Walter once bubbled...
"Keeping track of morons is part of the job."
It most certainly is not!
It's attitudes like this that promote the lack of decent standards championed by some agencies. "They may not know what they're doing, but a DM will baby sit them on all their dives." That's a dangerous attitude and it gets people killed.
I agree with Walter. A dive professional has his limits. Our DM in Provo had no problem with saying that if you go over the wall with bad buoyancy and start dropping to 6K ft (which he wrote on the white board that he did his dive briefings on), it was C'Ya. He would be waiting at a safe depth for you. He had a family to come home to at night.
If a CERTIFIED diver chooses to deliberately slip away from the group and put the would be rescuer at risk, that is the CERTIFIED diver's responsibility at some point. This is a reason that we put divers through certification classes. If this guy went out, bought a boat, and did it on his own, he would be just as dead. This is one reason why many of our wreck charters will not provide DM's. I have read a statement by a boat captain that I agree with. The effect of it is that if a diver chooses to ignore safety rules and the safety briefing once they are in the water, you can't stop him from doing so.
The other course of action would be to station a DM at some depth to catch divers who wanted to drop below him/her before the individual got down that deep. But again, at what point does the responibility end for the diver himself? When do we quit treating certified divers as children. This is obviously in flagrant disregard for safe diving practices and should be noted as such.
Descending down to where I need an unplanned amount of deco would be nearly as irresponsible on my part as my certification agency does not teach staged decompression diving at all. I doubt that most DM's are taught that kind of gas management as DM's. And if they are, as Mike F. says, it is definitely a bad risk to go that deep on a single eighty and the DM would know it. I am glad that things worked out, but they easily could have been worse.
Another point, many experienced divers (again in Provo) with cameras actually wanted to see the reef. It is very difficult for everybody to see everything when they are huddled in a huge group. This included myself. I was outside the view of the DM much of the dive while I was waiting for a fish to come out and give me a good picture. Our LDS owner (with many moons of diving) saw the DM during the dive twice, just prior to getting into the water and during the safety stop. Most of our divers from Michigan followed the same schedule. If we would have done something really stupid, we were on our own!
I dive Nitrox most of the time, so following him down would have been impossible for me without a serious risk of oxygen toxicity (which is a risk for straight air as well at that depth). I would have taken a course similar to Mike F.'s suggested course and tried to prep the boat for an emergency while hanging tanks down to do the decompression stops. And if the !@!!@#! moron would have made it back in one piece, he would not have been getting in the water again on my watch. If I would have let him back in, then I would have been deficient in my dive leadership. This guy has already proven that he is wild card. He would not do it again on my time, ever!
As far as I'm concerned, if someone wants to intentionally put their life at risk in this way, the phrase to cover that is "I am so sorry for your loss, Mr./Mrs. _______."
