Cave Training and Etiquette Real or Imaginary?

[boulderjohn]

My initial reaction to this is based on several other posts I made earlier. The focus seems to be to assume an instructor is doing a good job unless you somehow find out otherwise, after which will follow an investigation and punishment. As I said earlier, the trend in businesses today is exactly the opposite--assume all instructors can use help and implementing a non-threatening program of continuous improvement. I know that is an outlier position, but it might be interesting to toss the idea around for a while.

 

[Rick Murchison]

.. Standards should not be so stringent that the instructor is restricted or limited in working with a student diver but they must clearly explain the acceptable limits and the instructor to hold to those limits.

So I ask myself what are the minimum skills common to all cave training agencies? What are acceptable pass or fail criteria for these skills?

I look forward to seeing what y'all come up with.
But... or, should I say "in addition to..."
Perhaps the most important standard - and the most difficult to define and evaluate - is what I call the "Safe Diving Mindset" or "brain engaged diving."
And while skills and procedures must be known cold and the diver must be able to execute them accurately and automatically, situational awareness and the ever-changing envelope of "what works" has to somehow be evaluated too... I know that's a squishy statement, but as I say, difficult to define and evaluate.
One of the greatest compliments I ever got from a cave diving buddy after a dive was "Man, you sure are cautious!"
Uh, yeah, yew bet yer bippy!

Rick

 

[GDI]

I look forward to seeing what y'all come up with.
But... or, should I say "in addition to..."
Perhaps the most important standard - and the most difficult to define and evaluate - is what I call the "Safe Diving Mindset" or "brain engaged diving."
And while skills and procedures must be known cold and the diver must be able to execute them accurately and automatically, situational awareness and the ever-changing envelope of "what works" has to somehow be evaluated too... I know that's a squishy statement, but as I say, difficult to define and evaluate.
One of the greatest compliments I ever got from a cave diving buddy after a dive was "Man, you sure are cautious!"
Uh, yeah, yew bet yer bippy!

Rick

Situational Awareness is hard to qualify/quantitfy but it most certainly is an important skill. It can be tested simply by asking studnets if they noticed things like turns, unique line arrow placements, cave structure and something that their buddy is wearing, etc etc

 

[PfcAJ]

In both my cave classes we were expected to know when we reached a jump, how much gas we used to get there, what the bottom time was when x event happened, etc at our surface debrief. Also excellent or keeping a "running tally" of where you are, what time you're at, and what resources you have.

Buddy awareness was reinforced by the instructor switching off the rear student's light. While rear student was deploying the backup, front guy should notice the lack of light from the rear guy.

Things like that.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Situational awareness and gas management are the two most undertaught skills at the recreational level ... mainly because so many instructors and agencies believe it's not necessary to learn them. Unfortunately, once you've developed basic diving habits that don't include them, it becomes much more difficult to integrate those skills at higher levels of diving. That which is learned first is learned best ... and that includes both the skills and mindset to pay attention not just to what you're doing, but also to what's going on around you while you're doing it ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[GDI]

IMO Skills should be divided or grouped into two types The physical and the psychological. The training should be inclusive and holistic. By all means Situational Awareness needs be developed at all levels of diving. This consideration has seen many would be cave divers not make the grade. There is a triangle of which the diver is the base, the environment and the equipment are the responsibility of the diver to chose to make a dive or not make a dive. If any of the supported arms of the triangle are not at 100 % the diver should call the dive until the three legs are ready in a go state:

Physical skills include:

Equipment Type, Configuration,Deployment, Operation and Usage
Buoyancy and Trim
Propulsion Techniques
Reel and Line Techniques
Line, Hand Signal and Light Communications
Line Management
Emergency Procedures
Gas Planing and Management
Depth and Time Management
Team Dynamics
Cave/rn Environmental Considerations

Psychological Skills (Situational Awareness):

Cave Configuration and Environmental Awareness
Equipment Operational Awareness
Communication Awareness
Depth, Air and Time Awareness
Team Awareness
Body Positional Awareness
Line Awareness

Just to name a few items as one can see many of the above items are repeated. . I always instruct using the acronym :

D = Depth, Dependency
E = Environment, Equipment
A = Air(gas), Awareness and Attitude
T = Team, Time and Training
H = Health, Habits

 

[Rick Murchison]

This is turnin' into a right good thread now!
Good thoughts y'all.

Rick

 

[TSandM]

Maybe it's because I primarily cave dive in MX, but there seems to me to be a hole in your otherwise excellent list, Rick, and that's a "navigational awareness". It's kind of a synthesis of some of the others, but knowing what kind of passage you have been in, what kind of line you were following, how many intersections you have passed and what kind of intersections they were, what the flow was doing, what the general compass direction of the cave was, whether there was any flow, the compositions of the sediments, the depth of the passages and intersection and whether there was halocline, and if so, at what depth . . . those are all pieces of information that will GET YOU OUT if everything else fails.

My original cave class, although a level I class which also taught line skills and emergency procedures, was heavy, heavy, heavy on these things -- collecting data, correlating and synthesizing it, and being able to use it to form an image of where you had been, and where you needed to go to get out. As a result, I have turned more than one dive on "full brain"; either recognizing I couldn't absorb any more information, or worse, realizing I was no longer confident of the information I'd already collected.

Florida seems a little different, at least at the "tourist" diving level. There, perhaps, depth and time and silt are your biggest enemies (I have profound respect for Florida red clay sediments!). But in MX, what will kill you is getting lost, and it can be frighteningly easy in the spiderwebs of cave and line down there (not to mention the fact that the lines you came in on may not be the lines you go home on, depending on who has been in the system while you were diving.)

I'd rather, and I have dived with someone whose technical skills were not as stellar, if I thought they were aware and processing what was going on around them.

 

[tbone1004]

Lynne, why aren't you guys cookie-ing all of the intersections? with touch ID's on the cookies as well as visual ones, it shouldn't be that difficult to keep track of where you've been....

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Some of the caves in MX have jumps so close you can bridge the gap with a double-ender. Take your eye off the line for a split second and you can suddenly be going into the cave on a completely different line than the one you think you're going out on ... :shocked2:

... Bob (Grateful Diver)