Student lost - Seattle, Washington

[Stratum0]

Well, re:standards discussion and ratios discussion.

Night is direct supervision for padi.
Regardless of all the ratios, the minute they could not see her, they were violating standards.

The fact that they got all the way to finishing the dive makes me think there might have been a significant amount of time that she was not under direct supervision.

 

[fisquid]

If the statistics show that modern OW training is not turning out divers that are going out and getting hurt (in any significant numbers), then why "should" OW training be changed to take longer and be more expensive?

I don't think we're talking about changing the OW training. Student divers will be inexperienced; nobody suggested that upping the OW requirements would solve that.

The question was, is 2:7 a good instructor:student ratio for an AOW night dive class? Yes, the students are OW certified, but that doesn't mean they're experienced. Nothing is stopping you from taking AOW class when you've only got twenty or thirty dives under your belt. You can take AOW and still be a relatively 'green' diver who makes novice mistakes like losing your buddy, allowing your buddy to lose you, no backup light... these are the kinds of things an instructor has to be there to catch during the class.

Of course it could've been a medical emergency. One which they failed to timely notice. Still points the same way. Failure to keep track of everyone in the group.

There's plenty to learn here. No single mistake could have done it. Several things had to go wrong, to achieve this outcome.

 

[RVBldr]

If she was out around the can buoy, that's around 40-50' so chances of seeing a light is probably not good, even with decent viz.

 

[davehicks]

See the light of a diver at 30+ feet in Puget Sound is pretty unlikely. Maybe if were we at maximum brightness and they pointed it straight up could you see it in full dark. But it does not get full dark until after 9pm. And by then any light would be burned down and likely sitting in the silt at this site.

 

[T Rex]

See the light of a diver at 30+ feet in Puget Sound is pretty unlikely. Maybe if were we at maximum brightness and they pointed it straight up could you see it in full dark. But it does not get full dark until after 9pm. And by then any light would be burned down and likely sitting in the silt at this site.

She was reported missing around 10p. It would have been full dark.

 

[DAJ]

To many unknown variables to make any conclusions at this time as to what happened and why. I have done several recoveries over the years that you thought would go a certain way and it turned out to be entirely different by the time the final investigation was concluded. All we know for sure is that a young lady has lost her life. Plenty of time for finger pointing and playing the blame game later after all those outside of this incident have had a chance to arm-chair quarterback this thing once the facts, or in some cases assumptions, have been made public. If nothing else, it serves as a stark reminder to take what you do in the water seriously and complacency can rear its ugly head and bite the best of us in the ass when we least expect it if we’re not careful.

 

[Ayisha]

That's because some of us think AOWs are a bit of a joke and the whole series of courses should be in the OW course, like it used to be.

Just as an FYI, the idea that a former OW class was divided in half to create OW and AOW is a common myth, but it is not true.

For PADI, it is true. My brother-in-law got certified through PADI in the 1980's over a 6 week period. When I took my AOW in 2002 and told him what my Adventure dives were, he was incredulous that we didn't fully learn them in O/W. He asked, "What do you mean, you're doing (Peak Performance) Buoyancy... U/W Navigation, Deep...Night? Didn't you learn all that in O/W? How can anyone be certified without learning these basic concepts?"

 

[azstinger11]

This seems like a good take home even if ultimately unrelated to this accident.

Its actually shockingly common to take a backup light out or remove it from your harness. Then try to turn it on. In a cave course the second you remove it while off you'll "drop it" and its lost for the remainder of your exit. Turn on the light first then deploy is the lesson there. Considering how often experienced cave course students mess that up until they learn the hard way, i can imagine AOW students making all kinds of mistakes in the dark trying to deploy a backup light.

I'm sure this is some level of technical diving suicide but i normally have a loop of bungee cord around my wrist (with effort it can clear my dry gloves/wrists but with a gentle tug won't) such that I can actually clip the bolt snap off of my backup light (or small other items) to it and if I drop them they stay more or less attached to me.

 

[DAJ]

Diving has changed a lot over the years. Use to be just divers and instructors for the most part. Now every part of diving has been broken down to increase the overall profitability of the industry. Why teach everything that was taught 40+ years ago in one certification when you can now break it into several certifications. I still just shake my head when I hear people say they are only basic certified so they can’t dive deeper than 60 feet or they need a separate class for navigation or diving at night. In some places, you go down 10-15 feet and it’s worse than night as you can’t see your gauges. I have been on many dives where you could not even see a dive light until it almost touched your mask. Oh well, embrace the changes or be buried by them. I just try to stay in my lane and not worry too much about how diving instruction has “evolved” over the years.

 

[azstinger11]

Lamont,

Just as an FYI, the idea that a former OW class was divided in half to create OW and AOW is a common myth, but it is not true.

In the mid 1960s, The Los Angeles County program was concerned that too many divers were quitting diving soon after certification, and they decided to create an advanced program that would focus on some additional skill but primarily introduce divers to different kinds of dive experiences through different kinds of dives in the hope of piquing their interest. NAUI, which grew out of the Los Angeles program, followed suit for the same reason.

You can find a full explanation in this history of NAUI: http://deepadventurescuba.net/assets/uploads/files/nauihistory.pdf

So while I am not a LA County instructor (i'm like 3/4 of the way, $*%&ing COVID, and stuck as an instructor candidate), that checks. I would say the standard LA County Open water diver does still receive longer/more training than a NAUI/PADI/SSI Open water diver, but the advanced diver program does go pretty far and beyond what a PADI AOW covers (as that's my only comparable, all i feel comfortable comparing again).