Diver missing on Andrea Doria

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This reminds me of Denton Byers' death: The Deco Stop (you must register for the site to read what I think is one of the saddest tales I've ever read of a diving fatality).

There are really nasty risks that lurk in the shallows. I never end a dive alone, and I never send anyone else up alone, either.
 
I never end a dive alone, and I never send anyone else up alone, either.

I have. Many, many times.

I'm rethinking that.
 
My prayers and condolences to friends and family. I too have lost too many friends to cave diving and diving in general. 49 years of diving gives me a surreal insight to diving accidents. Again my prayers.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
There are really nasty risks that lurk in the shallows. I never end a dive alone, and I never send anyone else up alone, either.
I have. Many, many times.

I'm rethinking that.
This dive, accident, and equipment are well beyond my possibilities so I have had extremely little to say here. When I dive with my home bud tho, we descend together, swim together, ascend together, surface together - period. Too many accidents do occur on final ascent or at the surface. I remember our first trip together when I nearly ditched his weight belt at the surface.
 
You dive together, you surface together.
 
I have. Many, many times.

I'm rethinking that.

+1, including the day of this incident.

I finished my deco at 10 ft while my buddy completed his at 20 ft. The surface vis was crap and I could barely make out his tanks. I finished 4 minutes before him because of the shallower depth. I dropped down to him and signaled that I was done and surfacing. He gave an ok and I left. I can only imagine how I would feel if something happened and he didn't show up 4 minutes later.

Of course on the second dive a different buddy had a problem and had to abort his dive. It would have been nice if he had found me and told me. I was about 4 feet away from him, but looking elsewhere. That was a very long, stressful deco.

Solo is one thing. But if you're diving with someone, there's a lot to be said for surfacing together.


iPhone. iTypo. iApologize.
 
My deepest condolences to the family and friends of the diver lost on the Doria.

Before it becomes a thread about buddy diving/procedures - please note that diving on the Doria, or deep/nasty NE wrecks is always a live situation. This means that to the best degree possible you provide for self-sufficiency, and redundancies. This could include a buddy system, Jon line etc.

After the % of fatalities on the Doria in the late 90's my preferred charter enabled a system with a hard schedule. This means you gave the topside crew targets regarding bottom time, deco. schedule etc. They often sent a crew member to check on divers doing deco. If you didn't hit your target by a certain point the crew would enable a crew member to go down. I found this level of care and concern exemplary. Even then - you are really on your own as the Doria is a big boat, and if you were penetrating - hard to find you. In the end no individual, or crew can adequately plan, or assist for events beyond control.

X
 
This also raises some questions about dive planning for these sorts of dives. One of the nice things about the system in which I was trained, is that everybody is using the same methods of determining decompression, so there is rarely any need to discuss the profile beyond agreeing on the max depth and bottom time. But if you are diving with a buddy who is using a different method of computing his profile (whether that's different laptop software, or a different computer) would it not be a good idea to agree, beforehand, that you will do the decompression requested by the more conservative (eg. longer deco) method? I guess I have a hard time understanding why someone would terminate his own deco and surface, leaving his buddy (with whom he apparently executed and almost completed the dive) to finish his time.

There was a very nasty accident in California a few years back, a double fatality, in which a tech diver aborted his deco to rescue a recreational diver who was out of gas, and left his buddy doing what appeared to be uneventful deco at 70 feet. The recreational diver died, and the buddy left at 70 never surfaced. To my knowledge, to this day, no one knows what happened to cause his death.

One certainly doesn't know if a buddy could have intervened successfully in any of these cases. Denton Byers had an attentive and highly capable buddy, and died anyway. But without a buddy and a tale to recount, none of the friends or family know anything about what happened, and I can't help but think that they would forever wonder if the outcome would have been different, had the diver not been alone.
 

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