Fatality Off Miami Beach - Florida

[clownfishsydney]

Small BCDs can have as little lift as 19 lbs based on my experience with a well-known murder trial and court case. It is very easy for someone to carry that much weight, even if small.

 

[SC_Hoaty]

Yet since she was seen on the surface, we know the premise "more weight than the BCD could lift" is wrong - a red herring.

 

[crosshairs]

---------- Post added February 25th, 2013 at 10:01 AM ----------



What are you going to do? Follow her along and wait to rescue her?

Thats what I would do......if I saw a diver that appeared in over their head (no pun intended) I would watch them to make sure they were OK....were talking about 30 foot of water here......if anyone at all had been watching this woman, she would still be alive today.

 

[diverrex]

Too many divers seem to die on descent or shortly after ascending, maybe even reaching the surface. It's not uncommon for many buddy pairs to think about being a buddy team underwater at the bottom but do not pay enough attention to each other near the surface or descending. For experienced divers comfortable in the water this is probably not much of a problem. But for those without much experience and uncomfortable in the water (why are these people diving in the first place?) this can lead to problems. As said already if someone, anyone, had just been watching this woman the whole time she very likley would not be dead.

 

[Black_3000psi]

Lets look at it from a different perspective. As members of the dive community we all have a duty look after each other, there are many different ways we can do this but it has start somewhere. we can learn from this accident. ok so there was a language barrier, diving has a language all its own, a smile, that warm friendly greeting. obviously she loved diving enough to go out on a boat not knowing anyone just to get a dive in.

 

[letterboy]

Thats what I would do......if I saw a diver that appeared in over their head (no pun intended) I would watch them to make sure they were OK....were talking about 30 foot of water here......if anyone at all had been watching this woman, she would still be alive today.

Why not stop them before they got in the water and tell them they are unsafe. Afterwards you could enjoy your dive instead of babysitting.

Of course I would probably tell them they were unsafe, should not do the dive as they were going to kill themselves... That way when they do the dive and die I could sleep ok at night.

Sent from my pasture using Tabableet 2

 

[jIM STEELE]

Too many divers seem to die on descent or shortly after ascending, maybe even reaching the surface. It's not uncommon for many buddy pairs to think about being a buddy team underwater at the bottom but do not pay enough attention to each other near the surface or descending. For experienced divers comfortable in the water this is probably not much of a problem. But for those without much experience and uncomfortable in the water (why are these people diving in the first place?) this can lead to problems. As said already if someone, anyone, had just been watching this woman the whole time she very likley would not be dead.

hind sight is 20/20 watermanship proper weighting and a good buddy and crew and a lot of training and practice practice and more of the same we have over 15 hrs of pool time before our students even see the ocean.

 

[danvolker]

Why not stop them before they got in the water and tell them they are unsafe. Afterwards you could enjoy your dive instead of babysitting.

Of course I would probably tell them they were unsafe, should not do the dive as they were going to kill themselves... That way when they do the dive and die I could sleep ok at night.

Sent from my pasture using Tabableet 2

This is pretty hard to do on a charter boat filled with novice and poorly skilled divers....by appearance alone on the boat, many would probably have looked comparable to the Chinese Girl....you can pose this question to those on the boat, or ask the Private Eye to do this, but until one of these divers actually gets in the water, it is really hard to make distinctions about how well they can survive on the surface with swimming and floating skills, or 20 feet down with the most rudimentary diving skills....you need to see it usually.

Where you don't have many novices, it gets a lot easier--they stand out, and you know who to look at.

 

[InTheDrink]

proper weighting is key to comfort and balance under water, every lb more than you need you have a pint size bubble moving around in your dry suit or bc 5lbs is a large bubble to effect your trim and balance sounds like she was maybe more than 10 lbs to much. as instructors we should put more effort into teaching the diving public how to test and verify proper weighting.

---------- Post added March 3rd, 2013 at 10:16 AM ----------


check out the salty snorkel.com on weight train.

I should have labelled my post more strongly as speculation. It is highly likely this isn't the case here as facts are sparse.

However I'll stick by my general point that newer divers tend to he hideously over weighted. It makes the dive much harder and places them at additional risk.

My personal favourite is that when these new overweighted divers struggle with their buoyancy - IMO primarily cos they're over weighted and playing with a big balloon on their back - the standard response is to load them with more lead. I've seen this a lot. Very poor practise.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

Agreed. And this comes from open water classes where the instructor is too lazy, incompetent, or feels that teaching proper weighting and buoyancy control take too much time and are beyond the skill level of OW divers. And that's just BS big time.