Faith diving and magic?

[Jax]

2. You've obviously never dived with a spouse ... the effects of "relationship" often increase proportional to depth ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Wrong! :scorned:


But maybe I just haven't dived enough with my husband to have gotten there . . .

 

[Rick Murchison]

...So, what's the REAL takeaway? If you're a newb like me, it reinforces "Plan your dive, and dive your plan." If you have hundreds and hundreds of dives, the lesson is "Complacency gets you into trouble."...

You had it right the first time. The real takeaway is what you do... no matter how complacent or mad or happy or anal or distracted or furious or glad or sad you are, making a good plan in the first place, making all the hard decisions on the surface before ever getting into the water, and then sticking by those plans underwater is as important to Scuba safety as "never hold your breath." The "complacent" diver who makes and follows a good plan is far less likely to have a mishap than the "non-complacent" diver who has no plan or ignores the one he does have.
It is what you do that counts. That is why real mishap analysis examines actions, identifies actions that led to injury or death, and proposes actions that will prevent injury or death in the future. State of mind isn't unimportant, but it isn't a cause. The cause is the action taken.
Rick

 

[DandyDon]

To address some of the questions asked...

Do you push every last second out of your computer and ride the thin line of NDL right to the boat?

Nope. I use my computer to keep me safe, not just legal. I like to stay in low yellow at most generally, always exit in green if possible.

Are you a thrill seeker and occasionally put your watch into Deco, but manage to clear it by the time you get on the boat?

I survived that stage, barely - but nope.

4th dive of the day in Cozumel

If you have good air consumption, you'll need some Nitrox tanks in the day, at least one. I know the scene.

so 2 minutes, where is my wife. she has found one of her favorite sea creatures, a sting ray in the sand, so she is slowly swimming to it about 15ft down and 30 ft away heading down a sand slope. hmmm well my watch is bitching, so hers must be screaming..... I am the anal one, I am always pointing to my watch and she looks at hers sees that we have 5 minutes or whatever and gets mad at me for messing with her mojo. we have done this a lot so I know she is going to be pissed if i interrupt her time with her new friend to point to our watches. but no choice she is headed for trouble, and at that point I did not know how much.

By watches, I suppose you mean computers? My bud and I have a different approach: we compare often and never are bothered by being asked. An approach I'd recommend.

I did some calculations, based on air, and predicted deco time, we would have enough air if we went into a small amount of deco at this point.***

So I swim after her, take one and a half minutes of video of her playing with the ray and then grab her arm and show her, her watch, and I get a look at it myself, 14 minutes of deco, OH ##$^^$*

So if you are saying this is an example of how not to dive, I'll agree. And I like to carry enough weight that I can stay down or get back down quickly regardless. Shooting a sausage in Coz helps but sometimes they get run over too.

 

[Karibelle]

I tell my students that any diver can call any dive, at any time for any reason. I tell them that within their buddy team that is true, and if they do choose to call a dive (or their buddy does) that ends the dive, no questions asked. There's no place for peer pressure in diving. I don't expect my spouse to be less of a buddy to me than anyone else.

I think including that in the plan you make at the surface would make the "hard decisions" underwater a lot easier.

my two more cents.

 

[Rick Murchison]

... no questions asked...

The wording I use is "without repercussion." And certainly "no questions asked" applies under water.
However, once on dry land or the boat I am certainly going to find out (or, if it's I who called the dive, tell about) what caused the abort, and explore ways to avoid the problem in the future. The key is maturity - the ability to honestly evaluate what happened and how to avoid it without being "hurt" or "hurtful."
Rick

 

[lamont]

I hope this will stimulate some adult conversation and not a bunch of pointing out my mistakes.

I kind of think you need an adult to point out your mistakes.

Strapping a computer onto your wrist does not make you a technical diver capable of doing decompression dives. The computer is there to tell you when you should leave, and you should not violate that limit. It gives you decompression information in case you have no choice but to overstay your welcome at depth. You clearly had a choice and made a bad decision.

You need to not be worrying about shallow-NDL violations vs. deep-NDL violations and how that affects decompression penalties, you simply need to stop violating your NDL until you get training.

You also obviously need help with gas management, since really you don't need a lot of gas to burn off 15 minutes or so at 10 feet. And you definitely should not be going into deco when you're misweighted so that you feel you can't hang at 10 feet safely.

The fact that you are a scuba instructor hasn't really given you even the basic tools to be able to violate NDLs safely and you shouldn't be doing that.

 

[Karibelle]

The wording I use is "without repercussion."

That sounds a bit nicer doesn't it. More velvet glove, less iron fist. I'm still working on that. :blinking:

And certainly "no questions asked" applies under water.
However, once on dry land or the boat I am certainly going to find out (or, if it's I who called the dive, tell about) what caused the abort, and explore ways to avoid the problem in the future. The key is maturity - the ability to honestly evaluate what happened and how to avoid it without being "hurt" or "hurtful."
Rick

Agreed. Thank you.

kari

 

[TSandM]

It is what you do that counts. That is why real mishap analysis examines actions, identifies actions that led to injury or death, and proposes actions that will prevent injury or death in the future. State of mind isn't unimportant, but it isn't a cause. The cause is the action taken.

I love you, Uncle Ricky . . . You should post here more often.

 

[DandyDon]

That sounds a bit nicer doesn't it. More velvet glove, less iron fist. I'm still working on that. :blinking:

I've been trying for decades: Fail!

 

[Atom]

And the final lesson here is that weighting yourself to be neutral at 15 feet with 500 psi means you will be light shallower than that, or with less gas; one or two extra pounds is not perfect weighting but makes stressful situations a lot easier to manage.

I often hear people say that "Weight yourself to be neutral at 15ft and 500 psi in the tank". It seems like such a bad idea! It effectively mean that you forfeit that last 500 psi because if you start breathing it you'll go positive. Seems to me, that like TS&M is saying, a diver should aim for neutral at 15ft with 0 PSI in the tank. If you're down to that last 500 psi something wrong happened, and you don't need buoyancy problems on top of that.

Now to answer the original question... I trust my computer to give me an appropriate estimation of my NDL, or of my deco time if I go beyond the NDL. I trust the number but that's not the point.

They're not joking in the rec computers manuals when they say deco info is only for emergencies, they're wholly inappropriate for decompression diving. When you look at your NDL the time you see if linear, you know that if you don't go deeper that number won't go down faster than time is elapsing, so you can act on that number to execute your dive safely without surprises about your NDL and the time/gas you need. That makes your computer a useful planning tool when you respect the NDL.

As soon as you hit deco, you're being shown the minimum amount of time you have to spend in the water (which also mean a minimum amount of gas necessary), if you don't start an ascent immediately that number will go up at a non predictable rate (but a quick one) depending on your current dive profile and the previous dives you did. Since you've got no way to estimate that number before it pops-up, to you it might as well be a random amount of time you have to add to your dive. You can't plan anything around that. As soon as you hit deco, the only thing you can do is GTFO and hope you have enough gas to do the stop. If you go into deco on a rec computer it's like planning to win the lotto. Your computer is still useful to know how much deco to do to avoid getting bent, but it's not helping you plan anything anymore.