Are you not fully reading posts or are you just trying to argue?
I have to admit it is very difficult when the posts are as extremely long winded and circuitous as this one.
From a TOS standpoint personal attacks, even attacking someone's credentials are prohibited. You can inquire and question them, but you better pull up short of "attacking" them. That attitude is what turns boards into howler monkey pens.
So what you are doing is threatening to have people disciplined when they point out that the depth of your knowledge on a subject is shallow? But you can still call other SB members jerks with impunity because you have SB Staff next to your name? Bravo.
To repeat myself, I have Cavern and Intro to Cave certs, I am completing a full cave course this January, but without the pretention of thinking that I will then know it all whether I pass or not. Based on comments from instructors and other cave divers with Full Cave certs, I am confident that I am ready for Full Cave and I am aware there is no guarentee of passing. On the other hand if I suspected I would not pass, I'd put it off until I and other felt I was ready. Knowledge of your limitations is a healthy attitude that I have found comes with age and experience along with the willingness to engage in critical thinking.
Well I am glad that this is your attitude. I am tired of reading all these people who post "I'm flying down and will have cavern/intro/cave done in 2 weeks!" like the certification is assured.
That cave training is in addition to 20 years of diving experience and about 10 years of technical diving in doubles and extensive deco experience. I am one of those odd individuals who think full cave should not be completed without prior or at least concurrent deco training, based mostly on doing deco diving when many of the younger divers I encounter were still in training pants. The older I get them more I value experience and the more I appreciate God's grace in letting me survive the hubris and immaturity of youth.
I am glad to hear you survived a decade of deep air diving (You are not certified to dive trimix so I can only assume that that is how you are getting into any kind of deco obligation in OW) but that has nothing to do with cave diving or your experience with regard to issues surrounding cave diving.
I agree with you that no amount of prior OW experience can prepare you for cave diving, but there are real benefits to having solid dive experience and technical diving training before you engage in cave training. The zero to hero approach to cave diving is fraught with peril and no amount of cave training can instill brains, common sense or maturity - that comes from within the diver - especially in what is often an ego driven and, to the outsider, often viewed as an elitist sport populated by chest pounding primadonnas.
I am not disputing any of this, and I have no idea why you are bringing zero-to-hero into this.
Trying to resolve the problem of unthinking or irresponsible divers by giving them a rigid "just say no" response unfortunately does not work - especially when it comes from someone who may be correctly or incorrectly viewed as an elitist primadonna by the person receiving the "NO".
I do not want to expand this to places other than the Ginnie ballroom, Bonne Terre and the Chadelier cave the OP asked about, so lets not bring in other "easy" caverns, for there really are potential dangers in that type of generalization. But to use your own Ginnie Ballroom example, the diver will be told "NO", but will see other OW divers diving Ginnie Ballroom, and conclude two things:
1. Other OW divers are doing it and many of them suck more than me, therefore it must be safe for me to do it (it is potentially an ad populum logical fallacy as everyone doing it does not in and of itself make it safe, but it appears to be a valid argument to the average person). And more alarmingly;
2. The guy(s) who told me "NO" are full of crap/elitist a$$holes/etc, and obviously have questionable credibility as they are overstating what is obviously a minimal threat. (This assumption of the minimalness of the thread gets made when the person lacks other more substantial information to help them make a better decision as they simply don't know enough to know what they don't know.)
Those conclusions are followed in short order with a rationalization that their skills are indeed good enough for the ballroom, and after diving the ballroom, and most importantly, failing to see the differences between Ginnie Ballroom and other caverns or caves because no one explained it to them (after all WE, the cave commuity, lump them all in the same "just say no" category) they go to wayne's world and die.
The cave community has spent decades trying to spread the message that if you were going to do this kind of diving be trained for it. A cavern course is economical and I have never heard of anyone regretting the money spent on it. It is important to have a consistent message. It is never OK to tell people that "this is an overhead environment but you probably wont die if you dive this particular place so it is OK". That is violating Rule #1 of accident analysis, be trained for the diving you do. Once you start people off on the assumption that there are exceptions to the rules thats when you get people using unsafe gas planning, not running guidelines, etc.
It is a safe bet that the two divers who recently drowned there both heard the "no OW training can prepare you..blah blah blah" line numerous times and heard it pretty much the way I just typed it, despite the best intentions of those saying it. Hell, one of them even said it himself on the deco stop while posing as a cave diver, so I know he understood the words even if he had not internalized the implications of the statement.
Yeah these guys thought they had it all figured out. They had all the gear, read everything on the internet, and thought the dives they were doing were no big deal. One of them had a lot of open water certifications, but apparently they did not help him in the situation he found himself in.
Based on a 20 year career working with people in legal, counseling and higher education settings, I have become a firm believer in fully informed consent. It is not ethical to simply tell a person they cannot do something. To do so and believe that will work is incredibly ignorant and assumes that everyone adheres to soley authoritarian arguments. That is just not the case. It is far better, far more effective and consequently far more ethical to provide a person with the information they need to fully understand what they are contemplating and to be able to fully assess their training and abilities in comparision to the demands of the activity. That is what the OP got in this thread, so don't misrepresent that as permission to go overhead diving where ever a person pleases without proper certs.
An informed consent approach requires that you have faith that most people given all the information will make the right decision. That is not always the case as there indeed people who are lacking judgment are excessively ego driven or are just polain stupid, but in those cases where they will make the wrong decision, they'd have ignored a "NO" anyway. That is preferrable to trying to protect people by saying "NO" and restricting them from the information they need to make their own decision.
What the OP got in this thread was a bunch of excuses from people with little or no cave training as to why diving in this cave was no problem. This is the problem with these forums. If someone posts in the CAVE DIVING forum on scubaboard the only people who should be giving advice are people who have backgrounds in CAVE DIVING. A CAVE DIVER points this out and you call him a jerk.
I don't hang out on the wreck diving forum and give people bad advice, I don't hang out on the DIR forum and tell them they need to put button gauges on their stage bottles. That's because I don't have any wreck training or experience and do not have any GUE training and only have limited experience based on talking with GUE divers and reading material. It makes you look like an idiot when you talk about something you have very little knowledge of
In your post to me are many veiled and not so veiled insults. Because I have not been decompression diving in open water as long as you, havent survived as many trips around the sun as you, I have the hubris of youth? Give me a break. You are further suggesting I am a "chest pounding primadonna". You are the one who has to tell everyone how many years he has been doing this and that in open water and how he is going to take this class and that class. I don't talk about my diving and how long I have been doing it online because I don't have to. I have the benefit of being right.
The most important thing in cave diving is when you start out, take the cotton out of your ears and put it in your mouth.
