Diver Death Belize Blue Hole

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I've only had one bad dive op in my entire life. The boat left while I was on a drift dive, to pickup some students (he was double dipping). If the boat got to the dive site and was there to pick me up, they've done their job.

Anything beyond that is my fault.

The dives in Belize and Cozumel are only dangerous because the major agencies have portrayed SCUBA as a safe tourist activity, no more dangerous than the roller coaster at Disney World. If SCUBA classes actually taught what they need to, including analyzing risk and objectively considering diver qualifications and dive difficulty, dive boats would be packed full of divers who demand that they be taken to dive sites with names like "Fun Happy Reef", not to a hole in the middle of the ocean, with no reachable bottom or a dark tube with an exit deeper than the diver has ever been.

The Blue Hole and Devils Throat and pretty much anyplace else you can think of are perfectly safe dives for divers that are qualified to do them.

The danger in SCUBA comes from divers who believe the advertising and the implied level of safety, built up over the years by marketing and instructors who are afraid to scare anybody, not because it's Belize or Cozumel or wherever.

Better education would mean that when the DM tells Mr. 10 Dives that he's "Going to the Blue Hole on Thursday", the reaction would be "Are you insane? Not with me, you're not." instead of "Cool!"

flots.

If you read the course material in the Padi Open Water and Advanced Open Water courses there are many warnings about the dangers in diving. I took the AOW course last January and their is no ambiguity about the potential dangers and the necessity of diving within your ability and training. There is no reason for a new diver to go into a dive without his eyes wide open. People choose to ignore their training. I dove last February in Roatan with a couple of guys. They were about 35, stock brokers from New York, and they started diving the year before. One of the guys told me about diving the Blue Hole the year before- it was his 5th dive after taking his OW course. He told me how someone in his group got into trouble, and unbeknownst to him they returned to the surface. He suddenly found himself alone at 130 feet with no dive watch. It freaked him out. Anyway in Roatan they wanted to dive a shipwreck that was 100 feet. The divemaster wouldn"t take them because they didn't have AOW. I saw these guys beg, cajole, bribe ( they tipped the DM very generously on regular dives) the DM into letting them go on the dive. Though he was reluctant he finally agreed to give them a modified deep diving course so they could go on the dive. These guys didn't care about a common sensical approach to diving--they were busy guys who went on one diving trip a year and they wanted to maximize the thrill. This personality type represents a certain percentage of divers and no warnings or training is going to stop them. There is no one to blame but them. People ignore their training all the time and nobody is at fault but them.
 
Well, the warnings come from training that comes from industry professionals. In the eyes of newbie divers, the charter boat op.s and dive guides are also industry professionals, albeit of a different sort.

Also, people starting out don't know what rules to adhere to rigidly and which they can, and maybe even should, bend. After all, you do your OW course, it's recommended you not pass 60 feet until you advance via training, mentoring, etc…, but a month later you're on a cruise ship excursion at Grand Cayman and the whole group is going to be diving around 80 feet, 'everybody's doing it so it must be alright,' and evidently they 'do this all the time.'

Kind of like when people start driving and realize the speed limits are often viewed by motorists as minimums instead of maximums. And on land, for a number of activities, if you 'push the limits,' you get some feedback - such as sore muscles from overdoing it at the gym - that gives you a warning. Diving often doesn't do that - by the time you realize you're in trouble, you're really in trouble. And a newbie may not yet be aware of how limited our capacity for task loading underwater can be; the equivalent of being able to walk, talk and chew gum, so to speak, underwater on scuba is way harder than it is on land.

So that ambiguity can be there.

I'm not saying certified divers don't have any responsibility for what they do, but it may be undesirable to encourage them to do some of it.

Richard.
 
I dove last February in Roatan with a couple of guys. They were about 35, stock brokers from New York, and they started diving the year before. One of the guys told me about diving the Blue Hole the year before- it was his 5th dive after taking his OW course. He told me how someone in his group got into trouble, and unbeknownst to him they returned to the surface. He suddenly found himself alone at 130 feet with no dive watch. It freaked him out. Anyway in Roatan they wanted to dive a shipwreck that was 100 feet. The divemaster wouldn"t take them because they didn't have AOW. I saw these guys beg, cajole, bribe ( they tipped the DM very generously on regular dives) the DM into letting them go on the dive. Though he was reluctant he finally agreed to give them a modified deep diving course so they could go on the dive. These guys didn't care about a common sensical approach to diving--they were busy guys who went on one diving trip a year and they wanted to maximize the thrill. This personality type represents a certain percentage of divers and no warnings or training is going to stop them. There is no one to blame but them. People ignore their training all the time and nobody is at fault but them.
If anything happen to them the dm and the dive shop will be condemned.
 
If anything happen to them the dm and the dive shop will be condemned.
New shop, new name - life goes on...
 
The posters on Scubaboard know of the perils of diving the blue hole. The question I have includes:

Is the fatality because of diving the Blue Hole?

It certainly sounds like the fatality was something that includes a health issue or an issue with the gas that was being used causing a health issue. I don't think it sounds like it was something that happened because it was the Blue Hole or a problem that was caused by the dive operator. It sounds to me like the fatality was related to a health issue or diver error involving breathing a yet to be determined gas.

I do not condone the dives that are done there. But I would not be so quick to condemn the dive operator on this one.
 
My opinion on the Roatan dive ops requiring AOW for certain dives is to drive sales of courses. Huge volumes of people goto Roatan to get certified, then AOw, and on and on. DM is cottage industry there. I've no dispute with that. I've had two of my friends over the years take their AOW there. Purely selfish of me of course, but convinced them it was the best thing for them. Neither regret it. :) That's also where I got my nitrox cert. (As an aside I'm really missing the days of the $10 per tank)
 
Just got back from doing the blue hole trip, with Amigos del Mar. While swimming with the big stalactites was cooler than I thought, overall it was a bit boring. (I actually thought the coolest part was looking out over the lip and down down down, at 30 ft, just before the descent.) If you're comfortable diving to 100-110 feet already and reasonable with your air, this dive is no big deal. We were down there quickly, stayed only the 8-9 minutes, and started back up. Not anywhere close to air problems (if, as I said, you're reasonable on air). Though I really didn't like my computer telling me I had only 2 minutes of NDC left, but only because I've never gotten a mandatory deco obligation on this computer, and didn't want to risk it locking me out (I know, I know---it won't if I follow its instructions---no logical reason, but I just really didn't want to incur a deco obligation anyway). So down to 2 minutes NDC time was as close as I've ever gotten---apart from this dive, I make sure to keep my NDC time at 10 minutes or above, to have a reasonable safety buffer for something unexpected happening.

The tanks hanging from the boat were of course just air, not O2, and there was no decompression stop---just a very very long safety stop (7 minutes)---but hell, you're back at 15' within 30 minutes so what the heck else is there to do. Given that you're only at 130' for a few minutes, the air requirement isn't even as big a deal as i thought, because the descent is just straight down, and reasonably paced. (I.e. you're down at 130' after starting from 30', within 2-3 minutes).

What did freakin' amaze me was that one guy on the boat turns out to have had maybe 3-4 dives past O/W. Or maybe only 1. Now that's just stupid...

One other guy made the mistake, as we started the gradual ascent, of telling the dive master he was at 1400 lbs, and the dive master for some reason switched him to the DM's octo. (Maybe the DM thought he said he was at 1000).
 
My opinion on the Roatan dive ops requiring AOW for certain dives is to drive sales of courses.

Could be. But in the states, the reason for this is more likely liability. Dive ops in the states would not take me on a trip >60 ft without AOW and would not take me on a trip to >100 ft with only PADI AOW (I needed the deep specialty.) And I presumed liability as the reason since they didn't push the course when I was trying to sign up for different trips. (This was on a local lake ... and not that I wanted to go to the 130 ft bottom ... it was too dang cold!!!)

---------- Post added July 21st, 2014 at 12:25 PM ----------

One other guy made the mistake, as we started the gradual ascent, of telling the dive master he was at 1400 lbs, and the dive master for some reason switched him to the DM's octo. (Maybe the DM thought he said he was at 1000).

Not sure why the guy even accepted the octo. Even with 1000 psi left, that should be plenty to get to the hang tank even at 30 ft per minute ascent.
 

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