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Liability is easy to deal with. You just buy insurance, pay your premiums, and dump most of the problems on the insurance company if you get sued. The problem here is that a diver has been criminally charged with (as near as I can figure) not being good enough to solve problems he's not...

First, get out of San Diego and find a place with clear, warm water. My wife took a while to get around to night diving, and I'm not really sure what got her to finally do it. We probably did some night snorkeling first, in a fairly benign place, but I really don't remember. Small chance it was...

Are you doing multiple dives on successive days, and do you have decent gas consumption? Are you one of those people who thinks there's an equivalent ascent rate to go along with equivalent air depth? There's not. How you got the N2 load you have has absolutely nothing to do with the physics...

I think it's just Sandals management doing their best to limit the number of people they have to take diving. I went to Sandals Ocho Rios a long time ago, and before I was certified. The swim test to take the resort course required people to swim 3 laps around the perimeter of a freshwater pool...

You think nobody has ever done that while sober? Both constant ballast and variable weight freedivers use weights in order to descend faster, in order to get deeper in a given amount of time. The same strategy will work for a weekend boater who wants to recover an anchor line. The difference is...

I know that you know the lungs contain millions of alveoli, and aren't at all like a pair of balloons. Just because your lungs are "only" 60% full doesn't mean that every single alveolus is only 60% full; there's always going to be some variation in how full individual alveoli are. Not that I...

Yet another poster who never met her, but I usually found her posts helpful and informative, and I'm very sorry to hear the news. I know none of us is immune, but if I made a list of just a few posters I wouldn't expect this to happen to based on reading their posts she'd be on the list.

So you're okay with a cave dive as long as it's at 100' and described as a "swim through"? Because the impression I'm getting from the descriptions in the thread is that Devil's Throat is a lot more than a typical swim through. Based on that, it seems to me that the DM should offer a clear and...

I thought there was a report earlier in the thread saying that the Coast Guard "recovered the body". I assumed that meant it was recovered by pulling the line, but I'm sure I haven't seen anything that offered specifics. The only thing I can find with a Google News search is the article quoted...

It should be clear that I was was addressing chilly's question, which asked about damage. The original story makes it clear that the pads aren't damaged at pressures of nearly 6ATA. The abstract I linked offers another example showing that they work perfectly (or too) well at increased...

AFAIK, there's nothing in them that would be damaged by reasonable pressures, and this incident certainly indicates that they work just fine at nearly 6 ATA. Here's an abstract from a study that exposed some to 3ATA and 95% O2 (conditions that could be encountered in a hyperbaric chamber). They...

That reaction is what is sometimes known as "combustion", and exposing them to higher concentrations of O2 or higher pressures is just like adding O2 to any other fire. It's certainly easily predictable, but only obvious if you have at least a basic grasp of how the heat is produced and bother...

If you think that's sad, how do you feel knowing that people from your town have an average of only one testicle? Knowing that all of the respondents to that part of the survey only do recreational diving is probably as useful in evaluating the significance of the raw statistics as knowing that...

I'm inclined to think that's the same part of you that wants to buy bridges, help Nigerian princes get their money out of Nigeria, and pay the fees and taxes required to collect that prize from the lottery you don't remember entering. Kind of like Phillip Morris wouldn't leave themselves open...

When you read do you only learn that bad things can, and do, happen, or are you learning how/why they happen and how to prevent them from happening to you? Experience is a very good teacher, and you can often learn more from bad experiences than from good experiences. Luckily, the bad...

I'm inclined to think that any diver who has enough gas should make a safety stop. Similarly, they should make a slow and controlled ascent to the safety stop. If you can do it any panic you experienced is almost certainly under control. I'd suggest that just doing a dive and paying attention...

That's part of the point I was making. Guinness is the de facto arbiter of world records, at least as they appeal to the general public, but there are other bodies that keep official records and other ways to become famous. If Garman had been successful I doubt that many people outside the world...

Do you suppose Sheck Exley would still be famous, at least within the diving community, if Guinness had never started keeping records?

There's a distinction between learning something because of an incident and learning something from the incident. Dr Garman's death has resulted in some people being exposed to information that's new to them, but as near as I can tell his death hasn't resulted in any new information becoming...

And there's the root of the problem. We've got far too many laws prohibiting people from doing things not because they cause actual harm to somebody else, but because other people think that it somehow harms them or, even worse, because they're offended or just don't approve. If we could all...