Article: Self Reliance and Tech Diving

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I have had the pleasure of diving with John on a couple of tech dives in Florida before I had to bail and come out here to Hawaii. I say "pleasure" because he joined our well established group and fit right in with no issues whatsoever. It was obvious from day one that he was well adept at fitting in with a long standing group/team of tech divers. As Jim pointed out, this article was written about technical diving. I find it interesting how quickly some put on open water spin on it and even some who have no technical training. As far as some new student going out and doing something "dangerous" because John Chatterton wrote something on a blog that some feel is dangerous.... I would say that person is more than likely incapable of thinking for themselves in the first place and has no business doing technical dives. I have a lot of respect for John, but I did notice that he puts his wetsuit on the same way I do.... one leg at a time. I guess the difference is, once his is on, he makes Gold Records. :) Dr. Lecter, I would love to get together and see some of the cool diving you are used to out here.... if we can set aside our different beliefs about the whole Cove 2 octopus thing. :)
 
I have only one thing to say......what the heck is up with the "Jajajajajajajajaja"? Maybe the backstory would be a nice break for everybody from this thread.
 


Another question for Chatterton.....If you had a teenage son that you were taking diving with you--and your son was OOA, would he be able to count on you to provide air. You know there is only one answer.

Seriously, if I had a teenage son, and I don't, and he wanted to be a diver, I would want him to be the best diver he could be. I cannot imagine anyone thinking anything different? Relative to this discussion, what does that mean to me? I would want him to dive within his limitations, be absolutely responsible, accomplish his goals, and learn about life from his diving. I would train him to never, ever, ever, ever, run out of gas. NEVER!! But being a teenager, maybe he would not listen to me, so he would be diving in 30 feet of water until he learned how to dive.

If we are diving in 30 feet of water on a reef, where I would expect novice divers to run out of air, it is far more expeditious to swim to the surface, using one of the techniques we all learn in training, than to involve a buddy. However, one size does not fit all, and situations are many where it is possible that the diver with the problem, is with the buddy, and together they share air, and head to the surface. This is all regular stuff. Diver screws up, runs out of gas, and bails to the surface, buddy or not? Both divers theoretically learn something? Hopefully, they learn to not run out of gas, but either way they are back to diving in 30 feet of water.

Okay, what about diving to 100 feet? What about 200 feet? What about 300 feet? What about 500 feet? First of all, if you are making serious dives, they are naturally accompanied by decompression, the soft ceiling. Your decompression obligation prevents you from bolting to the surface. You commit to a controlled ascent. You assume that responsibility, you make that commitment.

My point all along has been, if for any reason you are going to run out of gas, with no other option than to go to your buddy, for life or death support, then you do not belong on that dive. You are diving beyond your experience, your education, your equipment, and your capabilities. If you need a buddy for bailout on a 200 foot dive, then 200 feet is too deep for you. Go back to 100 feet, learn to be a better diver, and come back when you have all the skills you need.

My opinion is that I would prefer to be a self reliant diver, at a depth and environment in which I am competent, than to extend the depth and severity of my dives by being dependent on another diver. It is not okay with me, for another diver to dive beyond their limitations, by adding additional risk to me and my dive.

Cheers

JC

---------- Post added February 14th, 2013 at 08:07 AM ----------

I have only one thing to say......what the heck is up with the "Jajajajajajajajaja"? Maybe the backstory would be a nice break for everybody from this thread.

Sorry, it is the Latin version of, "Hahahahaha"

¿Habla español, mi amigo?

Salud
 
I came into this fray a bit late. But, I am a bit surprised by the antagonism and outright hostility of some of the comments. I thought John's OP was very clear, and his comments were spot on. It wasn't - as was pretty clear in the OP and as he explicitly stated in a subsequent post - about buddy diving vs solo diving, it wasn't 'bashing' buddy diving, etc. It was about the mindset necessary for, and required of, any diver pursuing deep technical dives. One comment stood out: You need to have a personal survival plan for every eventuality, which does not involve some unknown dive buddy who may or may not be around in your time of need. I wish that concept was what was taught to more divers from the very beginning (I would say it is the epitome of self-rescue, which we do teach). Instead of focusing on that idea, people seemed to have picked up primarily on his comment about fighting for a regulator, and posed questions about what would he do if the OOA diver was his teenage son, etc. That is irrelevant. The original point was there should never be such a situation, if the mindset of each diver is a driven determination to be self reliant. I am with Jim Lapenta on this one. I think this was a great post, and something I will probably direct my OW students to in the future. Yes, it was about deep technical diving, not recreational diving. But, I see nothing wrong with using it as a discussion paper for recreational divers, new and not so new.
 
I have had the pleasure of diving with John on a couple of tech dives in Florida before I had to bail and come out here to Hawaii. I say "pleasure" because he joined our well established group and fit right in with no issues whatsoever. It was obvious from day one that he was well adept at fitting in with a long standing group/team of tech divers. As Jim pointed out, this article was written about technical diving. I find it interesting how quickly some put on open water spin on it and even some who have no technical training. As far as some new student going out and doing something "dangerous" because John Chatterton wrote something on a blog that some feel is dangerous.... I would say that person is more than likely incapable of thinking for themselves in the first place and has no business doing technical dives. I have a lot of respect for John, but I did notice that he puts his wetsuit on the same way I do.... one leg at a time. I guess the difference is, once his is on, he makes Gold Records. :) Dr. Lecter, I would love to get together and see some of the cool diving you are used to out here.... if we can set aside our different beliefs about the whole Cove 2 octopus thing. :)

no matter what kind of diving you are doing, you gotta have more cowbell!
 


---------- Post added February 14th, 2013 at 08:07 AM ----------



Sorry, it is the Latin version of, "Hahahahaha"

¿Habla español, mi amigo?

Salud

now you have stirred the pot more by saying something is Latin, in no time we will have latin experts in here telling you you are wrong about this too.

:popcorn:
 
now you have stirred the pot more by saying something is Latin, in no time we will have latin experts in here telling you you are wrong about this too.

:popcorn:

Good Lord! It's SPANISH not LATIN! Lol

It took my almost a year of my wife (Mexican) and all of her friends writing that on Facebook before I realized what the hell it meant. Lol
 
I came into this fray a bit late. But, I am a bit surprised by the antagonism and outright hostility of some of the comments. I thought John's OP was very clear, and his comments were spot on. It wasn't - as was pretty clear in the OP and as he explicitly stated in a subsequent post - about buddy diving vs solo diving, it wasn't 'bashing' buddy diving, etc. It was about the mindset necessary for, and required of, any diver pursuing deep technical dives. One comment stood out: You need to have a personal survival plan for every eventuality, which does not involve some unknown dive buddy who may or may not be around in your time of need. I wish that concept was what was taught to more divers from the very beginning (I would say it is the epitome of self-rescue, which we do teach). Instead of focusing on that idea, people seemed to have picked up primarily on his comment about fighting for a regulator, and posed questions about what would he do if the OOA diver was his teenage son, etc. That is irrelevant. The original point was there should never be such a situation, if the mindset of each diver is a driven determination to be self reliant. I am with Jim Lapenta on this one. I think this was a great post, and something I will probably direct my OW students to in the future. Yes, it was about deep technical diving, not recreational diving. But, I see nothing wrong with using it as a discussion paper for recreational divers, new and not so new.

You can't say there will NEVER be a situation where a tech diver can have a failure that they should have been able to have a solution for. In a wreck or cave environment, an overhead environment, there is always the possibility of and outside force intervening....part of a ceiling comes down, your 1st stage or valve is impacted so hard that it freeflows and much of your emergency gas is exhausted by the time you achieve a shut down....maybe someone is temporarily trapped, and by the time they are pulled out, gas is low. Whatever the cause, the buddy teams need to be ready to solve the problem. One reason we rarely would stay down on 280 foot dives, longer than 25 minutes, was so that IF there was an emergency, our deco obligations could be shortened without catastrophic consequences--in order to save an injured buddy....In diving and penetrating old wrecks, this does need to be a contingency.
There are people that you can count on...and there are people that will only be out for themselves. Your job is to figure out who is only out for themself, and make sure this person will not be your buddy on a tech or cave dive.
 
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Good Lord! It's SPANISH not LATIN! Lol

It took my almost a year of my wife (Mexican) and all of her friends writing that on Facebook before I realized what the hell it meant. Lol

I realized that after my second cup of coffee. . .
 
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Reactions: Jax
It has been a while since I have posted here, this discussion is one of the better ones I have seen. My diving experience is a bit out of order compared to the average diver. I first went into diving in the military and commercial before doing any recreational diving. When I first started recreational diving I had zero experience or training. I quickly started was is now called technical diving mostly due to having experience with mixed gas and CCR's that the "tech" divers were interested in, so they welcomed me, perhaps a little sooner, to dive with them. It was not until many years later that I started diving Caribbean reefs in tourist locations and having difficulty getting to dive because I was not certified as a recreational diver that I took my first OW course.
The reason for the long explanation is to explain that the "buddy system" of diving was completely foreign to me. I continued taking recreational classes to eventually become an instructor and a technical instructor. Through all of the training, diving, and a few years working in the recreational market I always struggled with the "buddy" concept. Having gained experience in real life emergencies and life threatening situations I learned that no one knows how they will react when it is a real situation until they are actual there. I have also learned that trying to guess or predict who will or will not act/react well when it really happens is virtually impossible. I have seen people with loads of training and experience preparing fail miserably by completely shutting down or even worse full blown panic. I have also seen those with minimal training and experience react as if they were hardened veterans. Training and preparation are one thing while real life is often another thing.
From recreational OW on we train people to rely on their "buddy" first and rely on themselves as the last resort, when in reality the person that has the emergency most likely has no idea how they will actually react much less how their "buddy" will. We could go on for pages with examples on both sides of the debate. I have experienced enough situations to be able to argue both sides as well. My belief is that the training structure sets people up to fail from the very beginning and that if not for the reliability and simplicity of diving we would have far more fatalities and injuries.
IMHO a better starting point is to teach self reliance, redundancy, and proper way to or not to assist from the very start of training. If we trained to solve issues ourselves and always be ready to lend assistance if capable the mental approach to diving would be vastly different and IMO be safer.
The debate on solo diving is a good example. I can not understand how anyone would do a dive with a "buddy" that they are not comfortable doing "solo". I often dive with "teammates" and because I still guide I also often dive with "buddies". There is a vast difference to me between a teammate and a buddy. Teammates have what many call a "solo" mentality. They plan, prepare, and execute dives considering resolving all failures and emergencies that they have on their own. They also plan, prepare, and execute dives to lend assistance, if needed, to their teammates or anyone else that may be in the water. This includes gas reserves and a long list of other things. Buddies on the other hand are unknown entities thus requiring more conservative planning on my part. Some teammates I know have experienced emergency situations and I can feel more comfortable with how they will react. Other teammates may not have that experience yet I know their mindset and approach towards diving. Either way I never rely on teammates or myself to react in a specific way. The reality is that our actions/reactions vary from day to day with more influences than we could ever hope to control. I have been in situations that I should have easily acted or reacted perfectly and have made mistakes because of improper preparation be it mental, physical, or whatever reason. The reality is that it will vary from day to day and dive to dive.
The goal of the dive dictates the level planning and preparation. A 40 foot reef, for my experience, requires about a minute of planning and preparation not much more time. A recreational dive past 500 feet can take a year or more with considerable time dedicated to planning and preparation. The more complex and difficult the dive the more likely that it will be solo. The simple reason for this is that complexity and difficulty is compounded when two people need to communicate, understand, and agree on a course of action. IMO any planning will include enough time to stop, breath, and think through emergencies or problems that arise. If the plan does not allow for that then it is too aggressive and most likely needs to be structured differently or not done at all.
Highly complex and difficult dives that require a team to perform also need to be geared towards self reliance from every member. Relying on a teammate to arrive with gas that is needed to complete a decompression obligation is not something that I am comfortable with. Planning on a teammate to take unneeded cylinders and lighten the load during decompression obligations, with contingency in case they are not there, is a better approach IMO. This is not a matter of lack of trust or belief in the teammates ability or dedication. It is an understanding that the best laid plans can go wrong and the more people that the plan depends on to work the more likely that a failure can and will occur.
If we taught this self reliant with the readiness to assist if possible frame work from the beginning we would not only have better divers from the beginning but also decrease the divide between "technical" and "OW" divers.
One last point that is important IMO is preparing for anyone in the water. It took a number of incidents for me to fully learn the importance of this. I will give only the final incident that firmly drilled it into my brain. My better half and I were in the Keys on vacation and had booked with an operator to do "technical" dives. His boat broke down and he had to transfer us to another operator that was doing "recreational" dives. I had my CCR, my wife had doubles, and it would have taken too much time to reconfigure for simple NDL dives as we were away from home carrying limited gear and this was last minute in the morning of the dive. So we jump on the other boat and head out to wreck in 90 feet of water. We have a nice dive on the wreck and head back up the line when we approached our time limit, well within NDL limits. I personally always do deep stops even when within NDL's, my wife does not preferring to do a slow ascent up to her safety stop. At 60 feet we parted ways as I clipped in with my John line to do my first deep stop while she continued on with her slow ascent. We both had redundancy and didn't even think twice about this when we planned the dive on the way out to the location. I had only clipped in with the John line to get off the up line so other divers could more easily go past me. A diver from another boat, on a single AL 80, neglected to watch his gas and ran out on the wreck. He ignored his buddy and started up the line he was closest to. In his rush to get to the surface, as he was quickly going hand over hand up the line, he wound up on my John line and pulled himself face to face with me and nowhere to go. In his panic to get gas he pulled my loop out of my mouth trying to breath off of it, which was not going to work. My first instinct, without thinking, was to shove my bailout into his mouth from the single AL 80 I had for redundancy. A few seconds after doing this it occurred to me that I had just given my only source of OC BO away with my loop above my head and quickly flooding. While all of this was taking place my wife and teammate, who was keeping an eye on me, started back down the line to lend assistance. In her words "it looked like one of those cartoons where you see a wad of bodies spinning around with an occasional arm or leg coming out". She quickly realized that she could only make the situation worse if she got near us and held back until the situation stabilized. Fortunately my CCR is rather flood tolerant and I had enough breath in my lungs to recover the loop and clear the water. The OOA diver was now connected to me on the hose from my BO cylinder and I was connected firmly to the up line with my John line because he was still putting every effort into swimming to the surface. After a few minutes we got him calmed down enough that we could determine his BT which had been considerable. I can't recall exactly how much decompression he had but I do remember that it was enough that he most likely would have been rather bent if he had made it to the surface. We got him through his deco stops and back up on the boat without further incident. While we were on the 10 foot stop our boats DM came to us asking if we needed assistance. This was rather fortunate on our part as the captain, not knowing what had taken place, was getting more and more pissed at my wife and I as each minute went by. I should mention that when we showed up on their boat the captain and DM were not happy with our gear and it took a lot of reassuring that we were there to only do a recreational dive. It even required a call back to our original operator and him vouching for us that we would not do a "technical" dive on their boat and hold up the other divers. When we finally surfaced and the DM had already informed the Captain of what was going on so he was no longer ticked off. Lesson learned always prepare for others in the water and for me to always have two sources of BO when on CCR.
 
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