Recreational Limits, confusing or is it just me?

[NAM001]

John we are in total agreement. I have always called teh 60/100/130 diving ilmits based on trianing and /or training imposed limits. Thanks

That is what the PADI OW course says. I am just reporting what it says in reply to an earlier post. It says that an OW certified diver is certified to 60 feet, because that is the depth limit of the OW course. In the new standards, there is a restriction based on the depth of the actual dive, but it is still just a recommendation. The course also says 100 feet with further training and experience which I shortucutted to AOW, since that is the only official training course for that purpose. The AOW course has a required deep dive, with a 100 foot maximum limit. The Deep diver course takes dives to the full maximum of 130 feet. If you read the PADI Encyclopedia of Recreational Diving, you will learn that the 130 feet limit was established long ago, and the primary reason for it is the fact that the effects of nitrogen narcosis become more pronounced after that depth.



It is clear that this idea that we give the diver enough information to help them make informed decisions about their ability to deal with different situations. It is clear that is not working for you. Since you apparently need someone to tell you what to do in your situation, I suggest you have a meeting with a professional who can evaluate your abilities and tell you what you can do. As time goes by, you can meet with that individual, have him or her re-evaluate your growing skills, and tell you what you can do. If you can come to where I live and dive, I will be happy to help you with this.

 

[KeithG]

It is clear that this idea that we give the diver enough information to help them make informed decisions about their ability to deal with different situations. It is clear that is not working for you. Since you apparently need someone to tell you what to do in your situation, I suggest you have a meeting with a professional who can evaluate your abilities and tell you what you can do. As time goes by, you can meet with that individual, have him or her re-evaluate your growing skills, and tell you what you can do. If you can come to where I live and dive, I will be happy to help you with this.

It is totally working for me. I fully understand what I am capable of and I dive within those limits (as long as the operation allows me). And I agree that (many) divers (mostly) are given (almost) enough information to decide their abilities (except maybe those who are surprised when they get locked out by their computers, or those divers who run out of air, or those divers who are surprised when they go into deco, or those divers who ...).

My point is that I do not believe it is up to YOU to decide. Who died and made YOU king? There are thousands of "YOUs" out there. All with different criteria. That they made up all by themselves. Based upon their personal opinions & preferences. No 2 alike. Their personal decisions are not based upon any recognized criteria. That is the cause of confusion. There is no consistency. Hence there is no right answer. That is my point. Everyone makes their own rules. Total anarchy! Wild wild west. Random rules.

I know exactly what I am capable of. But if I ask 10 different "yous", I will get 10 different answers. So you must ALL be wrong.

P.S. Please feel free to come where I dive & I will evaluate your skills and tell you what you can do. Just kidding! I fully realize is a really stupid idea given our skill levels, but I hope you get my point. There is nothing that says I can not judge you. And if it is MY boat, well ...

I think the main thing I have learned from this thread is that there are a lot of people out there that arbitrarily make up rules and then cite some vague or non existent "certification agency" policy as justification.

I am happy to follow your arbitrary rules if it is your boat. But please be happy to admit they are just rules you made up.

 

[NAM001]

Brian

To play devils advocate. If ssi uses 100 ft and padi uses 60 is there any diferences in the course's training or skill sets to justify the depth differences.
Imnot an instructor. Just asking. Because when i took my owd course it was one course for everything, perhaps 40hours of training. it was the equivilant of todays ow through master. So another agency could very well have an openwater course that was the training equivilant of OW and AOW combined.

And as an example of the differences among agencies, SSI's OWD course tells students that 100 fsw is the "recommended maximum recreational depth" and 130 fsw is the max depth after the Deep Diving specialty course. Plus a recommendation, similar to PADI's, that new divers limit themselves to 60 fsw until they're comfortable and controlled enough to venture deeper.

Im my OWD courses I introduce some rules of thumb for new-diver gas planning, one of which is "don't plan to dive deeper than the number of cubic feet of gas on your back."

-Bryan

 

[KeithG]

</rant> The prosecution rests their case my lord.

 

[PhatD1ver]

There are no scuba police.

Recommendations are just that. We tell our students they are certified to dive in conditions similar to, or better than the ones in which they got certified. That means they shouldn't take off for the depths, or jump into a high current drift dive, the day after they finish with us. But six months later, things may be quite different; a diver who has been diving actively here can easily log 50 or more dives in that time, and would you still think it reasonable to try to limit that diver to the 45 feet he managed in OW class?

Exactly... my wife finished her OW cert on Saturday... her instructor gave her some sage wisdom... dive in warm water, and dive at 18-20m for a while... but she's a certified diver, and she's going to be my buddy for a while, and I'll be pawning her off on some poor divemaster and finding a buddy when I want to dive deep (which I am qualified to do)...

At some point, I am sure she's going to want to go to 20m more often, and maybe tag along to 23m, and I'll probably let her (after having her read thru my DEEP DIVE learning materials), and maybe later if she wants to go down to the helicopter wreck just off the edge of the house reef from the place in Anilao (29m), when she suggests it, I'll get an instructor to pawn her off on and start her AOW with a deep dive "experience" to see if she is really comfortable that deep.

But reality is, I was doing 20-25m during my OW certification... we did two regular dives a day, and then a third dive for 'fun'... training dives that were recorded were to 12-18m depending on what we were doing... 'fun' dives (which obviously still were supervised since I wasn't certified yet) we went a little deeper, and I lived to tell the tale. And a few weeks ago in Anilao, 9 of 10 dives were all 20m or more max depth, and 7 of 10 were over 20m average... due to the location and dive sites...

I'm comfortable at 30m, never experienced narcosis "knock-knock" (so far)... but my wife isn't, and that's cool, we just will be choosing different dive sites for a while until she's more comfortable and ready to proceed with her training.

The instructors suggestion to her for 'warm water' was because she needs to build some strength to manage wearing a 7mm wetsuit and fighting cold surf with full gear on.... we don't face much of that in Asia...

 

[Rhone Man]

BTW, one concern with sending young divers deep has nothing to do with the safety of the dive but the concern (admittedly unproven) on the effects of pressure on growing bodies, bones in particular.

We can split that off for a discussion in another thread, but I'll just lay down a marker that I am not a great believer in any line of argument which goes: "There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that this may be harmful, and no one has seriously considered examining whether it may be harmful because it is so improbable. But let's ban it anyway."

If you mean to suggest we shouldn't allow children to become commercial saturation divers, I'm with you. If you mean to suggest that 6 or 7 minutes exposure of nitrogen at 4 ATA is going to lead to any kind of increased risk of necrosis, then I am afraid I laugh in your general direction.

 

[beanojones]

If you read the PADI Encyclopedia of Recreational Diving, you will learn that the 130 feet limit was established long ago, and the primary reason for it is the fact that the effects of nitrogen narcosis become more pronounced after that depth.

Hilariously enough, that language for the justification of 130' used to include a passing reference to avoiding problems with oxygen toxicity, which of course had to be removed when PADI started teaching Nitrox(!!) Which is just "what what what"?

That language (that the 130 limit was there, in part, to avoid problems with ox tox) caused enough confusion that PADI CDs and others who 'knew what PADI wanted' used that reasoning to part of the explanation of why Nitrox would never be taught by PADI.

Being able to email the training department, and having 1-800 numbers that work off the US mainland really make things easier to check out. The amount of misinformation before we had digital IMs and easy contact to the training dept was really annoying. But even with all that, we still have instructors teaching on the knees because 'standards'.

Because 'standards' is as much an explanation as because 'internet'.

(I have no reference for the above, because who has hard copies of anything, let alone outdated training materials. But since I was Nitrox certified, I got to hear all kinda nonsense from PADI people before it suddenly became PADI approved.

---------- Post added July 21st, 2014 at 02:29 AM ----------

We can split that off for a discussion in another thread, but I'll just lay down a marker that I am not a great believer in any line of argument which goes: "There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that this may be harmful, and no one has seriously considered examining whether it may be harmful because it is so improbable. But let's ban it anyway."

If you mean to suggest we shouldn't allow children to become commercial saturation divers, I'm with you. If you mean to suggest that 6 or 7 minutes exposure of nitrogen at 4 ATA is going to lead to any kind of increased risk of necrosis, then I am afraid I laugh in your general direction.

Most, or all, old recreational instructors I know who actually worked as divers long term for a living end up with degenerated joints (You do not know such people. There are very, very few of us who actually work as divers, and we are only in the tropics.) They never worked as commercial divers (in the hard hat surface supplied sense). That is not really up for debate. Many recreational-only divers have suffered permamnent disability from diving. That similarly is not up for debate. Not a "shred of evidence"? Maybe for people who don't know that many divers. For those of us who do, there's plenty of evidence.

I think failing to err to the side of caution with regard to long term consequences, on restrictions on underage divers (or pregnant divers, since potential fetal harm from diving is also just speculation) is badly confusing what recreational diving is. It is a fully optional activity, that broad classes of people are restrcited from for all number of likely phantom reasons. Because it is a completely optional recreational activity.

Failing to protect young people from harm, even merely potential harm, is an appalling ethical lapse.

This thread on limits and rules has gotten us back to the same place that the other thread on limits and rules came to.

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/basic-scuba-discussions/486683-wreck-penetration-queuing.html

I quote myself from that thread, because it is on point. The point of that thread was overhead environments, so it talks about wrecks, but the reasoning about rules, and the inability of young people to actually make informed decisions is exactly on point.

Yes I realize divers wil swim through wrecks all the time. Kids play in streets all the time too. People drive drunk all the time. And drivers text while driving. Almost all of the time nothing bad results from these things. (or people whould have stopped doing these things on their own, a long time ago, whether we had rules about these things or not.)

Is any of these things safe? Is the fact that there is hardly ever a bad outcome to these actions even slightly on point as to whether they are safe?

Even though texting while driving has recently surpassed DWI/DUI as the number one cause of driving fatalities, most people who text while driving will never have a wreck, without killing themselves or some innocent third party, because most of the time bad things don't happen, in general. Most drunk drivers make it home without killing themselves or some innocent third party. Most kids playing in the road survive just fine(Game on!). Most divers go into overheads environment make it out just fine.

That does not mean the rule(s) does not make sense. It just means we as human beings are remarkably bad, unspeakably incoherently bad, at reasoning out why we have rules in the first place. They are not in place to protect from inevitable results of our actions. Not even slightly.

See several posts in this very thread that make that reasoning flaw.
1. I shot a video of divers inside a wreck/ I went in a wreck/People go in wrecks all the time.
2. no one died in the cases I am referring to
so
3. it is safe, and there is no reason to restrict access to wreck or caves or deco diving

Life itself does just fine at teaching us direct cause and effect lessons. Touch red hot stove, and you will get burned. Not possibly, but necessarily. It's cause and effect. I have never heard of any place in the world passing a law against putting one's hands on a red hot stove.

Cause and effect is not the reason for rules. The rules are in place to prevent high societal/personal cost versus low personal benefit mistakes from happening, especially to people who have incomplete ability to make intelligent choices about repercussions/risks concerning their actions. Like teenage drivers, or non-tech trained divers who go into overhead environments. Most kids don't die despite their utter foolishness.

So should we do away with the rules that not every kid follows, or that all rules if breaking them does not necessarily result in bad outcomes?

 

[Rhone Man]

Most, or all, old recreational instructors I know who actually worked as divers long term for a living end up with degenerated joints (You do not know such people. There are very, very few of us who actually work as divers, and we are only in the tropics.)

To the contrary, I have lived most of my life in the Caribbean and I have many friends who were instructors for 30 years plus, and I know exactly of what you speak. There are also any number of studies showing bone necrosis in commercial divers (although I don't know any personally).

But I stand by my original comment that an occasional vacation diver going past 100' once or twice a year with a bottom time of 6 or 7 minutes is a massive, massive difference in time/dose exposure, and I am pretty confident that is a risk sufficiently close to zero that I'd treat it as zero. Even when it's my own son.

 

[DivemasterDennis]

Much of the why for the rules assumes that the divers involved are diving independently, that is, not with a DM or other professional leading them on a guided dive. If that is the case, it is prudent for an OW diver to limit their depth. However, how much they should limit it depends so depends upon their experience and skill level. A diver can expand their depth experience and comfort level by going on guided recreational dives, or diving with a experienced and qualified buddy, who may or may not be a divemaster or instructor. All recreational dives should be limited to 130 feet, regardless of credentials, as a safety factor. Also, the deeper you go the quicker you burn through air. Divers who wish to dive deeper should get technical training, and learn proper decompression dive protocols. I know there are some readers out there who regularly exceed 130 feet on recreational dives, but that is just not prudent. My wife is an open water diver, with a few hundred dives, of which about 1/3 have been deep dives of 90 feet or deeper. She dives with me ( certified and insured DM ) She is an excellent diver, comfortable at any depth ( her deepest dive is 122 feet) No operator has ever denied her a "deep dive" due to lack of credentials. Here is the conundrum: who is more qualified to go to 120 feet: my wife, the open water diver who has done so quite a few times, or a brand new advanced open water diver with 25 dives who have never dove over 70 feet, and never dove without an instructor or divemaster? The answer is...
DivemasterDennis

 

[NAM001]

And my point has been if she is that good why not paper her from the start with a AOW and deep card as opposed to the, OW with experience, that no one can really measure. The difference is like offering a personal check vs a certified check to a credator. The personal check only has a promise that funds are there and the certified is a guarentee the funds are there. If one rates a certification then go through the process of getting it. I say that because when offered a card the card represents nothing more than,,, the minimum agency standards were met at one time.

Much of the why for the rules assumes that the divers involved are diving independently, that is, not with a DM or other professional leading them on a guided dive. If that is the case, it is prudent for an OW diver to limit their depth. However, how much they should limit it depends so depends upon their experience and skill level. A diver can expand their depth experience and comfort level by going on guided recreational dives, or diving with a experienced and qualified buddy, who may or may not be a divemaster or instructor. All recreational dives should be limited to 130 feet, regardless of credentials, as a safety factor. Also, the deeper you go the quicker you burn through air. Divers who wish to dive deeper should get technical training, and learn proper decompression dive protocols. I know there are some readers out there who regularly exceed 130 feet on recreational dives, but that is just not prudent. My wife is an open water diver, with a few hundred dives, of which about 1/3 have been deep dives of 90 feet or deeper. She dives with me ( certified and insured DM ) She is an excellent diver, comfortable at any depth ( her deepest dive is 122 feet) No operator has ever denied her a "deep dive" due to lack of credentials. Here is the conundrum: who is more qualified to go to 120 feet: my wife, the open water diver who has done so quite a few times, or a brand new advanced open water diver with 25 dives who have never dove over 70 feet, and never dove without an instructor or divemaster? The answer is...
DivemasterDennis