first deco dive

[ScubaSteve]

FYI, I am not defensive. I stand by my original post and later explanation of it. What you see as defensive is actually me calling people on their own BS. My post to the OP was short and without fluff but not impolite IMO. The OP has nothing to fear of me. I did not pull a Scuba Police Badge on them nor did most people in this thread. Things go awry when you and others get on your horses so high up there and claim that all the other posters are terrible people and are incapable of offering good information.

You just seem to hate that people do not see things your way. So you have three choices IMO. 1) Carry on arguing this with me until the thread gets closed and moderated. 2) Send me nasty hate PM';s telling me how terrible and mean I am. 3) Get over it and move on (maybe even move my "mean & incapable of anything good" self to your ignore list). Your choice.

I don't need to get over myself, I never claimed to have all the answers, unlike some members. I shouldn't need to provide statistics for known facts: scuba regulators hardly ever fail if properly maintained and DCS rarely happens to recreational divers. I think if anyone needs to get over themselves it is YOU, you think you can bully anyone don't you?
Is this because people didn't like your response to the OP, and because in this particular thread 2 people offered more sound advice? Based on your attitude in your posts I would say YES. If anything you have just added to the background noise of this thread by being defensive. Try accepting that your advice on this thread was not as sound as others and move on.

People shouldn't be afraid to post what they do on scubaboard for fear of a beating, they should get a logical response that explains the answer.

 

[Rhone Man]

This thread is in serious danger of descending into an argument about what is being said about the OP rather than the content of the OP, but I'll play one more time...

MANY of the posters in this thread can post articulate responses based on their own experience. You seem to think this is a unique skill available only to Lynne and Bob. You obviously have not read many posts out on the board.

I have read lots of posts on this board. I value the opinions of many people on this board - even when they disagree with my own views. On this particular thread the only two posters who I felt really addressed the issue in a well considered manner were Lynne and Bob.

Maybe they are willing to accept less risk in life and therefore classify more things risky than you.....that would have them no doubt defining (interpereting) reckless in a slightly different manner than you.

Not sure if this was aimed at me or not. Speaking as a lawyer, 'recklessness' has a very precise definition. And we are a long way from it.

I love the way you guys join these threads to preach about how preachy and terrible the other posters have been

True, but is that worse than preaching about how preachy those posts complaining about preaching are?

Oh and by the way, you cannot conclude anything because your post includes nothing you could come close to calling information.

You lost me on that one. I thought Lynne and Bob's posts were informative. On the other hand, the series of posts that started the thread just saying "reckless" and Grazie's nomination that the OP be given a Darwin award didn't really tell anyone much about anything.

People can do whatever they want. You are right. But when they come onto a public board and post the question to the world "WAS I RECKLESS?", they might just find a couple people that feel they were. Or maybe they feel they were careless but use the same words the OP used. This does not translate into Scuba Police. Get over yourself.

People can and will disagree - God bless freedom of opinion. But a short one line post just saying 'reckless' but nothing more smacks of the preachy scuba police. A longer, well thought out, well articulated post saying 'well, I am not sure you were exactly reckless, but it is not really a good idea for the following reasons' is a lot more useful to the OP and everyone else. Sad that I felt the need to point that out. Sadder still that we are arguing about it.

 

[Tortuga68]

The only question here, as far as I'm concerned, is gas supply... If you don't know how your computer will react to deco, you can not know that you have sufficient gas

Sufficient gas to complete the deco that your computer may give you and sufficient gas to surface safely are not the same thing

Personally I'd rather that people were basing their diving decisions on sound knowledge of theory rather than blindly following what a bunch of circuits strapped to their wrist is telling them

 

[Blackwood]

Sufficient gas to complete the deco that your computer may give you and sufficient gas to surface safely are not the same thing

Personally I'd rather that people were basing their diving decisions on sound knowledge of theory rather than blindly following what a bunch of circuits strapped to their wrist is telling them

Absolutely. But the premise of this thread, as I understand it, is someone who does not have a sound knowledge of deco theory experimenting with the circuitry on his wrist 'to test out deco mode'.

Without sound knowledge of theory, one can not predict deco, can not recognize whether or not the computer's profile makes sense, and can not quantitatively determine gas requirements.


A lot of the contention in this thread about whether or not it was reckless seems to hinge (as it should) on gas supply. Some are taking the OP's assertion that he had "plenty" at face value. I tend to question it given the context of the thread. Someone who knows that he has plenty of gas doesn't need to ask whether finding out was reckless.

 

[TSandM]

You know, we're really getting our panties in a wad over a very nebulous thing -- first, we have to define "going into deco", which obviously varies with the computer or algorithm or table you are using; then we have to define "reckless", which appears to vary with one's degree of risk-aversion. We have to get all that straight and agreed upon (which we never will) before we can really agree on an answer to the OP's question.

I do think that, the more you know about decompression, models, computers and tables, the more you realize that "deco" is not a well-defined state. The more experience you have with problem-solving underwater (whether that's through a class, or through DumpsterDiver type experiences ) the more you realize that losing that option for a direct ascent is a BIG decision -- but that where you have actually LOST it is not well-defined, either. Risk isn't a binary thing, it's a continuum, and some of the risks involved in diving aren't even amenable to precise evaluation. People following profiles that would be universally viewed as acceptable get bent; people blow off large amounts of mandatory decompression and don't.

"Reckless" to me means deliberately engaging in an activity with a high likelihood of a bad outcome, and without doing anything to mitigate the risks. The OP was deliberate, but I think we can argue about the likelihood of a bad outcome, and he HAD done some simple things to mitigate risk (checking his SPG and assessing the gas available to do what he wanted to do). I do not think he was particularly well-advised to do what he did, and as I said in my post, I wouldn't recommend continuing to experiment without some further education and training, but I do not think it met the test for "reckless".

 

[Tortuga68]

Absolutely. But the premise of this thread, as I understand it, is someone who does not have a sound knowledge of deco theory experimenting with the circuitry on his wrist 'to test out deco mode'

Sure. But to extrapolate on that thought, just because your computer says you are 1 minute from your NDL doesn't mean you're any more or less safe than being 2 minutes into deco. That's the message that I'd like people to take from this thread, and the one that sems to have been overlooked by a lot of the posters. Plenty of people have gotten bent or into trouble following "all the rules"

Eh, we're saying the same thing I think

 

[Blackwood]

Sure. But to extrapolate on that thought, just because your computer says you are 1 minute from your NDL doesn't mean you're any more or less safe than being 2 minutes into deco. That's the message that I'd like people to take from this thread, and the one that sems to have been overlooked by a lot of the posters. Plenty of people have gotten bent or into trouble following "all the rules"

I agree with that 100%. Check out my first reply (post #8):

"there's practically no difference between NDL-2 and NDL+2"

which is why I later went on to suggest (in post #80) that this was probably benign.

In my mind, "benign" and "reckless" are not mutually exclusive terms. Something can be benign, but if you don't know that and do it anyway, it can be considered reckless.

Eh, we're saying the same thing I think

just caught that edit. LOL.

 

[ZenDiver.3D]

No. It is fact that you apparantly did Not plan to go into deco. You should have simply planned it, made sure your gear matched the plan, and then had at it.
We were off the coast for one purpose and that was to film the sand tigers. They may be there and they may not be. If they are there they may be at the top of the wreck, they may be at the bottom, or they may be anywhere inbetween. I'm not sure what depth I'll be at. I'm not even sure if I'll be on the wreck for 30 - 40 minutes filming or maybe 15 -20 minutes just swimming around looking and returning because there is really nothing we want to film. As it turns out, they were there and we filmed. Okay, so plan for them to be there and at the deepest depth. Gear yourselves for gas and redundancy. Then you are ready to film anywhere. I'm just saying that planning not to plan, is a bad choice.On all four dives we never went into deco by more than 4 minutes. On all four dives air and equipment was never an issue. I returned to the boat with just under 1000 lbs, he had just over 1000 lbs, and we had one pony between us.If you were possibly going to go into deco, you both should have had your own backup gas. That would be quite easy to manage.][/COLOR] Perhaps on a dive like this you would feel the need to have a more formal type of plan and that's great. A diver should always do what they feel is necessary to keep them safe. Our plan was to keep a close watch on our computers and make sure we start our accent with plenty of air to get us back safely to the surface. We did exactly that. We've been doing this type of dive for years and have found this "plan" to work just fine for that type of dive. If attempting to dive the Andrea Doria I feel certain we would come up with a different plan. I am glad it has worked for you for years. That does not mean it will forever. I think you should always have your contingency air ready if you know that you might go into deco.
Snide comments that have nothing to do with my post are unneccesary.

If there were any snide comments it started when you said if I keep diving the way I do then I'll end up in the A&I forum. I simply responded to your comment. We both know your initial comment was unnecessary and added nothing of value.Not true. You have done seat of your pants dive planning and execution for a long time. I hope you don't ever have a problem, but when you play the odds over and over, chances are that you will roll bad at some point. I would like for you to avoid that, adn for these new divers to not look upon your practices as safe. They aren't.

Your plan and dive execution are your own business, until you make a post like you first did. Then you are encouraging reckless behavior. Just don't encourage others to regulary go into unplanned deco. That is foolish.

I have never encouraged others to participate in reckless behavior in scuba diving or anything else for that matter. The OP simply asked if anyone thought that knowingly going into deco by two minutes with 1500 psi left in his tank was reckless and I told him I didn't think it was. Still don't think it is. Just because I don't think it's reckless doesn't mean I'm encouraging it. You read into my post what you wanted to read. Not what I wrote. That happens a lot on ScubaBoard.Then you may want to word it differently. That's exactly how it sounds. And you're right, it does happen a lot here.

......

 

[Cave Diver]

Again, this all assumes that the OP did not know how his computer would react. That may be a bad assumption.

To extrapolate on this, on the last trip one of my buddies was on with me, I was diving a recreational computer and he had a tech oriented computer. We incurred some planned deco on a dive and on the ascent, his forced a deep stop that mine totally did not like. As we did the stops his computer called for, his deco obligation was steadily decreasing, mine was increasing rapidly. It was no big deal as we had plenty of gas and out times still ran within the parameters of the plan, but it illustrated how vastly different computers can be. At one point, mine showed 30 minutes of additional deco over his, but most of that cleared as we hit our shallow stops. We finished up the last of the stops, played around in the shallows for a while, then made our exit.

Don't assume that just because you've only incurred a minute or two of deco that something can't hang you up and cause a rapid change in your circumstances.

 

[Kingpatzer]

The OP was deliberate, but I think we can argue about the likelihood of a bad outcome, and he HAD done some simple things to mitigate risk (checking his SPG and assessing the gas available to do what he wanted to do). I do not think he was particularly well-advised to do what he did, and as I said in my post, I wouldn't recommend continuing to experiment without some further education and training, but I do not think it met the test for "reckless".

To me anytime one does not plan a dive and dive the plan they are being reckless. It may well be through ignorance and it may well be of minimal risk, but it is still reckless.

I suspect that this is a semantic point as you admit you would not recommend continuing down this path. And that is really the central point of agreement regardless of what term we use to describe the 'why' behind that lack of support for this method of gaining experience.