Diver drowns in guided cenote dive

[CuzzA]

I'm not cave or wreck trained.... So I say to anyone, "I'm not going in there." Note the period at the end of the last sentence.

I was actually surprised to see this thread at 6 pages long after I originally read the first couple posts the day the thread was created. It was pretty clear what happened and nothing more really needed to be said. (Unless new information was brought to light)

We are all made aware of the dangers of entering an overhead from our basic open water course. If an INDIVIDUAL makes the DECISION to violate that rule, well I'm not surprised to hear he/she died.

So what's the analysis here? Don't dive outside your training. I don't care if J. Cousteau himself came back from the dead and said, "Hey buddy, come dive this cave with me." As NetDoc pointed out, there's nothing worth dying for in there. Not even a dive with the ghost of J. Cousteau and certainly not some Mexican dive guide.

I will add it's constantly repeated on here that scuba training is not what it once was and divers are not trained well. There may be some truth to that; however, scuba related death statistics don't support that theory. More and more people take to the waters, yet diving related deaths have been slowy declining for decades.

At the end of the day, what can be learned from this... They weren't kidding when they taught you not to go in an overhead environment without being properly trained. Doesn't matter if you're in the US, Canada or Mexico. I believe most of these popular dive sites are well surveyed and maps can easily be acquired on the Internet. I think it's safe to assume anyone diving these sites know exactly what they are getting in to and have CHOSE to ignore the warnings from their training.

 

[Jarzi]

I will go beyond that and say that the warning we give them is potentially WORSE than useless.

We tell them they can NEVER go into ANY overhead environment without advanced and expensive training and equipment. Then they go on their first trip to, say, Cozumel. On their first OW dive, the guide takes them through a short and very safe swim through, violating that supposedly absolute rule. Maybe they instead go to South Florida for their first dives, and enter the big, wide, open main deck of the Tracy wreck. Again, they are violating that ironclad rule from the start of their diving experience. They naturally conclude that the rule is a total crock. That leaves them with no rule or guideline whatsoever.

So then we tell them not to go into caverns, caves, serious wrecks, etc., because--as we said before--NEVER go into ANY overhead environment without advanced and expensive training and gear. Are we surprised when they conclude that these warnings are part of the same BS warning they heard before? Are we surprised with they decide they can ignore those warnings as well?

That is true, I had only few dives before the definite rule was broken just as you described. Then again, I understand the point of the rule, even if I broke the literal definition. Swimming through a small overhead is not the same as going in to a cave or deep in to a wreck.

Anyone with a functioning brain and survival instinct should.

Incidentally, I've been browsing through some old padi material and there overhead was defined approximately as 1) being within 30m of surface and 2) within light from the surface-

 

[The Chairman]

Using the DeJoy model

Somehow, I don't think DeJoy is a cave diver either. Way too complicated.

Since you like boxes, here's a far saner and safer decision tree for deciding whether to dive in a Cenote or not...

 

[kafkaland]

I understand the view that these guided cenote tours are unsafe for OW divers under any circumstances, but I am reluctant to share it, and I don't think they will go away anytime soon anyway. So I'm wondering what lessons beyond the categorical OW divers don't belong in caverns can be learned from this incident. And to arrive at an answer, I think we need to know why the diver ended up in the cave, and to my knowledge, we haven't heard that yet, at least not definitively. I see three distinct possibilities, with different lessons to be learned:

1. The guide took them past the sign into the cave. That's certainly plausible, as the cavern line is rather short and I can imagine that there is a temptation to show more. If that's the case, the question is how do we enforce the rules better, make sure guides are better screened by the tour operators, and make damn sure that if a guide is caught breaking the rules, he or she is never employed as a guide again, instead of just moving on to the next shop.

2. The diver accidentally strayed from the cavern line, perhaps made an inadvertent jump to a cave line. If that is what happened, we can question how these sites are set up, for instance insisting that all cavern lines, and only cavern lines, are thick gold line, so that it can be briefed as "if you see white line, stop", or if additional grim reaper signs are needed. Or we can look into procedural questions, such as whether a second guide bringing up the rear should be required for all groups with more than two guests.

3. The diver deliberately decided explore on his own and leave the group. In that case he is a victim of his own stupidity. Extra training in OW or during the dive briefing driving home the message that this is extremely dangerous and may end deadly may help, but there is only so much we can do to protect the stupid from themselves.

 

[The Chairman]

More signs in Florida Caves:

 

[Lorenzoid]

I agree with kafkaland that these dives are not going to go away, no matter how sensible that seems to us. Must the rules in Mexico be like the rules in Florida? For sure, quite a few sections of the tour route exceed the threshold of what I understand to be generally considered the cavern zone--e.g., essentially no daylight and quite far from anywhere to pop up into open water. But there often are places to pop up--these cenotes are more riddled with open water bits than FL. So I can see how based on the structural differences alone Mexico might be reluctant to adopt FL-like rules that make strict distinctions. Of course, regardless of what is locally considered normal, each of us makes our own rules to live by, and in that sense I completely appreciate Pete's black and white message.

. . .
2. The diver accidentally strayed from the cavern line, perhaps made an inadvertent jump to a cave line. If that is what happened, we can question how these sites are set up, for instance insisting that all cavern lines, and only cavern lines, are thick gold line, so that it can be briefed as "if you see white line, stop", or if additional grim reaper signs are needed. Or we can look into procedural questions, such as whether a second guide bringing up the rear should be required for all groups with more than two guests.
. . .

That seems the most plausible to me. On the dives I did, there were only two of us (my wife and me) plus the guide. Between divers not maintaining close enough spacing between each other, rental lights that aren't powerful enough or used effectively enough, and the haloclines (which can be disorienting to us), I can see how the third client could conceivably lose sight of the person in front of him and the line. My wife and I are good OW divers and have a little training in using primary lights effectively, but at a few places where we turned sharply I recall I still having to keep a close eye on the line and the person in front of me to avoid moving off the line by mistake. If the diver in the rear lags behind and turns away for more than a minute because he's enraptured by the scenery, fiddling with his GoPro, etc., I could see him losing the group and then in an attempt to find them getting further away. I like the idea proposed earlier in this thread to require a second dive guide in the rear.

 

[The Chairman]

I agree with kafkaland that these dives are not going to go away, no matter how sensible that seems to us.

As I said: it's an economic decision on their part. They're not going to say "No" to the tourist dollar.

So, I do what's safe for me. I can't stop the fidiocy of others. They are going to keep on dying but I don't have to jump off that cliff. I'm not going to jump off that cliff. I choose to live. I can speak out against the cavalier attitudes I see, so I at least do that. Let Darwin sort out the rest.

 

[John C. Ratliff]

John C. Ratliff aka SeaRat => I am not, by any means as experienced as you - and probably will never be...

...One thing I was told on my first experience in caves by one of (great) instructors I was fortunate to meet, he said:
'Doesnt matter if you have 10 000 dives or 100 dives - if you never dove in caves you never dove in caves - your first cave dive is your first cave dive. Period'.

Hard to disagree with it - If you never been into the cave, never did cave diving - you have ZERO, NULL - non experience in it and ZERO knowledge. End of story....
I've seen experienced divers, with 1000's dives under they belt, aborting cave dives in first 10m - its jut NOT for everyone and if you never experienced it - you are not qualified at all. Just like someone who never scuba dived in their life is not qualified to talk about scuba diving...

Well, first of all, that's not quite true of me. I don't claim to be a cave diver, but have done cave diving.

Second, we are all looking for simplistic solutions to complex questions. But saying I cannot talk about cave diving because I'm not a current cave diver is simply a way of shutting down potentially productive conversation. I do bring a different perspective, which some here are unwilling to hear.

SeaRat

 

[boulderjohn]

Pete, I am a little confused by your current position.

Are you saying divers should not do guided CAVERN dives unless they are CAVE certified? Do you mean fully cave certified--not cavern certified, not basic cave certified, not apprentice cave certified?

 

[Bob DBF]

But treating an overhead like it's OW is a large part of the problem. Trying to educate the OW student how to dive an overhead safely in their OW class is not a sane way to do this. They need to be taught to get the right training first. It's just nuts to do this differently.

I'm not saying to educate an OW student how to dive an overhead safely, I'm saying that Just say no doesn't seem to work all that well, otherwise this thread would not exist. From my perspective it seems that mentoring portion of OW class was lost in the fast certification of computer/local pool/resort checkout. If a diver is adequate in all sections there is little time for each instructor to tell if the student needs to have better judgement before being certified.

If my SCUBA instructor had not spent the time improving my judgement, as well as my skills, I probably would not have made it to my OW course 17 years later, although I did have some good mentors along the way. The OW instructor I had later had used the same approach, all the skills in the world will not guarantee your safety if you use poor judgement. The first could control my access to gear and the second could withhold certification at a time I needed it to travel.

The diver accidentally strayed

Let's not just blame the victim. He was lost, the dive op took a group for an advertised safe dive in a cavern/cave environment and returned from the dive one client short. Rather than him wandering of on his own, a more plausible explanation would be, perhaps, his mask was kicked off as he was following closely so as not to lose the group, and by the time he fixed it the group was gone and he was left to find his way out alone, and without training. Of course he can't tell his side of the story so obviously it must be his fault.



Bob
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