Failure to turn the dive

[Stoo]

Thanks for reminding me that my decision not to cave dive was a good one. And I'm glad everything worked out.

You cave divers are a "special" kind...

 

[uwxplorer]

Not a cave diver and never will be, but I am curious about the reasoning behind "With CCR I could have stayed another 3-4 hours waiting until clear water and/or searching for missing diver".
That sounds very much like the TrueDive philosophy of "plan for your maximum bottom time"...because a serious dive-ending situation (like a flood or a breakthrough or what-have-you) is very unlikely.

 

[Altamira]

@slimshady. Thank you for having the courage and self-confidence to post the details of a problem that could have gone sideways, with a very different result. As a retired pilot who is used to all participants airing the "dirty laundry" in mission debriefs, it is comforting to know that attitude is pretty common in SB members. Learning from our own, and others' mistakes is invaluable in hopefully saving a life, or at least giving us some things to consider or reconsider. A primary lesson I usually take from these types of near misses is that less than optimal decisions made by highly trained, qualified, and proficient people can bite the participants in the butt just as easily as decisions made by inexperienced or poorly trained people. Over the years, I have found that most of the time I found myself in a nasty, possible life threatening situation, it was at least partially due to a bit of complacency, mis-assumptions, and overconfidence in my planning and ability.

 

[flymolo]

The guy who described the route to you, what configuration does he dive? I.e. did he know you would be going through in a BM ccr?

 

[Garth]

Definitely glad to hear everyone made it out and that you used a line to connect back to good line. I’ve been in situations like this and it’s rather stressful thinking of your buddy behind you when going through tight stuff with backmount CCR. It’s also why I love the CCR in the cave due to the extra time you have to sort things out. Hopefully this wasn’t a really deep cave. At a 100’ things are less stressful when managing a problem, the deeper you go the more the deco clock can be of concern. I’ve heard of others having issues while deep and fortunately I’ve not had major delays when in deeper cave.

Good post with a good outcome.