I have to jump in here and ask everyone a question. At the half way point when the DM discovered Brendan was missing (this is where the bottom sloped off and went down to a very deep depth). What should he have done?
Continued the Dive?
Aborted the Dive?
Tell everyone to stay put and done a quick swim around to see if Brendan went to the drop off and was down too deep and if he saw him signal to him to come up?
That's not the right question, he never should have been in that situation in the first place. Had he kept track of his charges, even with his bad choice of dive sites, he would have only had to drop five or ten feet to get the poor fellow back into line.
What if he saw Brendan down too deep say (200ft) could he have done a rescue? Could he have taken someone's tank (letting them use the other's person octopus) and reg and gone to get Brendan? (If Instructor's have that kind of training and Matthew is an Instructor) I don't know.....
Still not the right question. But to answer it: I'm at 100 feet, I see one of my divers at 200 feet slowly drifting down, 100 feet will take me less than 20 seconds, so I go get him and bring him back up. The minute or so of increased nitrogen will not mean much, the short time will not use much air, but that would bed my primary concern, but then the other divers in the group should (at ten minutes into the dive) have plenty.
Everyone is saying that we should have planned our own dive. Maybe so, but that isn't what happened. Matthew the DM planned it for us. He told us where we were going. He did the dive plan. Yes, I know we could have said NO, but with all the different diver experiences I think we ALL thought he would be the best one to plan the dive. However, until he told me we were going to 100ft then I said NO. That is when it should have stopped. Plus it all started at the dive op telling Brendan he would be fine and safe.
That lesson has been made abundantly clear, you can't trust the DM to make your plan (I would have thought that a new diver should be able to do that, but I guess that was only back in the day when a rather different and more nurturing moral structure existed for diving leaders).
Also, I think the dive op should hold some responsibility.
Yes, they get a piece too.
Perhaps the difference between us then is that I knew that because I sucked that I need to improve on myself and not have false expectations of others.
I guess, when it gets right down to it I have trouble understanding why you see it as a "false expectations of others" to expect a Certified Diving Instructor who is leading a group to 100 feet, a group that includes a complete newbie, to pay little extra attention to that newbie and be sure that he doesn't get lost. For me ... that's the bottom line.
I was lucky that I found some mentors that worked with me and to this day I am eternally grateful for their patience and dedication. I have seen my share of new divers that assume they are invicible or the ones that assume others will look after them. I think this tragedy has demonstrated that neither approach is acceptable. However the POINT of this thread, since it is in the incidents and accidents forum is to try to prevent a reoccurance of it. So far I haven't seen many comments from you that are constructive designed to help prevent this from happening again ... as an instructor I want to know what I can do to improve the courses I teach. Already I have increased the number of times that I stress personal responsibility during class, I have come up with a new way (for me at least) approach to test how well dive planning is getting through to the students. So instead of laying blame - lets try and be constructive, what can we do to improve the reality that personal responsibility is a corner stone of diving or do we move the conversation towards enforcement and remove the personal freedom that we currently have in diving. Are you for education or enforcement?
I prefer education over enforcement but I am very concerned that the primary lesson being learned from this fiasco is that a new diver can't dependably lean, even a little bit, on a Certified Diving Instructor with whom he or she is diving.
No we probably never will agree on this - I suspect there are other issues at play here as to why I am stronger proponent of self responsibility then you are. I have no idea what they are but as far as I know I have answered your questions - the DM screwed the pooch when he chose a site that required divers to think for themselves and assumed that they had proper training and they would use that training. If the deceased wanted to go to 100', then he has already demonstrated he is ignoring some of his training. However, to your second question - I question if anything the DM would have said or done would have prevented someone who was already ignoring his training. OW cert means you have the training to plan and execute a dive in conditions similar to what you have been trained in - if this is not the case then please request a Scuba Diver cert instead of an OW cert.
The DM screwed the pooch six ways from Sunday. The deceased screwed up by not knowing better than to trust him. The deceased paid the ultimate price for his mistake. What's it gonna cost the DM?
I've been on those dives with this dive op (and many other very similar dive ops) and the plan consists of "follow me".
The group becomes very spread out and at least on a wall dive, it's common to see new divers with poor awareness or buoyancy control going much deeper than they expected to.
Regardless of the plan, no reasonable dive leader would expect a diver with 2 dives to be able to handle much more of a plan than "don't forget to breathe". Many new divers are so stunned by what they're seeing that they don't even watch their tank pressure and certainly don't watch their depth.
The cert agencies know this also, which is one of the reasons they recommend a 60' limit for new divers. At 60' even if someone really screws up, drains their tank and bolts for the surface, chances are excellent that as long as they "don't forget to breathe" (or in this case exhale), everything will be just fine.
I'm not saying it's right or that the victim doesn't have any responsibility, but that knowing how new divers behave, the DM (or shop) chose the site poorly.
Terry
Exactly.
Excellent question - what did the DM assume the deceased had done. As an instructor - going down to over 200' would be very low on my list of possibilities (unless I had seen him having bouyancy control issues before hand).
The DM's mistake was not in being unable to find him, it was in not seeing him depart from the group in the first place, I've flunked more than one ITC candidate on a problem solving dive over that just that issue, and in much lower visibility.
Only way to answer this would be to know what the DM thought had happened. If he assumed that the new diver had sucked back his air and gone back up without giving any indication ... just some of the speculation - only the DM in question would be able to tell us why, once we have that information then we could give our opinions.
He should not have "thought" or "assumed" anything, he should have known where all his people were at all times. If the deceased had willfully swum off and pushed the DM away when he tried to intervene, that would have been a different story.
I can't speak for every DM or instructor - but personally I wouldn't have gone that deep. Even with the training, you don't have the equipment to give yourself a good chance of success with a proper plan - let alone spur of the moment. I have been on a wreck at 130' with ean 28 in twin tanks on my back when I saw two divers at 148' having major issues with narcosis ... both were my friends but all I could do was sit and hope they solved the problems and got out of the situation they had put themselves in.
Sorry, that's horse pucky: 10 minutes into a dive at 100 feet, warm clear water, with a single 80 I've got about 50 cubic feet left, more than enough for a drop to 200 for a minute and back up to 100 for a quick deep stop and then suck my tank down at 10. What's the big deal?
I agree the dive op should hold some responsibility. The LDS that I work for has a very strict policy about not letting non-AOW diver on advanced dives. However - there are always a dive op that will take someone's money if that person wants to do a certain dive.
Yes indeed, there always is.
No reasonable dive leader would take a diver with 2 dives to a site that has wall access in excess of 300' either, but that doesnt seem to hold true in this case.
The bottom there while not a sheer cliff is steep enough (as I understand it) to provide a hazard to an inexperienced diver with inadequate buoyancy control.
I agree that it was a poor choice of sites for new divers. I also think there was an equally poor choice for the divers to get in the water at a site that was beyond their comfort level.
When the Instructor says, "follow me," the new diver assumes that there is no problem.
You see thats the point.... This diver never should have wanted to do that dive so early in his diving career. Now should the DM had said something? Yes! But the diver never should have had these ideas.....
No argument there, but that's a "thought crime" that should not have cost his life.
What if he gone Bonaire where it is almost all shore diving and no DM/DG. There you can follow the slope down to some 500-600ft.
But he didn't so that that's irrelevant.
Sounds to me like if this diver had been there, the same thing would have happened. Did the DM/DG screw up by not fixing a potential turned actual problem? Yes.... But the diver never should have caused the problem situation in the first place.
If he had been shore diving in Bonaire with his GF, he'd not have had a Certified Diving Instructor leading the way and lulling him into a false sense of security, chances are he'd have stayed above 60 feet and not had the narcosis and buoyancy problems that he likely experienced. So much for the irrelevant hypothetical.
)Yeah, I'm more afraid of diving accidents now than I was 250 [-]dives [/-] pages ago.
