Scott, I was not on the boat, so all I can do is to ask questions..hopefully you will follow up on these
- In one of the early posts on this thread, a Girl certified in Australia states that she was taught to take her gear off, and to hand it up before getting on a dive boat. In Fact, when I was diving in Fiji, where New Zealanders make up a large share of the clientelle, the same practice occurs--the boat crew at Beqa Lagoon Resort tells the divers to take off their BC's in the water, and fins, before coming up the ladder....As an Investigator, I think you might get some relevant intel by finding out if in the area where the Chinese girl was trained( assuming she did have a C-card), that they have a norm where gear is taken off and passed up before climbing up a ladder....And if she had been certified with an integrated weight BC, this then would indicate why she may not have figured out that the weight belt needed to come off.
- I think establishing if the two girls had the requisite skill levels to be buddied together IS relevant to the case, and, it is relevant to the mechanism of Social Norms and Rules that is a part of the process of development of Standards in the major Training Agencies--in other words, if divers begin to think a common practice is causing deaths, Agencies tend to make rules to prevent this practice. The deal is, each buddy has to have a requisite skill level, to actually be a Buddy.
---------- Post added March 2nd, 2013 at 12:05 PM ----------
Dan, you and I have discussed this several times. This thread is about -nothing-.
The reason it's about nothing is that all people are doing is speculating and theorizing based on what they think are facts, but what are really nonsense, gossip, innuendo, and in some cases flat-out lies.
Days ago you said you were going to stop posting because you recognized that you were keeping going an utterly pointless discussion-which does pose a risk of damaging the reputations of innocent people-for no reason.
Why do you keep this going? You weren't on the boat. You haven't spoken to anyone who was there except for Ari, who you have told me you agree is utterly unreliable and a well-known liar. You don't have any other source of information about what happened.
The actual witnesses and people who -do- know what happened are not posting here. (Or, in one case, no longer are.)
So what possible point is there in continuing this thread? Why do you keep posting?
Amos, I waited for you to edit this mischaricterization as you said you would, and since you did not, I will have to respond to it.
You and I had a PRIVATE CONVERSATION where YOU told me of
your dive with Ari and a student at the BHB. YOU told me your side of this story, and about how Ari had a very different telling of the dive than you did. BASED on your account, I agreed with you ( which you referenced in your SB post) that I did not like the way she was recounting the dive. This is where you apparently say that you and I are in agreement on Ari.
This is not true. I have no direct knowledge of this incident, and Ari indicated you ran off with the flag, putting her and the student in a bad situation. In other words, you went in as buddied with the two of them, then left with the flag. In other words, there are two sides to this story, and worse still, you are using it to disparage Ari, in a thread here on Scubaboard where it has no place.
Whatever type of instructor Ari is , Great, bad, in the middle, it has no bearing at all here, and you should NOT have introducewd this when you KNEW that Ari did not have this Chinese Girl as a student....
again, this is obsfucation and mis-direction.
If you want to protect this boat, tell the truth, and say you want to protect it.
Don't try to smear another diver. Let the investigators decide IF anyone deserves blame.
I think Ari is equally likely to be telling a correct version of events that transpired to any of the other actual witnesses on the boat....And hang on...Amos--
you were NOT on the boat....so what we have is you coming here telling us that your 2nd hand account is somhow better than several first hand accounts--Ari, Peter and Dennis....all saying the same thing--all there.
You keep posting like you were there, but you were not....
This thread should NOT be about Ari in the first place, it should be about how we can prevent tragedies like this incident in the first place. I should never have had to post a response like this, because of a charicter assasination.
The vast bulk of posts I have made in this thread are about how we can learn from an event like this, to prevent similar issues.... I do not know who is at fault, but I have every right to raise questions about various aspects of the trip, to assist in the future diving behaviors of everyone.
I think it is awesome that we have a real investigator on the case now, someone trained to get at the root cause of an accident like this, and who will hopefully share this with us later.
