Divers dying every lobster opening. This has to stop!

[red_instead]

Insurance is to pay for damage you cause to others, there is no requirement to have insurance to pay for your self-inflicted damage. We don't need PADI. People were scuba diving long before PADI was ever dreamed of.

WE don't need to do ANYTHING. I guess by your thinking we should ban all driving because some people drive drunk. We should also ban all knives because people commit crimes with them. Better ban all alcohol sales and all unhealthy foods. Should probably just outright permanently ban all scuba diving because people die while doing that whether bug hunting or not.

You may not need PADI certs - but the way liability structure is set up, you'd better bet that any boat that lets your dive without evidence of training or certification, or any shop that rents to you without such evidence, is going to be hammered if something happens to you. And chances are, their insurance won't indemnify them. So basically, without a cert, boat dives and gear rental are off the menu for you.

And that's the way it should work: insurance protects against risk, risk goes up without training, and there's no reliable way of quantifying a minimum level of training absent some certification of having received that training. It's not to protect you from yourself: it's to protect businesses from generalized dumbassery.

 

[Lopez116]

Why exactly do people die when lobster hunting again???

I have no interest whatsoever in doing it, so I really don't know.

 

[FinnMom]

I am very disappointed in this thread. I came here to read up on specifics that may have been offered into the unfortunate deaths of these divers....instead I saw a whole lot of comments speculating, insulting, denegrating, posturing and bragging about.........nothing really.

Not one of these threads provided an ounce of factual information as to how these divers died....Was their equipment faulty? Did they drown? Did they suffer some form of DCS? Was there some sort of entanglement? If they were swept away by current how did it happen?

I, for one, do not underestimate the danger of this activity and for that reason I try to read up on as much case study as I can of mistakes or accidents that happened to others. This thread however was unbelievably devoid of factual information (other than the very informative comment made by DrBill on the decrease in marine life here in the U.S.).

Shame folks.......

If you think this thread should contain a colation of accident data, don't sit on your duff and wag your finger. Get writing!

 

[DeepSeaExplorer]

Why exactly do people die when lobster hunting again???

I have no interest whatsoever in doing it, so I really don't know.

There are two primary reasons people die lobster hunting.

1 - They only dive once a year, during lobster season not so coincidently. The joke here locally is a lobster diver comes into the shop for fills and is told his tank needs a VIP. To which the lobster diver responds, every time I go diving you tell me my tank needs a VIP. To which the shop responds, that's because you only go diving once a year.

2 - Couch potatoes go lobster hunting. Nuff said...

Combine one or both of those with alcohol, hunting fever, poor boating and watermanship skills and someone is going to die, get run over by or separated from the boat.

Most often, these types of accidents happen on private boats, because there's no one to stop people from drinking before the dive, so of course everyone on the boat is drinking pre-dive including the boat driver.

---------- Post added October 7th, 2014 at 04:33 AM ----------

I am very disappointed in this thread. I came here to read up on specifics that may have been offered into the unfortunate deaths of these divers....instead I saw a whole lot of comments speculating, insulting, denegrating, posturing and bragging about.........nothing really.

Fixed that for you...

I think everyone knows why, but no one knows how to fix it.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

From the Orange County Register;
DEADLY WEEK IN DIVING

Five deaths were reported to local authorities during the first week of lobster season in California, which began Sept. 27.
Sept. 27: A diver complained of health issues while diving near Catalina Island, and U.S. Coast Guard officers pulled him from the water and handed him to a private emergency medical service ambulance, Petty Officer Andrea Anderson said. The diver died on his way to the hospital. There's no other information on the diver at this time, Anderson said.
Sept. 29: Forty-year-old Jared Royer of St. George, Utah, was diving for lobster off the coast of Catalina Island when a boat captain heard him yell "help" before sinking. Authorities searched for three days before finding Royer's body under 100 feet of water Oct. 2. The investigation into Royer's death is ongoing, said Nicole Nishida, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department.
Oct. 1: Oxnard resident Michael Grennier, 53, was found in the water at 10:45 a.m. Wednesday near Frenchy's Cove, off Anacapa Island. The cause of Grennier's death is still under investigation, said Armando Chavez, Chief Deputy Medical Examiner at the Ventura County Health Care Agency.
Oct. 1: Jeffrey Logandro, 38, of Carlsbad died in the San Diego Mission Bay Channel after he began to struggle near the surface of the water Oct. 1. His diving partner attempted to keep him afloat until paramedics came, but he was underwater for about six minutes without air. He was pronounced dead at roughly 8 p.m.
Oct. 1: A man in his late 40s was pulled out of the water at 10:40 p.m. in Long Beach's Alamitos Bay after complaining of chest pain just before he dove, said Jake Heflin, spokesman for the Long Beach Fire Department. He was taken to a nearby dock and pronounced dead at the scene.

 

[Ken Kurtis]

In this case you are only harming yourself.

This is not meant to sound critical of BUDMANOK but . . .

Not exactly. I think this is a common misconception. It fails to take into account that there are people on the boat (assuming that's where you're diving from) who will respond and try to save or find you. If you think that pulling someone from the water and doing CPR for an extended period of time while thinking to yourself "Please don't die" has no effect on you, then you'e not thinking this all the way through. Your imminent demise will likely trigger a massive response from first-responders which out here (SoCal) will likely include Coast Guard, Sheriff's, Baywatch, and Chamber, not to mention Coroner. And while they're all "professionals" and "used to dealing with this," it has an emotional effect on them too, not to mention the financial cost of these operations. And then there's the emotional toll this will take on whomever you leave behind.

So to think the only one you're harming is yourself, I simply don't think that's takes into account the full ramificiations of these types of accidents.

TS&M hit it on the head with the comment about being able to cure ignorance but not if you're still gong to be arrogant ("Well, that doesn't apply to ME . . ."). That attitude's likely a ticking bomb waiting to go off.

I think if you really read through the more thoughtful comments in these types of threads, you'd see the goal is to examine what happened, what went wrong, and what lessons can be taken away from it. And I think 80% of the comments generally reflect that. We can never eliminate these types of deaths. We can't legislate them away and we probably can't educate them away. But that doesn't mean we can't at least try to make things better.

I have looked at lots of fatality data over the years and things seems to fall into some broad categories, two of which are: (1) Medical issues that the divers didn't want to know about or knew about and chose to ignore, and (2) Diver error which many times is running out of air because what you were doing or seeing underwater occupied more of your attention than monitoring air supply and you simply weren't paying attention.

All we can do as a concerned and caring dive community is bring as much as possible to everyone's attention and, as I like to say, what you choose to do with the information after that is up to you.

- Ken

 

[vcblklion]

The OP asked, "What can we do, as a community, to stop this?" I didn't see this thread as an accident analysis.

Well...by definition..when you ask "What can we do, as a community, to stop this?".....an educated and responsible solution would REQUIRE.....and accident analysis......IJS

 

[Freewillow]

FYI

In Europe there is nothing left alive from centuries of uncontrolled fishing and dying reefs. Scuba or not, there is nothing alive to catch so therefore you want to give a living chance for the ones that get away.

California on the other hand has some of the healthiest reefs in the world and lobster catching via Scuba is as sustainable (if not more) as with hoop-nets which are outside the water and far more easy and safe...

Do I read you correctly :depressed:. Scuba for lobster catching is easy and safe? So what is this "post" all about .

FYI, I did not know that lobster could jump into hoop-nets outside the water. :shocked2:. I thought that the practice was to use lobster pots.

 

[Dr. Lecter]

Do I read you correctly :depressed:. Scuba for lobster catching is easy and safe? So what is this "post" all about .

FYI, I did not know that lobster could jump into hoop-nets outside the water. :shocked2:. I thought that the practice was to use lobster pots.

He was answering your earlier point about SCUBA lobstering being "unfair" or "not sporting" by saying that catching lobster with hoop-nets keeps the humans involved safely out of the water and it's much easier--just wait for the bugs to wander in.

 

[Freewillow]

Got it. thanks Dr Lecter :kiss2: