How often do you "Plan your dive, dive your plan"? Preliminary Survey Results

[AdivingBel]

I haven't planned a dive in years. Just got back from Little Cayman and last week the diving went like this,

1. The DM draws a map of the dive site on the white board and tells you what to look for.
2. The DM tells you to do a max of 110 ft. for 50 minutes (but you can pretty much do whatever you like)
3. You get your gear on and jump in.
4. Swim in one direction for about 20 to 25 minutes and turn and come back keeping a check on your air.

That's about it. There is nothing there I would call planning.

Most folks, when you talk about planning your dive, think back to when they got certified and you pulled out the tables and started doing some calculations etc. about how long you can stay at some depth and that sort of thing. Maybe now you could do that during a course using a dive computer. I don't know of a person or have ever seen a person on a boat use any sort of table or computer to go over their upcoming dive. I don't think I have even heard anyone discuss with a buddy what their "plan" is. For a lot of what I call typical recreational diving, I see no need to plan a dive.

Hmmm...that sounds very familiar...

Other than the dive briefing, I think I see more discussion (planning) among divers on the boat concerning the length of the SI after the first dive relative to the second dive as opposed to the dive itself. With warm water, trop diving this makes sense to me. I don't get the banging on rec divers over this. If I was diving cold or rough conditions or some other out of the shoebox scenario, I could see it. I get not everybody exclusively does "tidy bowl" diving, but I would think the percentage of those types of dives would be enough to skew the results (especially if you go outside Scubaboard for input).

 

[Lorenzoid]

I haven't planned a dive in years. Just got back from Little Cayman and last week the diving went like this,

1. The DM draws a map of the dive site on the white board and tells you what to look for.
2. The DM tells you to do a max of 110 ft. for 50 minutes (but you can pretty much do whatever you like)
3. You get your gear on and jump in.
4. Swim in one direction for about 20 to 25 minutes and turn and come back keeping a check on your air.

That's about it. There is nothing there I would call planning.

Most folks, when you talk about planning your dive, think back to when they got certified and you pulled out the tables and started doing some calculations etc. about how long you can stay at some depth and that sort of thing. Maybe now you could do that during a course using a dive computer. I don't know of a person or have ever seen a person on a boat use any sort of table or computer to go over their upcoming dive. I don't think I have even heard anyone discuss with a buddy what their "plan" is. For a lot of what I call typical recreational diving, I see no need to plan a dive.

So, when the DM is finished with the briefing and we're ready to splash, I take my dive computer and use the dive planning function to see whether the SI has been long enough at that point to do 110 feet for 50 minutes. Maybe it tells me I can only do 110 feet for 40 minutes, or whatever. I confer with my dive buddy about it. I consider that "dive planning." At least it's a sanity check against what the DM said and gives me an idea whether I might find myself having to ascend on the early side relative to others.

 

[scubadada]

Seems to confirm what accident statistics have proven over 30 years..... clueless, brainless divers run the most risk.......

R..

Or, has been illustrated, they mostly do dives that do not require much planning. Perhaps it's the exception dive that does require some planning that gets these individuals into trouble. Or, perhaps, if something unexpected goes wrong during a routine dive?

 

[boulderjohn]

So, when the DM is finished with the briefing and we're ready to splash, I take my dive computer and use the dive planning function to see whether the SI has been long enough at that point to do 110 feet for 50 minutes. Maybe it tells me I can only do 110 feet for 40 minutes, or whatever. I confer with my dive buddy about it. I consider that "dive planning." At least it's a sanity check against what the DM said and gives me an idea whether I might find myself having to ascend on the early side relative to others.

No surface interval of any length will allow you do to 110 feet for 50 minutes. If you want to stay at the maximum depth, it will be for a heck of a lot less time than that.

Now you are getting into some level of needed planning. In that case, my buddy and I would discuss how close we want to get to that maximum, and what plan we should follow in exploring that wreck. We will, of course, do the deepest part of our plan first and then work our way up. How complex the planning that is needed depends upon the complexity of the wreck. In some cases, you can see the entire wreck several times in 50 minutes. In other cases, you have to decide where to put your energy.

 

[Diver0001]

Or, has been illustrated, they mostly do dives that do not require much planning. Perhaps it's the exception dive that does require some planning that gets these individuals into trouble. Or, perhaps, if something unexpected goes wrong during a routine dive?

Maybe......

A few weeks ago I did a dive with my daughter in Italy. We were camping in an area where foreign tourists were rare. I found a dive shop that would take us out out with their regular dive....

They were really great. Seriously. They took us in to their usual "fold" we went diving with them and it was sincerely a great time......

However, during the descent it was pretty clear that that not everything went according to the book.... All the Italian divers went straight to the bottom and waited on their knees for the dive to start. The guide was the only diver who looked sorted in the water to me.

My daughter (who is OW certified) and I descended to a few meters above the bottom and stopped. She was trained by myself and my best friend and has been diving since she was 12. She had 5 "logged" dives but probably 50 dives of experience. I didn't certify her until she was 16 (yes, she had 4 years of training) but she's never seen anyone other than myself or my buddy diving. So this was new to her.

The instructor kept coming to her and "dragging" her the to bottom. I assume he thought that a newly certified diver would drift to the surface if they were not planted to the bottom. I let it go because I thought it was best that there was "one cook in the kitchen" but every time he let her go she came back to hover next to me......

We descended with the Italian divers and followed them around the dive site. At the end of the hour of watching most of them crawl around the site like crabs in tights, we surfaced.

On the drive home after the dive my daughter said to me that in the first 10 minutes of the dive she thought that that the other divers were having an emergency until she realized that they were just just having trouble with their buoyancy control...... I told her, "you were trained by me and Arthur". She said, "you mean this is common?".... I told her, "in some places this is the norm".

Point here being that some OW divers really know what they're doing..........

R..

 

[Lorenzoid]

No surface interval of any length will allow you do to 110 feet for 50 minutes. If you want to stay at the maximum depth, it will be for a heck of a lot less time than that.
. . .

Of course. I borrowed the numbers from BDSC's example. Regardless of the actual numbers, I compare what the dive briefing tells us to what the dive planning function of my computer tells me.

 

[bradells]

Originally Posted by boulderjohn
No surface interval of any length will allow you do to 110 feet for 50 minutes. If you want to stay at the maximum depth, it will be for a heck of a lot less time than that.
. . .
Of course. I borrowed the numbers from BDSC's example. Regardless of the actual numbers, I compare what the dive briefing tells us to what the dive planning function of my computer tells me.

And is handy to plan for an average depth ....


BRad

 

[RonixWarrior]

I wonder about the wording of question 1. I NEVER plan with my dive computer or slates really. As other posters say, many recreational divers choose similar, if not identical profiles dive after dive.
My buddy and I plan by picking a depth, and not exceeding it. We have nearly identical gas consumption, and dive familiar, and safe sites. Experience has taught us that we will run out of gas long before we hit any deco at these sites, and we always monitor our gas with a set turn around pressure, and gas remaining for the surface.
That being said, we will make a plan (table) if we are doing any abnormally deep or different site, then follow our computers during the dive. But that is rare.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

[guyharrisonphoto]

This is precisely why I asked the planning question multiple ways to tease the distinctions out. How often do you...

• plan with tables/dive planner
• plan with your computer
• plan with dive planning software
• use your experience to determine a general plan
• develop a specific dive plan with a buddy/other divers
• follow a plan given by a divemaster/dive guide
• follow a plan developed by a buddy/other divers
• simply follow the information on my computer during the dive itself

As mentioned, I'm sorting through it now, but on a quick look at the recreational divers who report that they NEVER or RARELY pre-plan their dives

• only 16% say they "Usually" or "Always" use their experience to develop a general plan
• only 24% say they "Usually or "Always" develop a specific dive plan with a buddy/other divers
• nearly 50% say they "Usually" or "Always" simply follow the information on their computer during the dive
• greater than 40% say they "Usually" or "Always" follow a dive plan provided by a divemaster/dive guide
• less than 20% say they "Usually" or "Always" follow a dive plan provided by a buddy/other divers

When it comes to relying on their experience to generate a plan, note that the mean number of dives per year in this group is 10-19 dives per year... so for the average diver here, we're not talking about the avid diver that does 50-100 dives per year on the same familiar sites. We're talking about the typical recreational diver that does a handful of dives on vacation once or twice a year.

It would appear that when it comes to dive planning... the majority of recreational divers are simply winging it or doing trust-me dives.

PS - note that less than 20% of all respondents came from ScubaBoard. Also note that the data above is only for the 1,512 respondents who report that they only do recreational diving.

I disagree with your assumption that divers following their computers are not "planning" or are "winging it". The simple fact is that a dive computer does "plan" your NDL, but merely makes the prediction in real time during the dive, with far greater precision than pre-dive assumptions based on square-profile tables. Following a dive computer's NDL is a perfectly fine "plan". It has the advantage of real-time tracking of complex multi-level profiles that, in the recreational NDL diving context are safe (reverse profiles, even moderate yo-yo profiles) as the computer algorighms take these into account.

Gas planning is a different story and more divers should be cognizant of that, I agree. However, the advent of AI computers, with the ability to trigger a warning to surface at pre-set reserves, is also "gas planning" and pretty good planning at that.

 

[boulderjohn]

Let me see if I understand what we seem to be saying.

Winging it: Two divers go on a dive to a wreck, planning to ascend when one of their computers gets within a few minutes of NDL or when one of them gets to an agreed upon gas pressure.

Careful planning by highly trained tech divers: Two divers drop off oxygen bottles at the mouth of a cave. They follow the mainline of a cave, planning to turn back to the exit when one of them gets to 1/3 of gas pressure. When they get to their oxygen bottles, they will do as much decompression at the end of their dives as their computers tell them to do.