A little confused about overhead environment

[MBH]

I'll agree that the Ballroom in an easy dive that OW divers do just about every day. For the OW diver it's actually too easy...as long as everything goes ok. It's when things don't go ok is where they are unprepared.

How many OW divers do you see get in the basin and then take time to let their tanks cool so that they know how much gas they really have? How many bother to do a couple of air share drills before they go in? Practice swimming around without their mask? Air share without a mask? Calculate thirds? Do a checklist? Run a reel?

Is all that stuff overkill for little 'ol Ginnie Ballroom? Maybe it is if everything goes ok.
It's when things don't go ok, on what should be an easy dive- that's when all that pesky trainig just might come in handy.

A diver can expect absolutely no mercy for a cavern or cave.

 

[SparticleBrane]

So you are saying that it is OK for a "DIR practitioner" to dive in an overhead environment beyond their training level as you have superior skills and are comfortable with the dive?

Where, in any part of my post, did I mention DIR? Nowhere. You just brought it in here to incite people; get it out of this thread. This thread has nothing to do with DIR.

I know the divers, I know the training they received, and it wasn't DIR. But I also know that short of learning to run line, they essentially had all the other skills covered in a cavern class, taught in their classes at school. They could easily hold buoyancy and trim while sharing air, they are comfortable without masks...and they sure as hell didn't silt out the cavern zone. Neither of them are stupid enough to go any further than they did on this dive without receiving proper training.

Is the attitude your students get trained with in the superhero 1-percentile too?

We certainly don't impart an "attitude" but it's amazing what students come back and tell us about the idiots they see while they're out diving on boats or quarries or whatever. Don't anyone jump down my throat for saying that, because we've all seen them before...

 

[ianr33]

Where, in any part of my post, did I mention DIR? Nowhere.

It is beneath your name.

Maybe "DIR Practitioners" dont actually practice what they preach ?

 

[SparticleBrane]

It is beneath your name.

Maybe "DIR Practitioners" dont actually practice what they preach ?

If there's one thing I don't go preaching about, it's DIR...

 

[LIVES4SHARKS]

Ok folks, the DIR debate should not be a part of this thread. The arguments are counterproductive to the OP's question. Many have supplied good information on their personal experiences at Ginnie and I do hope that has helped the OP.

After rereading his posts, he made the comment that his wife and dive buddy was not comfortable with overheads. That should be his final answer. In Overhead diving, your buddy is your life. You must be a good team on the same level to address each other's emergencies. So if your dive buddy isn't comfortable, then you don't go in that environment.

Here is a link to the Florida Springs Website. Florida Springs: Scuba Diving and Snorkeling in Florida Springs

I hope you have a safe and happy trip!
Carolyn:shark2:

 

[TSandM]

When Peter and I went down to do our cavern class, we ended up with another student who was someone we hadn't met before. He hadn't done Fundies. He was a very nice man, and trying hard, but he was so challenged by the cavern class that he didn't complete it. On the other hand, we sailed through almost all of it -- We had the buoyancy control, we had the kicks, we could do no-mask work, we could run line (not from Fundies, but from other DIR/UTD classes). The only thing in cavern that challenged me was lights-out line-following exits, and that was because of my own personal issues with diving when there is no visual reference.

Honestly, a lot of what is taught in a usual cavern class is buoyancy control, kicks, line running, and team skills. If you have done Fundies and Rec Triox, you are WAY ahead of the curve on training for overhead environments.

I wouldn't say that you should blithely enter any overhead environment, but honestly, the Ginnie Ballroom is going to be a pretty safe place for someone who brings those skills to the game. The OP, however, who has 10 dives and none of this training, is a different story altogether.

 

[bfw]

So I'm confused. In my OW and AOW, both the PADI books and my instructors strongly emphasized NEVER to enter an environment with overhead without training... ie don't even go under the training dive platform.

In 1984 when I took OW, the AOW students doing their dives went through a tunnel, a school bus, and a sand silo. Six months later, so did I. A year later, when I started DM, PADI changed the standards to disallow overhead environments on all training dives. Over the last 24 years, it's morphed from allowing AOW students in overheads to telling all OW and AOW certed divers not to go under the edge of the platform. You'll note that diver corpses weren't exactly piling up on the docks 24 years ago, either. PADI policy has also more recently evolved to the position that OW certs are only safe to dive with professional supervision. Not long ago, PADI officials actually referred to ntrox as "voodoo death gas," - their change of mind on it was more a factor of it becoming a profitable, and now they advise members to push it like it's the greatest thing since night baseball. Give it a few years, and you'll start noticing further changes if you pay attention, and by no means is the evolution of policy limited to PADI.

One thing to remember is that rules, regulations, and policies do not necessarily constitute transcendent truths about objective reality, whether those rules are written by your kindergarten teacher, the agency that certified you, or even the US Supreme Court (does the name Dred Scott ring a bell?) Numerous liability, political, and economic considerations go into these policies, and, in the end, they represent a snapshot of the current, often poorly or unethically thought out and debated opinion of a group of fallible human beings.

 

[bfw]

Your instructors were right.

Any time you can't directly ascend to the surface, breathe and relax, you have entered an area where your OW training is no longer valid.

I'm not talking about "The SCUBA Police", but conditions where you no longer have the training or equipment to stay alive.

So, when you're in the Keys, checking out the reef in 30 feet of water, and the current switches, swinging the dive boat on its mooring, and it passes over you, you lack the training or equipment to stay alive?

This defies reason and common sense, and seems predicated on the idea that no one with more than one functional neuron is diving.

 

[DA Aquamaster]

I agree with bfw that if you are not careful you can get a little too rule bound. Rules are not the be all and end all of safety and as pointed out above they often involve many factors other than diver safety.

Rules are actually more of a middle level of development in terms of reasoning ad problem solving and if a diver is not careful, rules can take the place of common sense and independent thinking. And rules often conflict with each other. For example, does an OW diver follow the PADI rule interpreted as don't even duck under a training platform as it is an "overhead" or does he or she follow the Ginnie Springs rule that allows OW divers in the Ballroom?

There is really no right answer to that question. One rule is so conservative that it is patently stupid and as such will be ignored by many OW divers - and potentially lead to a steady erosion of other progressively less stupid rules under the flawed logic of: "That one was stupid so I broke it and I lived, that one is also kinda dumb so I'll break it too" which continues until the diver breaks a rule that he or she should have followed. The other rule is potentially dangerous to an unskilled diver (regardless of experience level) *if* something goes wrong. But to be fair, new OW divers also drown in plain old open water when things go wrong - consider the recent accident at Lake Rawlings. That fatality or others like it does not mean we should ban all newly minted OW divers from diving.

I am a bit of conservative so I'd really prefer to see us only promoting rules that really should be rules and not get into the business of telling people what they should or should not do in an over zealous effort to protect them from themselves rand in the process remove the concept of personal responsibility and judgment.

That is really the issue. The decision made by an OW diver to dive in the ballroom should be made by the diver based on an honest and thoughtful assesment of their skills, abilities and limitations. Will divers make bad decisions and do stupid stuff - absolutely and for some those mistakes may be fatal. But I am not convinced that in and of itself is reason enough to deny a responsible OW diver the opportunity to expand and challenge their limits a bit, especially if one of the goals is to enter the ballroom to get a feel for what cavern and cave diving may be all about.

I suspect that is what is really going on since, to be totally fair and objective, despite the concerns expressed here and the theoretical risks the bodies of dead OW divers are not exactly washing out of the ballroom on a regular basis and Ginnie does not seem to be concerned with the potential for lawsuits from the grieving surviors of the darwinian challenged divers who may make bad decisions. In short, the nay sayers are basically overstating the risks. Frankly I am pretty sure a thorough analysis would support the theory that the drive down to Florida and or to Ginnie has killed a lot more OW divers than has diving in the the ballroom. Getting out of bed in the morning involves risk - life would be really boring if we eliminated all risk and diving is no exception.

 

[Reg Braithwaite]

Reading all of the posts about how he overhead environment of a cavern is equivalent to the dive boat swinging overhead,and about how PADI rules used to allow things they no longer allow, and about how some people drown diving in open water any way, and about how easy Ginnie springs is...

I'm surprised at how many people have taken a specific question about a specific diver who has ten OW dives (four of which may have been checkout dives) and who has a partner who is uncomfortable diving Ginnie Springs... and who have gone far away from that to discuss the general philosophy of diving things when you feel you're ready.

Well duh, dive Ginnie Springs when you have the skills to do so. The problem is that the OP doesn't know whether he has the skills to do so, that's why he asked us for advice. Our job is to say yes, no, or we don't know. Pontifications about dive agency standards and the ease with which persons X, Y, and Z have dived Ginnie Springs are not helpful to the OP.

I go back to my advice, which I still feel is correct, and which absolutely none of the posts about the ease of Ginnie Springs have refuted: Don't do this dive if your partner is uncomfortable with it.