Bad vis. How bad is too bad?

[MXGratefulDiver]

I'm putting my hand up for those crying ridiculous. International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation recommended years ago that focus needs to be on compressions. No point in putting air (and potentially water) into the lungs if the blood isn't circulating. Get them to somewhere you can actually accomplish something worthwhile!

IMHO there is no excuse for the dive industry to stay in the dark ages with something this vital to the well being of divers!

FWIW - NAUI's been teaching this for about three years now.

Getting back to the original topic ... I almost called our dive today because of the vis. Thursday night is when I get together with a group of friends to go play with our scooters. We have a "regular" route that takes us visiting several octopus dens ... some on eggs. We geared up last night and dropped down into what looked like diluted coffee ... heavy runoff from 30 out of the last 34 days of rainfall. I couldn't even see the nose of my scooter it was so thick. We popped back up, talked about it, and decided to surface scooter out to deeper water and drop down. If it was this bad at 40 feet, we'd call the dive and go grab a beer somewhere.

Fortunately, at 40 feet the vis opened up to the point where we could at least see our dive buddy. At 60 feet, it started opening up enough to relax and enjoy the dive.

We skipped the "shallow" part of our usual tour ... opting instead to scooter back to the boundary rope at a 50-foot depth, clip off the scoots, and do a slow kick back to shore, following the rope. At 10 feet I couldn't even see my buddy's light ... much less my buddy. We were in touch contact at that point until we surfaced.

Weather report for today calls for more rain ... I think I'm gonna start working on an ark ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)