile up on M1 near Patchetts Green. 10 or so cars involved, chaos all around. Walked away but blacked out once I’d walked over to the hard shoulder. Concussed by the B-Pillar. New W reg Mondeo with only 21 miles on the clock was a right off.
Write
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Meh!
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On the other side of the experience.
In the early 90s I was working in the Med as a watersports instructor.
I was in a 5m RIB with a 110hp tilt trim outboard.
We used it for waterskiing and as safety for the daysailers.
We had a strong offshore wind and I had spent most of the afternoon stopping beginner windsurfers being blown off to Africa.
I was sitting with the engine in neutral getting blown quite a way offshore myself and before I motored back in I had a look round and spotted something further offshore.
I radioed in and said I was going to have a look.
A good mile off shore I found a young couple trying to swim an inflatable back to shore with their small child sitting on it… They were losing the battle and were exhausted.
I got the family on board and ‘accidently’ put a knife through the inflatable and got them back to the beach.
That family holiday could have ended very differently.
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Oh, and several acid trips, plus a heroin episode which very nearly went very Rong™.
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On the M6, wedged in behind a lorry in the middle lane when a five foot long 6x6 piece of timber fell off the lorry, bounced end on and went over the roof of my car. Five yards further forward or backwards and it would have been through my head.
Got chased by a cow elephant, that was a close one. Fell in a REME cess put, nearly drowned, and lastly played with a green mamba, although that one didn’t count as I was oblivious to any danger.
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That reminds me of…
I used to live in Austin Texas. Over there 1st of the month is ‘moving day’ this is when a certain section of the population loads up their car and skips out on the rent into another manky apartment. On the 1st of the month you could see ludicrously overloaded cars, trucks and vans driving about the roads of Austin. I’m behind a fantastically badly packed pickup and trailer combo with what looks like 3 houses, an office and granny clampett strapped to the top and sides.
The roads over there are not billiard table smooth, hence the need for suspenstion made from marshmallows in the states. Unfortunately the trucks suspension was under extreme provocation and wasn’t really suspending any longer. The resultant shocks through the badly packed edifice caused a particularly large metal cabinet to come adrift and make it’s own way down the interstate showering sparks over the front of my car as i had the incredible bad fortune to be behind this monument to bad life choices.
I managed to swerve around the cabinet and continue on my way but from then on avoided all but the most necessary trips on the 1st of the month from then on.
Motor bikes. Hate the fucking things. My cousin was killed on one days before his 21st birthday and I fell off the 2 I had, once when I hit a rain gully thanks to some cunt not dipping his headlights which sent me over the handlebars and the front wheel through the radiator of my AR 80. And the second was the chain jumping off the rear sprocket of my rd125lc and jamming the rear wheel, on a roundabout, in front of a fucking lorry. Luckily he swerved and missed my falling off arse but it put the shits right up me and prompted my gran to lend me a grand to buy the aforementioned metro.
Trout fishing by myself on a river that was running high and fast due to rain a few days before. I decided to cross to the other bank at a spot that I knew was bad to use even under ideal conditions, but I was young and cocky and would save myself a half hour of bashing through some fairly heavy bush to safely cross at a bridge. Made it to mid-stream and realized the water was far deeper and running far faster than I’d estimated, and I couldn’t properly see the stream bed so I was guessing where to safely place my next step. I thought about turning back, but realized that I would probably end up falling if I attempted it. If I fell I would end up with my chest high waders filled with water and well and truly fucked (by well and truly fucked I mean drowned), so I had to press on. By the time I made it to some slack water at the far bank my legs felt like they were made of concrete, I was reduced to crawling from the water on hands and knees.
Sat on a log, smoked a fat spliff, and contemplated the stream. Not today Old Man River, maybe one day but you didn’t get me today.
Really was far scarier to experience than it reads 
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as a student knocked off my CB750, by a white van man cunt, broken leg and ankle.
once upon a time I went out wearing a boring pair of shoes
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Driving up the M1 to Leicester to work a car I was in the middle lane a car overtook me at about 90mph and suddenly skidded in the central reservation and flipped back into my path sideways across the motorway. I avoided a massive collision by swerving very hard. I did see the car in my rear view mirror stop itself on the hard shoulder - I was then 200/300 yards away on a busy motorway so did not stop but continued on counting my blessings and shaking like a leaf. I did make a mental note at the time to make a point of reducing my commute distance of 150 mile round trip but it was six or seven years before I managed that.
Once also I ran over a dead badger on my Honda RS250 and managed to hang on.
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That video is of a guy called Paul Orritt, in 1999 at the bottom of Bray Hill. I met him at the Honda party at the Douglas Hilton in 2000, and a few other times as he raced for a local bike breakers that was a bit of a bikers gathering place. He lost parts of several fingers and was really quite fucked up indeed by that crash.
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I’m picking up on a common theme here.
Motorcycles . . . not even once 
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and water 
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I’ve been into whitewater canoeing since my mid teens and things happen fast in water. It pays to be well trained, well equipped and well prepared or it is too easy for bad things to happen.
That said I’ve also had some fantastic experiences that I wouldn’t swap for anything. Life is for living after all.
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I was expecting some reassuring “bright-light-at-end-of-tunnel” anecdotes from this thread … I suppose the deaths, within less than a month, of two of my closest friends is making me maudlin and superstitious.
Were I asked, I would characterise myself as “highly risk-averse” - by way of a euphemism for cowardice. Then again, there have been a few near-handshakes with the slim chap with the scythe.
Pre-school, on my first trip to learn to swim I was punted unnoticed into the deep end of the adult pool by an older child, wherein I discovered a profound lack of buoyancy that even the later acquisition of cetacean-like layers of blubber have never relieved. I lay on the bottom for a bit and then went to sleep. No reassuring bright lights until I woke up some time later having the bleachy water belted from my infant lungs by some spotty youth who was supposed to be lifeguarding.
I grew-up near a decent-sized river, but the above experience made me pretty wary of actually entering it, however the nearby third-rail railway line was always a strong attraction to pre-teen me and chums, and the series of arches taking it over the river were a preferred climbing frame for us. No clear recollections of cheating death, but that may be due to a failure to comprehend the many threats - not least the whaling parents and police alike would have given me had I been caught…
Another play area was in the seemingly abandoned basements under the town’s fire station, which were entertainingly reachable by opening a sort of cupboard door and crawling through a tunnel. This led to a series of rooms furnished like domestic premises, differing only in an odd smoky smell and stain on everything. Light only dawned when one day, mid-games, some unnoticed fittings in the ceillings started first roaring, then vomiting flames and smoke… It is remarkable how fast frightened children can shift when leaving a confined area on hands-and-knees. Scared as we were, it was probably second to the firemen in full breathing apparatus that we crawled full-pelt into as they entered what was a hilariously lethal training area… That resulted in one of a respectable tally of hijacked school assemblies that we precipitated into safety-preaching sessions. Plus a HELL of parental beating, richly deserved.
My old man was a bike racer, so I was kept away from motorbikes as a kid, in any case, as a rampantly horny yoot all I wanted was a motorised metal box to fuck people in. Pushbikes however have taken me to the edge a few times - always in the dreariest circumstances, riding to school or work. I can immediately recall three times when only a mix of freakish luck and quicker instinctive reactions than I’d care to take credit for have saved me from death by piss-soaked-old-nodder - pulling out of side roads, too blind and stupid to notice me. First when I was 13, the last in Oxford in my late 40s.
Oxford was also where a roadraging pimple-farmer in a silver Corsa tried very hard indeed to hit me with his car before speeding off. Apparently being in cycle lane in a traffic jam is some kind of personal affront to some folk. That ties for the angriest I’ve ever been, and had I had more luck with the usually sluggish traffic at the Cutteslowe roundabout I would have pulled the cunt out of his shittly little car - piece-by-piece if need be - and ended him. Proper red mist rage.
During my life, I’ve spent inordinate amounts of time halfway up cliffs studying rocks and collecting fossils. Cliffs are wrongly used as metaphors for permanence, when in fact they are quite ephemeral, and crumble constantly. Those crumbs usually weigh from kilos to tons, and even the smaller ones - descending from height and attaining terminal velocity - will redistribute functionally-critical chunks of human matter all over the local scenery with alacrity. Somehow I escaped a lot of these (current statistics stand at 100%, otherwise I’d not be typing this), certainly way too many to chunter on about. The best was in Alum Bay on the Isle of Wight, where 5 minutes after leaving the beach the largest landslide in living memory eradicated about 300 metres of the beach and foreshore I’d just been on. It’s an impressive noise and sensation - second only to an earthquake - but the speed with which many thousands of tons of what may be mistaken for solid rock can move is humbling. Don’t imagine you stand a chance of escape. You have none whatsoever.
I also managed to find myself on highly-exposed cliffs when a severe thunderstorm rattled-in off the channel. I was 16 and really enjoyed a nice set of Sparks and Bangs, so I cracked-on with what I was doing enjoying the bravado and the fireworks. One of my two conmpanions caught-up to me and suggested we should, in fact, consider leaving. When I looked-up, her long, saturated hair was stood completely on end and waving gently like seaweed! Apparently my shorter stuff was also swaying in sympathy - all from static build-up. We were, of course, the highest points on a barren expanse… Very, very lucky not to have been “struck”.
1987: Sailed into Zeebrugge past the capsized Herald of Free Enterprise for a two month stint of fieldwork - during which an irate farmer in France shot at my trespassing self with a shotgun - towards the end the weather in northern France was so bad we decided to drive back a day early and ended up on the last Calais - Dover ferry to sail as Michael Fish’s hurricane kicked-off. Not really a near-death experience, but certainly one of Mr. Bones’s wilder rides…
Years later I endured a 737 with no functional flap extensions/airbrake doodads etc landing on Gibraltar’s tiny runway at about 250% of optimal landing speed. The front undercarriage was less than 10m from the Bay of Gibraltar when we stopped, and the fire brigade trucks had to hose the wheels down so the tyres didn’t explode before we were allowed off. Why the fuck they didn’t divert is well beyond me. To keep life interesting, the flight back two months later decided that flying through a supercell over the Pyrenees was a good idea - whee, flash, flash, flash, whee, flash, flash FLASH!!! etc.
Gibralatar fieldwork was always colourful - we worked 7 days a week, for 6-8 weeks, with just one day off in that entire time. During daylight we worked, after dark we partied - all night, every night. I was young, booze was cheap, flange was plentiful. The site involved climbing down, then back up, many hundreds of very-damaged-by-rockfall steps carved into a fucking massive limestone cliff in a military-only area strewn with spent munitions, then working amidst what remains the sharpest rocks I’ve ever encountered, inside massive caves heavily infested by starving fleas trapped amidst the decaying remains of seabirds whose fledgling flights from the cliffs high above ended in failure and death… Somehow, all I got (apart from flea bites) was some broken bones caused by the incompetence of Britain’s foremost palaeoanthrolopgist (he’s often on radio and telly) from the starting handle of a seawater pump we were using for sample-pre-processing. So a bit of an (un)dead end … except the first year’s day-off trip involved chartering a poorly-maintained (but cheap, yay!) wooden sailboat to take us across the Med to Ceuta - the return trip was into a stiff and very choppy headwind, so we motored a lot of it until the engine failed… naturally she went broadside to the weather (!!!). If you’ve been near small boats you know the rest - bad fairground ride, seawater and vomit. Luckily the radio did work and it’s a very busy sea area, a fishing boat towed us back, albeit to fucking Algeciras…
So… not to be outdone, the following year’s “day off” was a drive out to the Sierra de Grazalema for a spot of caving in order to view what were alleged to be very, very early examples of sgraffito cave art. The climb-up to the caves probably should have been roped in places, but the “easy” cave turned out to be over a quarter of a mile long and involve a series of very tight dry sumps - my first experience of being fully encased in solid rock. Amusement factors included the fact the confident Spaniard leading us had only been there a couple of times before, the one and only light source was one (1) bog standard hand-held battery torch, there was 15 of us, and the cave was part of a 3D maze that included a few large pits in the floor that we had to edge around. I look back at this honestly bewildered by our breathtaking collective stupidity. I actually found my way around some bits by the remarkable luminescence of my Lorus wristwatch - one of those where the whole face was luminous - still never seen a better lume on a watch, though the complete and perfect blackness of being deep underground probably helped…
Like all of us, I’ve dodged any number of side-swipes by lazy, careless lorry drivers suddenly overtaking without indication or mirrorcheck, but about 15 years ago one twat on the A1, small hours, otherwise empty two-lane section not far from Newark decided he’d rather try to kill me than allow me to overtake - repeatedly swerving in front of me no matter what I tried to do. Amphetamines - not even once.
Mains electricity has bitten me a few times over the years, but so far nothing worse than a bit of sudden unexpected travel and a lie-down. I suppose all this wretched waffle does at least point-up the fact I’ve never had the bottle to truly endanger my own life when driving - I know I’m a second-rate driver and tend to err on the side of safety. I do honestly wonder what might have happned if I’d actually been a bit intrepid. I wish I was as afraid of food as I am of unconfined heights and deep, murky water, cos that stuff will be what kills me.
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Meh, I almost broke a toenail once 