Are you prepared?

[The Natural]

Be prepared!- Boy Scout Motto

Practice emergency situations, have redundancy in your emergency gear, know your buddy and your skills.

One thing I found this weekend while diving is to be able to USE all of your gear. I have a new knife and found that where I had located it makes it easy to pull out, but a pain in the butt to get back in the sheath. I know now I am going to make at least another run in the quarry and basically just practice removing and replacing all of my gear in various fashions.

 

[mac_diver]

Oceancurrent wrote:

"Note that about 45% of all victims had made 0 dives during the past 12 months! This is zero, nill, nich, zilch, none! Sad, very sad..."

This is interesting raw data. However, to be useful it should be adjusted to the number of divers in each grouping. Since there are more divers who are vacation divers that dive once a year, it makes sense that that group has the higher number of fatalities.

Just playing the devils advocate. I do believe that it is wise to dive often and practice emergency drills.

 

[oceancurrent]

This is interesting raw data. However, to be useful it should be adjusted to the number of divers in each grouping.

Good point, macdiver! Unfortunately, DAN only investigates and collects data on injured divers. I know that PADI collects data on divers using the PADI travel network, but I don't know if and how it is available. It would be interesting if one could compare normalized data from multiple sources.

While common sense implies that most of the DAN statistics comes from vacationing divers, many of which are diving sparodically, it is hard to believe that the DAN fatalities-experience chart only reflects the overal distribution of divers based on experience and is flat statistically. From my travels around the Caribbean, I am under the (very subjective) impression that there are roughly equal number of inexperienced and experienced vacationing divers. Also, here in New England, where most local divers are of the dedicated kind, we see that most fatalities did involve a rusty diver (at least over the past 6 years).

Overall, my feeling is that there is a disproportionate number of fatalities amongst the inexperienced divers group, altough the real numbers may not be as extreme as the DAN chart suggests. Of course, it would be interesting and useful if anybody could bring up some supporting/disproving statistics. I wonder if there are any DAN/PADI Research folks on this forum?