Dangerous psychology- Diving beyond one's training

[MXGratefulDiver]

I am saying that the theoretical education of planning a dive is easily acquired without an instructor. I am saying that any person, with a little motivation, can educate themselves well enough to do risk assessment, for themselves, on any dive available to do anywhere in the world. It is up to the individual to then decide whether or not that is a dive they want to do given their current skill set. Risk assessment is what all of this boils down to and no one can decide someone else's risk tolerance. Plain and simple, no matter how much we say "get more training" there will always be individuals who will push well beyond the limits of their training. Many will survive, by luck. Some will survive, by skill. Some will die, arguably also by luck, but I think most of us would agree more by being foolish.

In order to do risk assessment you must first be able to contemplate the risks associated with a given dive, and then imagine what you could do to either avoid those risks or deal with them. Even experienced divers don't always do a good job of this, and sometimes end up having what we call "I'll never do that again" moments. I think most divers have had those. But we'll have to disagree on your second statement. I'm a reasonably intelligent person, well educated and experienced in diving ... and there are many, MANY dives in the world I would not consider myself qualified to do a risk assessment for. Essentially any dive environment I've never been exposed to. "Get more training" isn't always the best way to remediate the risks ... often it's a matter of doing those dives with someone who has the requisite exposure and experience to help you prepare. But there's more to it than you can get by reading.

Risk tolerance certainly varies by individual. But one thing to keep in mind is that when you dive with individuals who have a high tolerance to risk, it's not just themselves that are being exposed to those high tolerances ... it's also the people they're diving with, as well as anyone who might be compelled to intervene should that high-tolerance person find themselves in a situation they can't get themselves out of.

My point was that those decisions and level of information isn't the education I was referring to learning on your own, though I believe a lot of it can be with just more diving under your belt.

We're in complete agreement ... classes don't teach you how to dive, they teach you how to learn diving. The real classroom is the water.

I have taken PADI OW and TDI Basic Nitrox. I think I have 27 dives now. I'm slowly ticking off the things I think will get me to where I can do the dives I want to do with any boat out there. I've done a few dives down to 85-90 feet. I've done a dozen more in the 60-70 foot range. Most of my dives are in the 40-60 foot range. I can safely perform a CESA from 90 feet, I've practiced it. I've done a dozen or so night dives, I've done surf entries, boat entries, drift dives, now a couple dry dives, cold water dives, warm water dives, and had a camera on almost every dive to this point. I have had several "emergencies" (as folks here often consider them) that I dealt with just fine, generally on my own. I've never panicked and I've dealt with these "emergencies" because of previous "stress management" (What TStormdiver quoted as ' Essentially summed up in Sheck Exley's quotation, "Survival depends on being able to suppress anxiety and replace it with calm, clear, quick and correct reasoning..." ' ) training I've had in various other activities I've participated in over the last 20 years. Am I qualified to do the Andrea Doria? No. Any cave, anywhere? No. Could I plan those dives on paper? Absolutely, given a week or two of time to do research and get a little book learnin'. Would I then go and do those dives? Not on your life, let alone mine. But that has to do, as I've said before, with my own risk tolerance. Nothing more, nothing less. The research I could do in a couple of weeks time would realistically make me all too aware of what the real risks are- even the ones I don't know of at this moment.

You had me right up till that last statement ... research might make you aware of some risks ... the most common ones. But it will in no way prepare you for comprehending how they feel or test your ability to deal with them ... for that you need to add water. All diving is situational. The more aggressive your diving becomes, the more important it is to have developed your skills to a "craft" level that allows you to think, anticipate, and respond on the fly. You won't get this by reading about it.

Someone made a suggestion that I put my money where my mouth is and make a comparison of what I think I know before a class versus what I know after the class. I plan to do that, if I remember, after whatever class I take next. Right now I have no courses on the horizon but I think it would be a great way see if I know what I think I know.

This will work if you take a course that challenges you ... rather than one that simply steps you through a progression of skills that are designed to be easy. GUE Fundamentals is one such course, although there are others that may suffice. In my AOW class, the final dive is intended to do just that. After spending the entire class working on achieving good buoyancy control, trim, buddy awareness, and navigational skills, the students are asked to do a dive where they follow prescribed navigational patterns midwater ... where they can't see the bottom. One student gets the compass, the other the dive computer ... and they must work together to swim a pattern while maintaining a constant depth of 20 feet.

The purpose of the dive isn't navigation ... it isn't even buoyancy control ... it's about recognizing your limitations by attempting a dive that's designed to be difficult. Most students come out of the initial attempt with long faces. But the value of the exercise becomes apparent in subsequent attempts, as the students begin ... through experience ... to comprehend the things I told them to pay attention to prior to the dive. By the time they've made a few attempts, they've not only developed a better understanding of the sort of difficulties they can get themselves into ... they've also developed better techniques for dealing with them. But nothing I can say or they can read will prepare them for learning those things ... it comes by doing. And in the process, they begin to know what they don't know. That's really the point.

I understand the concept of "you don't know what you don't know" and I actually tend to believe it. I just think it's abused in threads like this when someone asks a question or suggests something a bit askew of the bell-curve of what most of us find acceptable progression. You see it in every "Should I solo dive" thread there is and your article sums up the decision tree fairly well, I believe. In the end, each individual must make the choice and the diving community as a whole hopes for the best outcome.

Once again we're in agreement about the choices people make. I solo dive a lot ... and yet I never took a solo class. But I learned and developed the requisite skills by applying what I learned in other classes ... or simply through my experiences of diving with others in the more than 1800 dives I'd done before going solo.

And yet, even today ... with hundreds of solo dives ... I still find myself sometimes taken by surprise, in circumstances I hadn't before experienced. Diving's like that ... situational ... and no matter how much you know there will always be something that you haven't experienced or thought about. The key to risk management at that point is to have developed a robust set of tools you can call upon as the situation demands and apply to the particular circumstances you find yourself in.

That's what newer divers lack ... the tools, and the craft to apply them in ways that go beyond what they were taught. You don't get those tools by reading ... you get them by diving.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[p1p]

Let me give an example. In OW/AOW, you are taught if you loose air, you signal to your buddy and reg swap. Ok, all well and good. In a technical dive, its all different.

Case in point, I'm on my Kiss Gem Rebreather, doing a deco drill off of my Al30 with 50% O2. Suddenly I suck, oops, no air. Previous training, signal OOA.
So I do that.

wrong!

Here i sit with my rebreather, my necklace off of my back gas, and a bail out 30 of 33% all to choose from yet I signal OOA and reg swap with my instructor? After that was squared away, I've laughed about it abit as a great example of training, and new training. Thats not from a book, thats the school or hard knocks.

Tech diving even adds other things like bottle swaps at 20ft while maintaining buoyancy, no easy feat, and harder on a rebreather. Deploying an SMB at 20ft with light tanks, ascend to 15 managing buoyancy and tension on the SMB.

None of this comes from a book.

And admittedly I'm no fan of the C Card frenzy either, given I didnt even have my AOW for quite awhile, yet dove AOW during that whole period. But I've new found respect for tech diving I never had before, because my friends all made it look so easy...

 

[redacted]

Let me give an example. In OW/AOW, you are taught if you loose air, you signal to your buddy and reg swap. Ok, all well and good. In a technical dive, its all different.

Case in point, I'm on my Kiss Gem Rebreather, doing a deco drill off of my Al30 with 50% O2. Suddenly I suck, oops, no air. Previous training, signal OOA.
So I do that.

wrong!

Here i sit with my rebreather, my necklace off of my back gas, and a bail out 30 of 33% all to choose from yet I signal OOA and reg swap with my instructor? After that was squared away, I've laughed about it abit as a great example of training, and new training. Thats not from a book, thats the school or hard knocks.

Good thing you were not a solo diver student.

Deploying an SMB and managing buoyany during the subsequent ascent are OW skills.

Maybe you moved into tech a little too quickly and missed opportunities to fully develop OW skills.

 

[p1p]

If you knew anything about rebreathers and buoyancy, you would realize the idiocy of that statement.

 

[boulderjohn]

Good thing you were not a solo diver student.

Deploying an SMB and managing buoyany during the subsequent ascent are OW skills.

Maybe you moved into tech a little too quickly and missed opportunities to fully develop OW skills.

Or maybe managing buoyancy with a rebreather is totally different from managing buoyancy as an OW diver.

You would be surprised to learn ow much harder it is to maintain buoyancy while holding perfectly still in horizontal trim during a series of deco stops than it is to do a simple safety stop, legs lazily kicking beneath you, on an OW dive. I recently tagged along with an advanced trimix class in Cozumel. Maintaining depth in trim during the final stops was the biggest stumbling block those very experienced students had to completing the class. Going to 300 feet? No problem. Switching gases at the right times and holding stops on the ascent? No problem. Holding precise depth and position during the two shallowest stops for 20 minutes at a time? Well, that was a problem. I had had a bad year and a half of diving because of illness and injury, so these were my first such dives in a year and a half, and I found myself embarrassingly imperfect at that myself. I badly needed the practice.

 

[p1p]

and holding within 3ft of your stop...

 

[diverrex]

I swear this is a true story even though it sounds so stupid. Years ago I had a friend tell me he was getting much better at tennis. I expressed surprise because I didn't know he was playing much. His response was "I'm not but I have been reading a lot about it".

You can learn a lot about diving by reading but you really learn it by practicing. You can practice on your own and probably figure it out eventually unless something bad happens to you first. Or you can get a good instructor who can help you learn faster and safer.

Even Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods when each were at the top of their game and clearly better than anyone else in the world still used a coach to help them.

The problem in diving is too much of the training revolves around certification. More of it should focus on coaching, not collecting cards, but just getting better.

 

[recardomaurice12]

why would these people still doing this such risky things??

 

[NAM001]

I AGREE WITH YOU BUT WITH IN THE (oops) confines of the quality of rec diver training being done by a trained instructor vs mentor the you cant beat the formal instruction when done as designed. Whether they are designed to limit the more advanced aspects (like aow skills in an ow course) is kind of a moot point. Those actions set the stage for mentors to cultivate those divers hand in hand with experience perhaps for months or years till they decide to attain formal follow on training in a selected area. An example, I am not a big dir fan (this need explaining). I abhor the "your going to die unless you do things this way". Fact is i havnt and till recently i did nothing DIR and i still have a pulse. I am a progressive fan of the methodology, DIR is not a get your ow and then your dir ticket. it takes a long time to actually accept the concepts. Those that get into it have to ease into it and firmly believe those portions that apply to thier type of diving before they can ever accept those aspects that dont. You cant just expect someone who accepts the bp/w to equally accept the 3 flashlight (expensive ones) theory's. unless through mentoring they start thinking of the future diving goals. At some point it clicks, not necessarily the whole package but pieces at a time. Then one day like nitrox or deep diving or penitration diving, the system just becomes normal. It cant happen to ow realm divers because the skills do not match the diving desired. No diver (generally speeking)out of ow has a good frog kick. it takes time to develope the skill to a working level not to mention a natural movement. When the time comes when they compare them selves to others, they figure out perhaps higher level diving is of interest to them. Whether it is penetration or what ever , thier once bag of axtra skills of basic diving now becone the corner stone for the more advanced forms. Eventually they will dive all dives the same. Then mentoring then starts taking place for other things like deco theory or trimix ect. Its a natural progression. I dont believe any diver is without a mentor in some form or another. Progressive realizaton can not happen in a training environment. Training tells you what to think, experience makes you either a believer or not.

I would add that the quality of official training standard may limit best practices in scuba. How many years did the official training agencies deny recreational divers the benefits of nitrox? How much longer will they uphold the low standards that compromise safety in the name of profits?

 

[tstormdiver]

why would these people still doing this such risky things??

That is the whole point of this thread.