It's more dangerous, more risk, because it is less forgiving, despite the training.
Any incompetent OW diver can go their whole lives diving and experience some incidents and still live to tell the tale.
However with cave diving etc, incompetence will quicker lead to death or injury...
Training teaches you to mitigate the risks, not eliminate them... And the reality is, there are MORE things that can go wrong in cave diving.. So it is inherently much riskier.. And most ppl associate risk with danger
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I agree that you can't really eliminate the risks, but you can mitigate them a lot. I also agree that more things can go wrong in a cave, but also that training and practice enables you able to handle more things.
As Diver0001 suggested, it is apples and oranges, and I am not trying to be arrogant, overly confident or anything like that. I just thought it would be an interesting discussion to try and compare a new cave diver in a cave and a new OW diver in the open water.
---------- Post added October 23rd, 2013 at 03:41 PM ----------
Well, all the things that could go wrong in an open water dive, can go wrong in a cave dive -- equipment can fail, you can get lost, lights can fail. You have redundancy to deal with equipment failures, and better skills to deal with other problems, but the fact is that you are under a time pressure in cave diving that you are not in recreational open water diving, because you CANNOT just surface if your coping strategies fail. Therefore, I'd have to say it's still higher risk. I think that, with a respectful attitude and a willingness to follow the rules, the risk profile falls within tolerable for me -- obviously, because I do it!
I agree. I think Diver0001 nailed it when he separated the chance of something happening from the effect of it happening. I think I was too focused on the former.