beester
Contributor
Hi all,
I can answer some of the questions about our diving, but I don't do the tech diving so I'll have to get someone else to answer the technical questions.
Our Over the Wall dive has been one of our signature dives for 50 years. We descend over the Tongue of the Ocean and sit on a ledge at 185 feet. From the time we leave 20 ft until the time we have to LEAVE 185 and start ascending we have 5 minutes. The rest of the dive is spent at 55 or so. The total dive time is 18 minutes and when time correctly, is a no deco dive. It's led by a team of divemasters and we control time and depth. Like I said in the Spiegel thread, I've been doing this dive for two years and have never had an OOG situation.
As far as Church Windows (225ft) and some of the inland blue holes, they do dive on AL80s but they carry extra gas and have stage bottles.
The deeper dives and cave dives are done on a case by case basis after spending time with divers to evaluate their skills.
Whoever recommended Brian Kakuk for caving was right on. He's a friend of Small Hope's and dives our caves here. We've got an awesome cave survey that he did of one of our Blue Holes on the wall in the Lodge.
If you're a diver that like to stay within recreational limits, we've got plenty of great dives for that too! Over 60 dive sites within 15 minutes and only a few are below recreational limits.
Dear divebunny. I have to congratulate you on stating the facts and giving your honest opinion. Since you are a PADI instructor with more then 500 dives under your belt and have been a member of this board for some time I'm sure you are aware that your remarks or the way the dive op you work for organises certain dives will rubb alot of people (DIR, CAVE, TECH divers) the wrong way.
I'm not a cave diver so I'm not going to remark on that. I do have some experience with diving in the 130-160 foot range so I would like to ask you some questions on the 185 bounce dive.
- Can every C-card holder join (I assume PADI AOW with deep specialty)?
- Do participants have to show some experience diving deep on air?
- Do participants have to proof that they've dived recently and are fully capable to control their buyancy?
- Are divemasters-Instructors diving bigger tanks?
- Are buddies paired up as you go (without any previous experience diving together)?
- Is there someone diving redundant gear (doubles?)
- Do you make a gas plan? Do your customers do?
- Do you know what kind of reserve you need to get someone back up in case of failure?
- What's normally the group number and the divemaster to participant ratio?
- Is this a trust me dive?
- You understand that perception of narcosis can be different than your real decrease in mental bandwith?
- You understand that narcosis can change entirely from one dive to the other. There are just too many variables (slept wel, caffeine, CO² build up, taskloading, etc)
-What would you do in following scenario. You drop over the ledge at 20 feet and drop down to 185 feet (about a 2 - 3 min drop). So you have a 2 to 3 min NDL at that depth. You are looking at one of your customes signaling something to you... in the meanwhile another customer who is dropping a bit more gets really narced... he think he sees something below and while pointing at it starts finning down. You notice him dropping down only 5 secs later when he's already 30 feet below you. What do you do?
Do you go after him or think to yourself... he's a gonner. Ok so you go after him... you catch up at 230 feet. At this depth this guy thinks he's a fish and looks at you fully at ease with the world, he's in awe, the drums are beating in his ear, he's nice and cozy warm, but he doesn't understand why you are motioning alot of stuff at him... just relaaaaaxeeee.... so you grab his BCD and start finning up...
I've done some rescues from 130 feet up to 30 feet as an excercise for the AI curiculum. Both neutral, the other one behaving unresponsive. I was diving double 10L tanks (double 72cft), boy by the time I had lifted him up, started the ascend and had arrested the ascend at 30 feet that manometer showed less than 100 bar (1500 psi). That's with 60 extra cft.
I've also seen someone behave erratic at 150 feet, doing crazy stuff (entering a wreck when the plan clearly stated no entry). By the time you finally get through or manage to grab him you've lost valuable time.
So basically... I understand that the old hands at your diveshop (probably the owners) have been doing it like this for 40 years... but you as an experienced instructor should know better, don't you think?
holy shenanigans
