I rely on the internet to learn about DIR, so I am interested to hear what else is no longer correct in that video.
DIR was and is about common sense. DIR is not a training agency approach--it began as divers sharing ideas, in person, and went on to share on the Internet as well. If you think you need to pay money, to get a good idea, then the dive industry has wonderful things in store for you
George's approach to the hose for ocean diving the way most scuba divers dive, was that they could use a 5 foot hose with less problem ( routing issue for 7 foot hose, so no immediate hurdle to adopt the 5 foot hose and necklace reg). Much of our ocean diving was spearfishing on reefs, and with zero need for negotiating narrow restrictions in overhead environments, the 5 foot hose was a reasonable way to get recreational divers on to the "path". The plan was get them thinking about what was wrong with stuffing an octo in a holder, and not having immediate access for buddy breathing. Since GUE is a training agency, they have stronger parameters, based on an exact picture they want every diver to become--again, this was not what we were doing with DIR....we were just trying to get common sense ideas out, to counter the misinformation of the dive industry and heavy marketing they used for this.
There were some huge issues we had to address. George and I had done too many body recoveries, and seen too many divers strggling on the bottom, to ignore it when a dive shop sold a "new tech diver wannabe" a set of double high pressure steels matched to a thick wetsuit, and then bungie wings....Forgetting the arguement about the wings for this instant, it is too easy for YOU to see what happens at 250 feet down, with a thick wetsuit and heavy steel doubles....it requires enormous air in to a BC or Wing, to get this diver off of the bottom. This was how we had the tripple death tragedy back in West Palm around 1999, when instructor andre Smith and a student and a friend, all died on the 270 foot ledge area off of Singer Island. All were in thick wetsuits for the thermocline, all were using heavy steels for the extra gas.....the survivor of the incident, told us that the student was constantly bumping in to the bottom, unable to maintain Bouyancy. This was part wing failure, and part poor matching of gear. He also told us, that ultimately, when Andre Smith tried to get the student up, he was so negative himself, that he could not get the student up. This was one incident out of many. I see a 100 pound lift dual bladder BC as a typical dive industry solution. Sure, it is possible to survive a deep dive with it, but it adds many new problems for the lift it provides.....The monster BC has enormous drag, so the diver will work harder, and breathe more gas to swim a given distance. Because of the enormous swing in bouyancy for the heavy steel tanks, the diver has to swim with lots of gas in the bladder, hugely increasing drag from this. Once the diver successfully gets to the deco depths, now he has many orders of magnitude MORE lift than he should have, and a new tech diver wanabee, who makes a mistake, could rocket to the surface with this 100 pounds of lift, now no longer as counterbalanced by the tamnks, and is combined with the wetsuit( as it is now bouyant).
Back to the student death, it appeared a failure in the wing, was allowing gas to escape, so he could not maintain lift. The bungees kept pushing out the gas, and this became fatal. Had he had the same problem with a non-bungee wing, the gas would have stayed longer, without being shoved out by the bungees.
And there is zero need for Bungees. I dive the deep reefs off of Palm Beach all the time, where the drop could mean passing through 2 different currents on the way down....The boat needs to do a great job of guessing/estimating your drop, and the diver needs to be going down at 100 feet per minute or much better if possible, the second they here the DIVE, DIVE, DIVE command. I will have pushed all the air out of my wings, and then used the oral inflator to pull out any tiny bit of gas left in the wing. There is no need for a bungee to do this--it is too easy. Once in the water, the water will do what the bungees are intended to do, so again, you don't need or want them.
Bungees are a poster child concept for DIR, as is the miss-matching of heavy steel tanks with a thick wetsuit. You don't need to take a class to hear the thinking on this..and it does not hurt that the ideas are coming from a group of divers who have the best safety and performance record of any deep cave diving team on the planet. We wanted people to hear the logic, because at the time, we were seeing too many tech divers die, and the causes were way to preventable.
And since most divers are recreational, and all divers have to start as recreational divers, prior to becoming tech divers, DIR ideas needed to get introduced early, prior to bad marketing ideas causing new rec divers to begin making dangerous gear combination choices.....This includes the whole buddy concept--the real foundation of what DIR is all about.....
Dumpster Diver, I have read posts by you before, and I have a hard time believing that you disagree with our fundamental view that new divers should be taught good buddy skills. This in itself, is pure DIR. Nothing we talk about, is more DIR than buddy skills and buddy behavior on a dive. This is common sense.
We have even had conversations about DIR for photographers and spearfishing divers--2 groups where the "mission specific" nature of their dive will render many of the common sense buddy concepts unworkable. For instance....
My wife is an excellent underwater photographer ( she shot all the photos in
www.sfdj.com ) , but when she sees a turtle, or a nudibranch, or whatever, she would no longer see you or me.....for a minute to maybe 5 minutes, she is in another universe. After this shot, maybe 5 minutes later, she "can" go back to being a buddy, and doit well.....but common sense should tell us that a diver can NOT stop being a buddy for 5 minutes at a time.....The dive industry solution, which George and I hate so passionately, would be to stick a pony on her, and on you or me if we were supposed to be buddied with her. They would sell us this pony as our redundant air source. But this is a poor solution, for a person you care about.....I would NEVER allow Sandra to use a pony tank as a buddy....imagine if she goes off on her own ( as photogs do) and in the middle if shooting some macro stuff, gets tangled badly in some monofilament. This was the last subject she planned to shoot, prior to coming up ( the last 5 minutes always has the most exciting shots for a photographer
.... So she is very low on air, but her pony is her buddy. Will the pony be able to help her get out of the monofilament? Will the pony be able to get itself out of the line wrapped around it, behind her back?
I could go on with this, but the short story is, I would never allow Sandra, or anyone else I care about, to dive this way--if I have any control of it. Sure, on a perfect, gentle reef dive, she would be fine. The idea is to be fine for every dive you do, and to not have an accident you could die from. My solution, is that Sandra will always have a buddy, and usually it will be 2 buddies. The 3 buddy team is really the only way DIR can be "approximated", as George and I could be DIR buddies, and we both are keeping an eye on Sandra. We will not expect her to see either of us having a problem, but since there are 2 DIR buddies, plus her, this is fine. Spearfishing works kind of the same way..better with 1 spearfisherman and 2 DIR buddies....but with 2 spearfisherman they can take turns shooting and watching...it is not really a problem, and is actually more fun to be diving with your friends, than to be diving solo. Again, this is comon sense, it just happens that we have bundled a bunch of what we think are good common sense ideas together--many that existed 20 years before George or I had ever heard of them....and then began trying to push these out to counter mis-information .
REgards,
Dan V
