Tony, I'd love to see if APitkin would join in as well. I don't know if he's even registered here, but I'm always interested in what he has to say about staying alive on a rebreather.
Ccr Diver From Ohio Died In Ginnie Springs Today...
- Thread starter The Chairman
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LiteHedded
Contributor
I think he would be in favor of it
I'm pretty sure everyone who reads this can help talk about staying alive on a rebreather.
It is the ones who can't respond that I would like to hear from. If only the dead would talk...
It is the ones who can't respond that I would like to hear from. If only the dead would talk...
scagrotto
Contributor
I suspect that quite often the last thing you "learn" is "I knew better than to do this."
Larry, I am wantonly stealing this sentence and using it every training opportunity I get.
OP
From a fairly reliable source: the autopsy apparently revealed that the diver died from a heart attack.
That's not entirely unexpected, given the diver's age, and the description of events.
It also isn't inconsistent with my own observations. Marci and I got in the water with the team of Optima divers, and I noted one of the divers was slower getting organized and looked a bit more stressed and took a notably more time to get geared up and ready than other diver. I chalked it up to being the first dive of a trip and/or being in a drysuit and maybe a little over worked after carting scooter, etc to the water.
It's hard to gauge however how much of that, if any, is abnormal, if you don't have a baseline to compare, as I have with Marci or myself, and I think that's an important aspect of diving with a regular team mate and getting to know each other's quirks, strengths and weaknesses very well. If either one of us is stressed at the start of a dive, the other will notice and we'll just kick back and relax until we're both comfortable, ready, and feeling fit for the dive. And if one of us just isn't in the game, we'll call a dive on the surface, or more often cancel the second dive during the surface interval.
As it turns out that was the diver who passed, and he'd already been diving a few days that trip.
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What a shame DA Aquamaster. 
Are you left wondering," if only I'd spoken to him"?
Are you left wondering," if only I'd spoken to him"?
What a shame DA Aquamaster.
Are you left wondering," if only I'd spoken to him"?
I've certainly thought about it though - as anyone would - but the answer is still "no".
Hind sight is always 20/20 and had I known he was going to have a heart attack in the cave, I would have certainly talked to him about thumbing the dive. But it was, and would have still remained, his decision whether to dive or not. As a diver you are always the last and final authority who has to determine if you are physically and mentally ready for a dive - or not.
He and his team mate were much more advanced in the dive prep process than we were, with his team mate already sitting on the bottom pre-breathing his Optima when we got in the run. At that point, this gentleman was putting on his fins, arranging his gear, and clipping on his scooter. He was also pre-breathing the unit by that time and I didn't have a chance to talk with him, and doing so would have meant interrupting his pre-breathe. Given that he had a hood, mask and BOV in the way I saw very little of his face the few times he was facing me. If I had seen him sweating profusely, looking ashen, etc, I would have probably asked if he felt ok, but I didn't observe that, and I have no indications that he felt anything out of the ordinary under the circumstances.
What got my attention was that he kept backing into me, and on casual observation he seemed a little disorganized and his body movements suggested he was perhaps tired and or a bit stressed. Given the time of day I assumed it was dive 2 for him so being a little tired wasn't all that odd for a gentleman of his apparent age.
Ironically, I fully expected him to have a similar run time as we planned for our dive and figured we could talk about rebreathers, where we were from, etc, when relaxing in the run after the dive. No one there expected a fatality. It's just one of those things that takes on more significance after the fact in light of the unforeseen events that transpire.
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I am sensitive to how divers look gearing in up in part because I had a technical diving buddy (who was an MD) about 10 years ago who'd get really stressed when dressing in drysuit, doubles, stages, deco bottle, etc, on a dive boat in hot weather. Once he was in the water and relaxed, he'd be fine, and it was understood in our group that we just didn't rush and commenced the dive when everyone was relaxed and ready to go. He was also a private pilot who kept passing 2nd and 3rd class medicals, and we'd fly in his twin for dives in the great lakes area. Eventually however he died of a massive first heart attack on a single tank, shallow, pretty fish night dive in the Bahamas with his girlfriend, so he obviously had an undiagnosed heart condition that developed at some point.
This gentleman was not demonstrating that level of stress, and as noted previously, at that point, and with no baseline for comparison, it seemed within the range of 'normal' for a dry suited diver in seasonably warm weather, who may just have been slower gearing up and/or a little slower getting organized due to a little "rust" since his last cave trip.
I'm also not super organized getting in the water on my first day or two back in the water after a couple months. The alternative in a situation like that would be to try to talk every middle aged or older diver I see out of doing a dive if they look a little warm in their dry suit, a little stressed after getting all their gear down to the run, or are acting in a manner that suggests they have to knock a little rust off early in a dive trip.
Personally, I'd be really annoyed at someone doing that to me and I'd get pretty unpopular in N FL pretty quickly if I did that to everyone else. Again, the decision to dive or not is a decision each diver has to make on his own and if a diver feels 'off' he or she needs to be the one to decide it's just not their day to dive.
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What an event like this does leave a middle aged diver wondering about are the risks that start to come into play as you continue to dive in a stage of life where the risk of heart attack and stroke are increased, and in an activity like cave diving where the occurrence of that kind of medical event is probably not going to be survivable. But on the other hand, no one gets out of life alive, and if I have to go of natural causes, I can't think of a more enjoyable time or place to do it - with due regard and apologies to the people who may bring my body out.
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