Cave diver drowns - Jackson Blue Springs, Florida

[billgraham]

What stuck with me was something that @rddvet said about transitioning to CCR, he said he spent a year working his way back up to the same level of diving as he did when he was OC.

This is solid logic, and it actually took me longer than a year.

 

[Whitrzac]

Oh look, another rant on how somehow years since certified = experience and being a better diver.

I know a lot more people that have been certified cave divers for years and still suck, or only dive a couple times a year and are always rusty/forgetful.

How many cave dives did they have? Where they 5 a year vacation divers or where they in the springs every weekend?

 

[tursiops]

Oh look, another rant on how somehow years since certified = experience and being a better diver.

Sure, years are not enough. But years are a necessary condition, just not a sufficient condition.

 

[KevinNM]

Sure, years are not enough. But years are a necessary condition, just not a sufficient condition.

I suspect it’s somewhat like flying. If you spend >99% of the time watching your airliner fly on autopilot across the Pacific and auto-land, the fact that you have done this for 12,000 hours might not provide you with the skills, experience and judgment you need when things get ‘interesting’.

 

[DOBY]

Oh look, another rant on how somehow years since certified = experience and being a better diver.

I know a lot more people that have been certified cave divers for years and still suck, or only dive a couple times a year and are always rusty/forgetful.

How many cave dives did they have? Where they 5 a year vacation divers or were they in the springs every weekend?

No one is that how long somebody’s been certified is the only thing that matters. How many, and how frequently also matter. Just saying it’s best to take it slow, gain some experience, and have a few recoverable issues; before advancing to more complicated dives, is all.

 

[Manatee Diver]

Yup. Why is the question.

Unfortunately it is too late to ask. A good investigator could probably dig up evidence to guess at a conclusion by interviewing people that they have dove with. But that is an expensive time consuming process.

 

[berndo]

I don't know what the flow in JB is like right now, but too often people overestimate their exit speed in high flow caves because "oh this cave can't be blown out". This is a screen grab from @Dive-aholic around the 2nd breakdown in JB. Ginnie is more than capable of doing the same. I don't know their intended dive plan for max penetration or what his SAC rate was for bailout, so can't comment on whether it was enough or not.

I don't know where they were, so there is that, but 85s sound reasonable to me in that range. I've kicked to the 2nd T a few times on 85s OC and was out with about half full tanks.
The picture doesn't look that bad.

Oh look, another rant on how somehow years since certified = experience and being a better diver.

I know a lot more people that have been certified cave divers for years and still suck, or only dive a couple times a year and are always rusty/forgetful.

How many cave dives did they have? Where they 5 a year vacation divers or where they in the springs every weekend?

Not saying you're wrong but I see a lot of non-local-to-caves people that do rush through the levels... they do 2 or 3 trips and than jump to stage/dpv/ccr and don't really dive on one level to get good but rush to the next, while not even really diving at home regularly or having a backround with lots of dives.
This 'just do the minimum and do the next class' is definitely a thing. Not saying this was the case here but I'm surprised we don't have more accidents. Especially considering how hard ccr is sold to newish divers in recent years. I think it's not only the number of cave dives but also the number of total dives that matter. And I think years matter too. You can't get in that many hours in a few years if your not a local and have a job.
When I hear people only dive on vacation and dive caves it's scary but people still do it.

 

[runsongas]

@John the Pom that is all well in good in an environment where you can control things, but its inherently not practical in some cases. confined space, hypoxic environment entry is pretty much verboten at work such that the approach to either remove the confinement or make the atmosphere breathable. but drilling out a restriction in an underwater cave or draining the cave so it is no longer flooded are generally not really options like it can be for a storage tank or cooling pool.

 

[Manatee Diver]

Might be certified, but not experienced enough to be doing the dives some are doing right away after certification.

Someone also point that out too. Just because you are certified for 100m, and even did one in class doesn't mean that you should jump right in and do 100m dives immediately after class. As the instructor was always there as a guardian angel to make sure that you didn't get too far over your head.

Oh look, another rant on how somehow years since certified = experience and being a better diver.

I know a lot more people that have been certified cave divers for years and still suck, or only dive a couple times a year and are always rusty/forgetful.

How many cave dives did they have? Where they 5 a year vacation divers or where they in the springs every weekend?

As a "local" I can acknowledge there is a huge experience gulf between a year of cave diving as a local vs a tourist cave diver. Even for a local doing 40+ cave dives a year that seems pretty aggressive. And I am saying this as someone that was only a diver for two years before completing full cave.

 

[tbone1004]

I do not believe that number of years or number of dives since crossing over to SMCCR are relevant to this. Neither diver had sufficient SIDEMOUNT training to be going through this passage. There is a monumentally large gap between divers that dive in a sidemount configuration and those that are truly sidemount divers. Neither of these divers were even remotely qualified to be in a passage anywhere near that small regardless of their configuration, sure they both had full cave but neither of them were trained in true sidemount restrictions and it unfortunately showed today. I don't know if it's because the discussions about progressive penetration seem to only apply to length of passage vs. size of a restriction, if it's because we don't really talk about really tiny stuff, if it's because the surviving buddy was roughly the size of the deceased's left thigh and didn't have the experience to know that he wasn't going to fit, or what the real issue was but neither of them was even remotely close to being qualified to go through a restriction that small.
Let's try to keep this discussion around what made them think that going in that passage was a good idea to begin with because that's the root cause of this fatality and while it may not be entirely related to their general lack of years or number of dives, it has a lot to do with what was put in their heads that made them think they were ready to attempt something like that. I can guarantee you they didn't go through anything remotely like that in any class tied to any certification card they have. Those classes exist, they would not have been let into those classes yet.