Relying on a DM isn’t inherently dangerous. If it was, training agencies wouldn’t promote discovery dives/resort dives, and all those people doing these would drown. They don’t drown, therefore it can’t be that dangerous. If anything, relying on a professional DM could be safer than not - just as people rely on mountain guides.
I agree, but mountain guides on snow and ice still will rope their people up, talk about how to walk on snow and ice, insist on crampons on the sole of their boots, etc.
Now, for all you divers and dive instructors out there, I’ll say a few things about my insights. Realize that I’m also a retired safety professional, retired dive instructor, and retired industrial hygienist. As such, I have written technical safety articles for our professional magazines.
When I started out diving, I had no instruction. I was 14 years old, and had earned the money for my scuba (a 50 cubic foot tank and a Healthways Scuba double hose regulator) picking strawberries and beans near Salem, Oregon. It was 1959. My entire instruction manual was reading Cousteau’s The Silent World twice. (By the way, if you haven’t read that classic book, just about everything in a current dive text is covered by JYC at some point in his book.) I dove in rivers (the North Santiam being the river I dove in those days) and lakes or reservoirs (where my family fished). I had a very strong swimming background, on swim teams and in the Red Cross lifeguarding classes. So simply diving underwater with scuba seemed actually safer than my frequent snorkeling/free diving in those rivers.
It wasn’t until 1963 that I took a diving course, and that was because we had formed a club, the Salem Junior Aqua Club, which was attached to the Salem Aqua Club. We did dive together too, and nobody on the Salem Aqua Club looked for any certifications. But our club decided we needed instruction to go further in diving. So we hired an instructor from California (there were no instructors locally) to come up and give us classes and both pool classes and finally our open water certification classes. I was then certified LA County by Roy France, my instructor.
Now, some observations about these early dives. I dove solo before getting the club formed; I felt that diving solo with scuba was less hazardous than free diving, as I was breathing underwater. During club dives, we used the buddy system, and after getting certified in 1963 we enforced the buddy dive system on these dives. I still dived solo at times (way before there was such a certification).
So I’m open to those who simply dive with a dive master. You’ve got air underwater, someone looking after you, and if you keep breathing, there should be no high hazard.
I went on to go through the U.S. Naval School for Underwater Swimmers at Key West, Florida as part of my training for U.S. Air Force Pararescue. During that time, I also completed parascuba jumps, which were essentially solo diving when we dove in conjunction with the jump. We jumped using parascuba gear with twin 42 cubic foot tanks, and a parachute over the tank, a reserve chute on our front, a medical kit under the reserve, and a “butt boat,” which was a one-man life raft. We also had one or two Mark 13 signal flares taped to our dive knife (which we wore on our leg).
Then in 1973 I became a NAUI Instructor (#2710) under Dennis Grave, our NAUI ITC Course Director (before he went to PADI). So that’s some of my biography. I continue to dive, sometimes solo.
Now a couple of things from professional safety to think about. You know that the Cousteau divers were essentially team diving, and that they had only one double hose regulator on their scuba unit. They had no air pressure gauge either, but did dive with a watch and depth gauge. The regulators, after the switch from the original Aqualung two stage regulator to the Mistral regulator, had only 6 moving parts. In professional safety, we know that each piece of equipment has a reliability factor, and can fail. The failure rates are very low, but increase as more gear is added (it’s and additive increase). So a person who is wearing manifolded doubles with an isolation valve and two regulators has more potentials for a failure than someone with only a single tank, or doubles with a single regulator and a single regulator. Today’s two hose regulators have more moving parts, which increases the potential for failure too.
A few years ago, I was diving solo at High Rocks on the Clackamas River, went snorkeling out into the current, dove down and put my regulator in my mouth, inhaled, and got nothing but water. I was diving a single tank, and my regulator, a more modern Dacor, had an octopus, so I simply switched to the octopus and continued the dive. I found out that the regulator had one of those really flexible second stage diaphragms, and during reassembly it had folded over in about a one-inch area. It sill worked to give me air on land during the test, but underwater the river flooded in.
If you’ll read The Silent World, you’ll find out that the Cousteau team started out as free divers spearfishing in order to feed their families during the German occupation of France. So even before they invented the open circuit scuba, they were water people.
This is where I see the recreational divers of today who depend upon the DM for their own safety somewhat falling short. Many are not “water people” who are comfortable in and under the water. When I started diving, I had been snorkeling for years (starting with a “C” shaped snorkel with the ping pong ball in the top, which ultimately I cut off to farm a J-snorkel). I feel that for someone to become competent, even with the dive master there (DM there) the modern divers should be comfortable in the water.
SeaRat
