michael Friesen
Registered
Hey everyone, Just wanted to ask you if there is anything I can do to help future customers of a dive operation to stay alive.
I am in dominican republic and had one of the worst days of my life outside of my own country. All thanks to the dive operators I worked with yesterday (lots of factors I can talk about here). The most important factor which is the subject of this thread is pre-dive carbon monoxide poissoning and the safety issues of this organisation. The dive operation picked us up at a hotel with an old bus for a one hour drive, at first everything was ok (albeit no seatbelt, doors not opening and a broken speedometer), but 30 minutes in a huge plume of smoke started to come out the tail pipe and everytime the car stopped that smoke cloud moved forward and entered the cabin. The driver seem genuinely surprised about this and he did call his boss then and there, but kept on driving.
We get there and me and my familly started feeling dizzy, but we kept on going hoping some fresh air would help get us back into shape fo diving. so we get close to the boat which has its twin 175 hp 1980s (ish) engines running smoking up the whole place. including the air filling station not 10 meters away from the boat. we stay at port for 60 minutes while they cram over 90 people on a 40max catamaran with the smoke from the two engines entering the open space which is the cabin. by this point I felt sick with a headache and cancelled the dive for my whole familly.
Most of the other divers were clearly following a discovery course (btw they had one instructor (I imagine)/ 8 discovery divers). None of them probably know of the dangers of CO towards diving, and I talked with two groups who sayd that they received no information about diving (except: "put this in mouth, and breathe"). another group were OW with less then 20 dives each and say they were never asked what level they are in or how many dives there were.
Before they said that it is time to dive (and when I complained that it wasn't safe) there were no messages said to anyone on board and while I complained they were just saying "its safe, its safe, fine you no dive". No breafing was ever given prior to the dives of the others.
Anyway to help protect future customers of such companies as this?
I am in dominican republic and had one of the worst days of my life outside of my own country. All thanks to the dive operators I worked with yesterday (lots of factors I can talk about here). The most important factor which is the subject of this thread is pre-dive carbon monoxide poissoning and the safety issues of this organisation. The dive operation picked us up at a hotel with an old bus for a one hour drive, at first everything was ok (albeit no seatbelt, doors not opening and a broken speedometer), but 30 minutes in a huge plume of smoke started to come out the tail pipe and everytime the car stopped that smoke cloud moved forward and entered the cabin. The driver seem genuinely surprised about this and he did call his boss then and there, but kept on driving.
We get there and me and my familly started feeling dizzy, but we kept on going hoping some fresh air would help get us back into shape fo diving. so we get close to the boat which has its twin 175 hp 1980s (ish) engines running smoking up the whole place. including the air filling station not 10 meters away from the boat. we stay at port for 60 minutes while they cram over 90 people on a 40max catamaran with the smoke from the two engines entering the open space which is the cabin. by this point I felt sick with a headache and cancelled the dive for my whole familly.
Most of the other divers were clearly following a discovery course (btw they had one instructor (I imagine)/ 8 discovery divers). None of them probably know of the dangers of CO towards diving, and I talked with two groups who sayd that they received no information about diving (except: "put this in mouth, and breathe"). another group were OW with less then 20 dives each and say they were never asked what level they are in or how many dives there were.
Before they said that it is time to dive (and when I complained that it wasn't safe) there were no messages said to anyone on board and while I complained they were just saying "its safe, its safe, fine you no dive". No breafing was ever given prior to the dives of the others.
Anyway to help protect future customers of such companies as this?
