Irresponsible?

[MauiScubaSteve]

Kind of funny, all my training and experience point to easier buoyancy control as one goes deeper; each breath being less and less percentage fluctuation. Even going to 60' deep we add air to the BC as we descend; keep descending keep adding air. If one understands neutral buoyancy, one adds as much as it takes.

Often a site is way easier at 80 feet deep than it is at 40 feet deep.

 

[ZenDiver.3D]

Ah, yes. I think a proper discussion of how to define 'responsibility' is best left to a forum on philosophy or law, though.

Anyway. Thank you all for your replies.

For now, I'm just going to try to learn as much as possible: I'm doing my AOW course and reading as much as I can (on this board and elsewhere). I guess that until I'm more experienced, I will have to trust others' jugdement and experience to some extent. But, of course, that doesn't mean not questioning it or not walking away if I feel what they're proposing is too risky.

Good. You need to know to pre-plan your gas management and be a proactive diver. But you do Not trust other's judgement and experience, blindly. I have seen "experienced" divers who were train wrecks. Be careful in whom you place your trust and your life.

This is a storm in a tea cup. I'm sure you loved the dives. The "advanced" course, includes one dive to 30 meters and some exercises to demonstrate decreased cognitive ability. You have essentially done that sans the exercises. In fact you are now more qualified to go to 30 meters than someone with an AOW ticket, as you have had several, not just 1, under direct supervision of an instructor. The most dangerous part of the dive is the 1st 10 meters anyway (greatest gas volume changes). Out of gas a 10 meters and a bolt to the surface with a closed glottis will kill you as quickly as the same event from 30 meters. Had I been on the boat and the DM had forbidden me to go below 18 meters I would have been deeply dissappointed. He obviously accompanied you on the dives to assess your ability and safety, and must have thought you were OK. This board is over represented with Technical divers, and as a result are out of touch with recreational diving. At no time during the dive will you go into real or virtual overhead environemt ie into deco. It's not hard to surface with 50 bar, and if that is your goal it is easily achieved without extensive gas management planning. The standard is to signal the DM when you are at 100 bar and then start ending the dive. Personally, I feel that these arbitrary numbers like 18 meters, are just that, arbitrary. 30 meters in 50 meter viz is much better than 18 meters in pea soup.
Kudos to your liveaboard instructor for allowing you to enjoy the trip to the full, and for not being a slave to arbitrary rules and regulations. We need more DM's like that. Unfortunately we are are own worst enemies, and it is the threat of loosing a rediculous legal battle that makes most people throw commonsense out the window and become slaves to the written regulations. As for the guy back home... find another instructor! Most definitely not irresponsible.

This is ridiculous. He is Not better trained because he went on those trust me dives. He needs to know how to plan his own gas management for depth, pressure, and consumption. I am glad that he enjoyed his trip. If his instructor/dm had helped him plan and introduced him to gas management, Then I would be happy with him. But as an instructor, he has to uphold standards. He didn't. He would have been perfectly within his rights to teach the OP, but I don't think he did.

Don't jump to conclusions.
We had a class of 16 students who went through our basic program the previous quarter.
8 weeks of lectures and pool sessions, 2 skin dives and 4 checkout dives.
We had 2 DM's and 2 instructors on site doing the dive in addition to a charted boat crew.

Of the buddies who surfaced away or with problems, those buddy pairs weren't with DM's or instructors.
All our students were briefed twice, once by our DM before boarding the boat, and again by the captain prior to diving.
The girl who had the leaking Oring didn't know it was leaking until after she had surfaced, she was aware of her low air status during her safety stop.

Of those who surface below 500psi, they did so because they failed to calculate how much air they needed during their safety stop. They began their ascent well before getting to 500psi. (which is the minimum recommended imperial value to have when you surface)
And in fact they chose to surface away from the anchor line because they made the call that they didn't have the air to find it.

I will dare say our basic program and those divers certified through it are better experienced than any other student out of a basic class, yet even these students with only 8 dives under their belt (4 checkout dives and 4 adv dives prior) failed in their gas management when they were without an experienced diver.

It's also not as simple as "I'm going down add air into the BC". Not everyone can grasp that concept surprisingly. Most would rather swim to maintain trim and buoyancy rather than toy w/ an inflator and risk a ascent they can't control because
a) they don't have a grasp on how much to fill their BC
b) they can't get to their dump ports consistently (excluding the inflator)
At that depth swimming fully deflated does not work. And its something they've never experienced before, it's completely new to them and the don't know what to do.
It's easy for experience divers like you and me to simply say "inflate till neutral" but not for a diver who just got certified.

That was the point I was trying to cross, it is easy to to get into trouble at that depth when your fresh out of basic. You need more knowledge and experience on gas management before taking on a deep dive with a buddy of the same experience.
It's not simply "Oh I'm low on air let me surface". I don't think that's the right attitude for a deep dive.

Maybe for a tropical high visibility dive it's easy, but one thing I forgot to mention was we were doing a dive in 5-15ft visibility (bottom-surface). A midwater ascent without the anchor line scares the crap out of you in that situation.

All of this is beyond me. You had far too many students in one class. They obviously were improperly trained if they had all those problems. Inflator/ deflator use is not tricky and should be mastered before signing off on OW, to begin with. Most of my students' dives are in vis less than 5 ft, and I have Never had those problems. This was a true disaster.
But you are right, there is much more that I'm low on air, ascend, to this.

 

[TSandM]

xyrandomyx, from the grand elevation of five years of diving and nearly 1000 dives, I can look at what you did and be judgmental.

But I won't.

I was you. I went to Maui when I had about a dozen dives. My first dive there was with an instructor, as part of a "boat diving" PADI specialty, and he took us to 130 feet. Being rather in the habit of doing as diving instructors instructed me, I went . . . and had a good time, and surfaced with no qualms at all about what we did. I just didn't know about the "what ifs", or anything useful about dive planning or gas management or many things I have since learned. I hang my head now, thinking about how little personal responsibility I took for what I was doing, and how little independent thought I put into diving at that time.

If you think about it, your first open water dive is the ultimate "trust me" dive -- you have no idea at all what the environment will be like, and you have no tools at all to evaluate the dive or plan it. You go where they tell you to, and do as you're told, and in general, it goes pretty well. And you enjoy it, at least enough to end up where you were. You trusted your instructors, whether in retrospect they knew anything or not, and you develop the habit of doing so.

Eventually, you may look back and say, "I shouldn't have done that," or even conclude that the people who led you were misguided or even incompetent, and you followed them anyway. But I, at least, will forgive you; one of the saddest things about diving is that people come out of their OW classes with no conception of how much more there is to know about diving than what they have learned.

The important things are that you did your dives and enjoyed them, and had no untoward events. From reading here, you have gained an appreciation for the things that COULD have happened, and what you would need to know and be able to do to cope with them, and that's the beginning of your ongoing education in what diving really is.

Don't beat yourself up. Just keep learning.

 

[DevonDiver]

I went on a live-aboard trip earlier this year. I'd completed my PADI OW certification a few weeks before and hadn't done any dives since then. On the live-aboard, I was accompanied by an instructor on several dives to depths between between 22 and 27 metres .....

Was I being irresponsible?

If you were not personally happy with conducting the dives, then yes.

A big factor is how the instructor concerned approached the dives. Did he give comprehensive briefings and supply you with any extra knowledge or directions for completing the deeper dives? Or was it just a case of following him like a (trusting) sheep?

If you are going to extend your limits in diving, it is a good idea to do so in the company of a diver with sufficient training and experience who can safeguard you and enable your development to match the demands of the dives undertaken.

Generally, an instructor should meet that criteria (whether or not it is on a paid course, or a fun dive).

That said, there is a fine line between a 'trust me' dive... and a dive where you are enpowered and supervised to extend your limits....

 

[g1138]

All of this is beyond me. You had far too many students in one class. They obviously were improperly trained if they had all those problems. Inflator/ deflator use is not tricky and should be mastered before signing off on OW, to begin with. Most of my students' dives are in vis less than 5 ft, and I have Never had those problems. This was a true disaster.
But you are right, there is much more that I'm low on air, ascend, to this.

Agreed, our program should work more on buoyancy skills in our basic class. Our adv class usually isn't this big. We just had a huge influx of divers who are trying to complete requirements so they can get a scientific diving certification for their college major.(we're part of the university program)
I think we put a little more trust into our students because we've spent so much time around them, and we feel like they can be safe divers. All our other dives went off without a hitch and we thoroughly debrief the outcome of our boat dive. This is also the first time we've had this problem with an advanced class, so it's something for the our DM's and instructors to learn from.

Normally we go to a pinnacle where our divers don't stray from the anchor line, but conditions dictated a new site which relied more on navigation.

 

[cocoajoe]

I went on a live-aboard trip earlier this year. I'd completed my PADI OW certification a few weeks before and hadn't done any dives since then. On the live-aboard, I was accompanied by an instructor on several dives to depths between between 22 and 27 metres (~72 to 89 feet). At the time, I assumed this was OK. I was with an instructor. I'd been honest about my certification level and (utter lack of) experience. Judging by the reaction of an instructor back home, though, this was not case -- he seemed shocked that an instructor had taken me to those depths with only a PADI OW certification.

I felt comfortable at the time, but I realise this could simply have been due to ignorance and misplaced trust in the instructor I was with. I would have been put off by an attitude that seemed dismissive of safety concerns or one of bravado or machismo. I would also have been uncomfortable if anything seemed grossly reckless to me (for example, dive plans that exceeded generally accepted recreational limits). Beyond that, lacking the experience to evaluate the instructor firsthand, I was relying on reviews and research about the dive outfit that I'd done beforehand.

I also can't help thinking that the shocked instructor back home would almost certainly have been willing to take me to similar depths as part of an AOW certification directly after my OW certification. And, having just completed the theory for AOW, I'm fairly sure there isn't much new information introduced for the deep dive portion (it seems more of a reiteration and brief expansion on the info covered in OW).

Was I being irresponsible?

Was this DM your dive buddy or just there as a guide? Did he ascend with you and stay with you until you were back on the boat? If he was your buddy and stayed close given your experience level, I don't see the harm. Now if he was a guide, that means his attention wasn't on you much of the time. Big difference.

 

[TSandM]

BTW, several people have mentioned "gas management" in this thread, but no one has explained what it is. Have a look at THIS essay . . . it was attending a gas management seminar that Bob gave that was my first wake-up call about how little I actually knew about what I was doing.

 

[fire_diver]

I personally hadn't gone int detail because that is an entire thread (or 5) in itself.

 

[xyrandomyx]

BTW, several people have mentioned "gas management" in this thread, but no one has explained what it is. Have a look at THIS essay . . . it was attending a gas management seminar that Bob gave that was my first wake-up call about how little I actually knew about what I was doing.

Thanks for the link. I was about to reply asking if any of you could point me in the direction of some more resources on gas management. My post seems to have generated quite a bit of discussion and different views (varying in degree of opposition), but gas management seems to be one of the common themes.

I've checked through my PADI OW and AOW course work again and I'm fairly certain it doesn't go into much detail at all on gas management. It includes a few general statements about planning to have a reserve of air on returning to the surface (without saying much about HOW exactly one goes about doing that); observations about depth, temperature, other environmental factors and exertion playing a role in air consumption; and, the most detailed, a short section with tables explaining how to calculate an estimate of air consumption at a particular depth.

I could, of course, be missing or forgetting something that was covered in the course work, but I think I've had a fairly good look through it again. There are other bits and pieces scattered all over, but the certainly doesn't seem to be any comprehensive section on gas management in dive planning.

And, well, while it seems that various posters disagree about how much I should know, I'm certain that knowing more won't cause me any harm...so, I'll be reading more between now and my next dive.

 

[xyrandomyx]

Was this DM your dive buddy or just there as a guide? Did he ascend with you and stay with you until you were back on the boat? If he was your buddy and stayed close given your experience level, I don't see the harm. Now if he was a guide, that means his attention wasn't on you much of the time. Big difference.

I was with a buddy with similar (in-)experience. The two of us were accompanied by the DM/ instructor at all times, ascending with us and staying with us until we were back on the boat. There was a seperate DM leading the whole group of five, which included another pair of more experienced divers. On one or two of the dives we split into two groups of three (me, buddy, DM/ instructor together) so that we could follow slightly different plans (the inexperienced group staying shallower, etc.).

A big factor is how the instructor concerned approached the dives. Did he give comprehensive briefings and supply you with any extra knowledge or directions for completing the deeper dives? Or was it just a case of following him like a (trusting) sheep?

If you are going to extend your limits in diving, it is a good idea to do so in the company of a diver with sufficient training and experience who can safeguard you and enable your development to match the demands of the dives undertaken.

Um, I thought the dive briefings were fairly thorough (but, again, that could just be my lack of experience and knowledge). Aside from briefings given to everyone on the boat, the DM/ instructor gave additional briefings to me covering depth and other considerations for the dives that I might not have encountered before. So, there was an attempt to supply me with additional knowledge, I do feel as though I learned some things, but it's quite possible (or probable) that it was insufficient. I certainly wouldn't have felt qualified to do any of those dives with only a buddy of a similar experience or to have planned them on my own.