A deceptively easy way to die

[bowlofpetunias]

We have an Ocean Cave or two within a day's drive of here. Not subject to silt and not likely to get lost but equipment failures or panic attacks in them offer high potential for bad results. These sites are dived regularly by hundreds of OW and AOW divers a month. I would be shocked if 1% were trained for overheads. I don't even know anyone locally who teaches cave. This message needs to be promoted!

I keep seeing people talk about diving being safe if you stay within your training. Risks may be mitigated but it will not be safe until we grow gills and can control Mother Nature. Too many experienced divers die when they forget and get complacent. too many inexperienced divers die when they do trust me dives and fail to recognize the risks they are taking. Diving IMHO is worth the inherent risks but it is foolish to challenge Murphy by increasing the risks!

 

[Neilwood]

I saw a Divemaster Candidate lead a group of nearly a dozen freshly-minted OW divers into a cave with 3 lights between them and two were on a camera rig by the DMC. It was "just" to the Piano room in Vortex (300ft beyond sunlight, 110ft deep or so). All of them bounced along the bottom and weren't able to stay neutral. I approached the DMC off to the side and he laughed about it and about how bad their trim and buoyancy was, but they were learning and it wasn't really a cave and nobody could really die in there. Worst part? DMC was a nice guy and genuinely didn't know of the dangers.

They might just have been learning how to die if some minor issue had happened or one had gotten silted out. A good case of " you know what, you know but you don't know what you don't know" - he was obviously unaware of the myriad dangers that could have happened

I once saw a group of five divers coming out of the cave at Car Wash. The only person in the group who had a light was the leader ... I'm assuming he was some sort of paid dive guide, as he was also the only one in the group who looked like he had any buoyancy skills. Had his light gone out while they were inside that cave, I wish them luck finding their way out ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Again, the leader was presumably unaware of the dangers. It seems fine when you get away with it but the one time there is a small issue (which can quickly become a big issue in overhead situations), people will potentially pay the ultimate price.

I still maintain that this is one of the best training videos in diving. It sends a basic message and the potential results if you don't heed the warning.

While I agree with you on this (and think it should be shown on OW courses), it could do with an update for quality reasons.

---------- Post added December 2nd, 2015 at 01:16 PM ----------

We have an Ocean Cave or two within a day's drive of here. Not subject to silt and not likely to get lost but equipment failures or panic attacks in them offer high potential for bad results. These sites are dived regularly by hundreds of OW and AOW divers a month. I would be shocked if 1% were trained for overheads. I don't even know anyone locally who teaches cave. This message needs to be promoted!

I keep seeing people talk about diving being safe if you stay within your training. Risks may be mitigated but it will not be safe until we grow gills and can control Mother Nature. Too many experienced divers die when they forget and get complacent. too many inexperienced divers die when they do trust me dives and fail to recognize the risks they are taking. Diving IMHO is worth the inherent risks but it is foolish to challenge Murphy by increasing the risks!

People are correctly taught to only dive within their training - unfortunately it is human nature to think "That went fine so it must be safe" or " the guide must know this is safe so I will trust him" where in reality it should be viewed as "I dodged a bullet there as the slightest mishap and I wouldn't be here".

 

[Storker]

A propos the claims that "most adults would see the danger instantly" and that "99.9% of them would never consider [it]":

Here is the site list of a diving center in Palinuro, Italy. Note that 11 of the 14 sites that the operator doesn't require a cavern or cave cert to dive are overhead.

Here's a video that another dive center in the general area (Salerno) has posted on YouTube. Incidentally, this is video is shot in the same cave where, as NWGratefuldiver and I pointed out, four divers perished three years ago.
[video=youtube;flgDQiSALNU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flgDQiSALNU[/video]

Frankly, this kind of crap scares the living bejeebus out of me. But it seems that the dive centers in the region think nothing of it.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

That's cause some of those Italians are nuts. I should know. I am one.

 

[Storker]

unfortunately it is human nature to think "That went fine so it must be safe" or " the guide must know this is safe so I will trust him" where in reality it should be viewed as "I dodged a bullet there as the slightest mishap and I wouldn't be here".

Former astronaut Mike Mullane has a pretty good talk on just that phenomenon. They call it "Normalization of deviance". Commonly seen among DUIers.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

Steve Lewis also discussed it as it relates to diving on his blog.

 

[Subcooled]

A minor restriction is when your buddy is stuck.
A major restriction is when your stuck. [emoji41]

Depends on who's leading

 

[BenjaminF]

Depends on who's leading

And if they are stuck behind or in front of you? [emoji14]

 

[spoolin01]

I thought pady spent a lot of money some time back to discover that "scary" = "sales" in diving, no?

I can only conclude my OW instructor was a practitioner of that school of marketing. He did relish the role.

You can find quite a lot of them in Florida ... particularly at Ginnie on a hot summer day. But they're not unique to that area. I believe there's a cottage industry in certain parts of Italy from "tours" of underwater caves. Seems not that long ago when a whole group of tourists died inside of a cave ... taken in there by a dive guide who also had no overhead dive training. Oddly, not a single one of those people seemed to recognize the danger ...

How do you know what they recognized, maybe they just trusted the pro? No go without the pro, right? Seems like a dissonant theme in this thread, not without obvious irony.

I haven't found that to be the case at all. In nearly 12 years of teaching scuba I've yet to have a single student who decided to stop diving because of something that was said about its potential dangers. During that same time period I've known many who dropped out after inadvertently putting themselves in a bad situation and scaring the crap out of themselves. Some of those were people who, prior to their mishap, had been extremely avid divers. I don't ... at all ... buy the argument that we shouldn't be talking about the potential dangers of scuba at a "basic" level ... if it helps people think about mitigating risks before they get in the water, I see only upsides to doing so. By the same token, I think instructors who avoid that conversation ... or who sugar-coat the risks by telling their clients how easy it is ... often set their clients up for failure. Then when those people do something scary, out of ignorance or misplaced confidence in their abilities, they end up deciding that scuba is not for them ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Something said? It's not the subject matter straw man, it's the delivery. As to the one-sided nature of responses to alarming experience, and there being only upside to harping on danger - that seems just too... sweet. I can't see that blowing risks out of proportion - a common enough past-time here on SB - is part of effective instruction. Is it common in other fields to try to rattle fledglings?

A propos the claims that "most adults would see the danger instantly" and that "99.9% of them would never consider [it]":

Here is the site list of a diving center in Palinuro, Italy. Note that 11 of the 14 sites that the operator doesn't require a cavern or cave cert to dive are overhead.

Here's a video that another dive center in the general area (Salerno) has posted on YouTube. Incidentally, this is video is shot in the same cave where, as NWGratefuldiver and I pointed out, four divers perished three years ago.
[video=youtube;flgDQiSALNU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flgDQiSALNU[/video]

Frankly, this kind of crap scares the living bejeebus out of me. But it seems that the dive centers in the region think nothing of it.

Well, I don't read Italian, and much of that video was within sight of daylight, or in a group with lots of redundant lights and air, or under an air pocket. Hard to tell just how dangerous it was, or is all overhead bad, absent a cert?

I haven't kept a careful tally, but I'm sure you're not even within sight of 0.1% yet, and your examples strongly suggest a confounding factor.

 

[Storker]

I don't read Italian,

Neither do I. However, if you actually look at the link, you'll see that every site description also has an English (well, Google Translate English) description.

and much of that video was within sight of daylight, or in a group with lots of redundant lights and air, or under an air pocket.

Did you miss my point that that video was shot in exactly the same cave where four divers died quite uncomfortably back in 2012? Hard to tell how dangerous that cave is, eh?