In defense of Casual Divers

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TheRedHead:
When new divers don't dive regularly in controlled environments, they lose the basic skills they learned in OW class. They become the kind of divers that everyone points out as being unskilled and/or dangerous.

The winter does not present any opportunity locally for the "casual diver" where I live. I do keep diving until the river freezes (no offence to the ice diver types, it is just not in my list of things to do). So, when it comes time to look at heading to warmer climates for a winter vacation we head off to................THE POOL. Not a bad place to practice most of the skills so that when we get to the vacation destination we have one less thing to worry about.

My LDS offers a commitment that if you have taken any training with them you can have access to the pools they use without charge at any time they are running a class. They will even look to provide a DM if you want to work through a more formal SCUBA review (I don't make any money being DM for these sessions).

Most of the folks I dive with (my wife included) are the casual diver types. They know their limits and do take advantage of the pool so that can truly enjoy the vacation. The first dive is always a bit of a relearning experience, especially the adaptation between fresh/salt, a 5 mil/3 mil suit, and lots of sun.
 
BKP:
I agree with you 100%.

However, don't you need to also factor in risk? Cave and technical divers expose themselves to much more apparent risks -- and I'm not sure I'd classify them as casual (and good divers/poor divers present themselves in those categories as well). So, you'd naturally expect a larger percentage of deco/ooa/etc. statistics there... no?

I admit to not having read the DAN reports you cite (and perhaps I will... strike that... I WILL take a look), and I absolutely agree with your contention re: the agencies willingness (or lack thereof) to change stride...

Cave and technical divers may expose themselves to more things that are potential risks but the actual risk level has more to do with the ability to manage those risks.

Who is more likely to get hurt, a cave diver doing a cave dive that's well within their training, skill and experience or a recreational diver who isn't very good at any aspect of diving...ie the later is, IMO, an example of a case where all dives are beyond their training, skill and experience. Whether or not they survive is a matter of luck and the skill of their DM. Take away the DM and it's just dumb luck.

The fact is that you can live through being a pretty poor diver. Lets face it, you can sink to the bottom, walk around a while and climb the rope back up and probably not get hurt or killed. The industry takes full advantage of that by contending that they are doing something right in training because only a few people get killed. Only a few would get killed without the training. I dived for years with no training at all and I had a blast and never got hurt. Is that evidence that my training was good? It can't be because I hadn't had any training.

Divers are buying access not training. Since they have the access we have to provide supervision. I'm pretty much ok with that. What I'm not ok with is when one of those poor shmucks starts thinking that they can dive, try it on their own and go get themselves hurt, in part, because they have been lied to and mislead by some one they thought they could trust.

Probably the most disturbing case I've seen wasn't even one where anyone was killed. I've writen about it before but it was a dad, mom and little boy on a dive in a local quarry. They were sitting on the wing of a sunken airplane at about 30 ft and there wasn't much going on. Mom started to freak for no reason that I could see (I was later told that she just got uncomfortable). Dad had his hands full trying to figure out what to do with mom and they ended up getting themselves in some real trouble and Jr was left on his own. Dad tried to take mom to the surface but they were negative so when they slid off the wing of the plane they sunk to the bottom even though they were kicking toward the saurface. They dropped to the bottom where they were ungulfed in a cloud of silt and now the vis is ZERO. When they did start to actually ascend, they just about reached light speed by the time they reached the surface. They turned a little discomfort into an honest to goodness life threatening emergency. IMO, those three divers are subjected to unacceptable risk on any dive, anyplace on the face of the planet.

Later, I had the chance to talk with Jr who was pretty upset after seeing his mother pulled from the water screaming. In keeping with the thread title, I would like nothing better than to defend these casual divers. Who do we defend them from though? Me? The agency? The dive shop? ok, blame them but some one handed them their cards and lead them to believe that they could handle a nice 30 ft dive in the good vis that we had that day. I have little doubt that they could have skated through 99 out of 100 OW class at the exact same skill level that thay demonstrated that day.

Taking a casual approach to diving goals is one thing...sure just go watch the pretty fish. Taking a casual approach the the skills that are involved in just that sort of dive though is just plain stupid. Encouraging or excusing an approach like that, IMO, should be criminal.

There was another case that really got to me though I know of several that are very similar. I wasn't there that day but my son was and BTW, there is a long thread on this board someplace discussing the incident. A diver was on an AOW deep dive. As I recall, one of his fins came off at about 80 ft, he lost control of his buoyancy sunk to 100 ft or so, paniced and hit the surface unconcious and not breathing. He lived and even came onto this board later to defend his instructor. Why take a student deep if they can't do a decent job of diving shallow? Might not a fin come off at any time? Just the other day, I was on a very casual dive just to look at the fish. My left big toe was hurting so I took my fin off for a while. The good news is that every one lived and didn't even need an ambulance because I can dive with one fin or even no fins. I won't win many races without fins but it doesn't have any effect on my ability to control up and down moevement. The injured student, however, was almost certainly trimmed head up and therefor diving negative and would certainly need his fins to control his depth. Lots of divers have that skill issue and while most don't get hurt because of it, some do and the solution is NOT usually taught in recreational classes. Should it be? I think so.

Worse, this business of teach divers to dump air and fin to the surface is stupid beyond description. They don't have much of a chance at controling an ascent if they lose a fin do they? Would we consider being able to control an ascent important to even the most casual diving? I would.

I won't say that these divers WILL die because of it but they might and some ARE going to. Every year a few do and the industry doesn't learn a thing from it. Applying just a little of bit of common sense in what we teach and how we teach it can avoid some of them. It's not very many people and we aren't stepping over the bodies but as long as defenders of "casual diving" want to keep bringing up the liklelyhood of death I have to point out that the nonsense that we are teaching and what we are failing to teach is killing some number of people that I believe would live a lot longer otherwise. Hell, it's only a few so who cares?

It's not always rusty divers or out of practice divers but rather it's often divers that never knew what they need to know in the first place. The evidence that they probably never learned it in the first place can be found right in the agency training standards. You don't need any statistics or complicated analysis to see it either.
 
Hey, Tedtim. I dive regularly in the pool too. The point I was trying to make is the initial "love affair" that prompted us to drive 360 miles RT to the quarry (in the summer, yes, it was nuts!) reinforced our basic OW class. If we had not felt that we could dive independently after OW and waited for opportunities to dive with an instructor or DM, it would not have been as beneficial. At that time, I didn't know about any of these arguments and I just wanted to dive. It never occurred to me that I couldn't or shouldn't.
 
TheRedHead:
I did my OW checkout dives in a quarry that was 53 feet deep. After certification, my newly certified OW buddy and I spent just about every weekend exploring every inch, every nook and cranny of the quarry. While we having fun and not exceeding the depth of the environment in which we were trained to dive, I'm sure we improved our skills by diving and by watching and talking to more experienced divers. When we went to Belize and made a 70 foot dive, it was pretty easy. I think that is the way dive training is supposed to work. I don't think it would be "stupid" for a new diver to dive in a place like Key Largo in 20-30 feet of water without supervision or to dive in their local quarry where they did their checkout dives.

We have a fair number of accidents in some of these local quarries. You can just sit and watch all the messed up dives and divers poping to the surface but most don't get hurt.
When new divers don't dive regularly in controlled environments, they lose the basic skills they learned in OW class. They become the kind of divers that everyone points out as being unskilled and/or dangerous.

You can't lose what you never had.
 
MikeFerrara:
We have a fair number of accidents in some of these local quarries. You can just sit and watch all the messed up dives and divers poping to the surface but most don't get hurt.

I think my OW training was pretty good, it was 4 week course, but it didn't include alternative finning. My initial BC was ill-fitting and I was overweighted, but I stayed off the bottom and never corked (I have never corked, even in training). At no time did I feel unsafe. I have been swimming since I was a tot and snorkled for years before diving. There is something to be said for being comfortable in the water before taking OW class. I think perhaps some of the panic situations are caused by the fact they are not comfortable. Frankly, I think some people just shouldn't dive at all.
 
Rick Murchison:
Yep, yep... indeed...
However... there are a great many people who just don't want to hear or acknowledge or learn "the truth," especially if it requires that they rub two brain cells together. They are content to be sheep; they cling to "ignorance is bliss" with uncommon tenacity! I gave up trying to understand that mindset a long time ago... it's one of those things that's just there, and attempting to overcome it is a low percentage game. (Do try, but don't be too disappointed if your efforts are in vain. These folks want to be ignorant.) What amazes me is that some of the worst offenders have reached high station in other areas... MD, PhD etc. They just don't want to be bothered with all that mundane stuff like diving safety - that's what they're paying the peons to do. (There is a whole other discussion on the mindset that high rank/status/education exempts the holder from the laws of physics, but let's not get into that here)

When these folks want to dive, then, what's the safest way? They want to be led, and they want to be followed, and they're willing to pay folks to do it. I reckon the best we can do is take their money and keep a very close eye on 'em.
Rick


This addresses the key point here and Rick you are so right. To a lot of people on vacation, diving is not unlike taking any other tour, they want to go down, look around and then go out and have a nice dinner. They don't want to go over skills and actually "work" at it. In these cases and they encompass most divers because most divers are vacation divers, it's the DMs and or instructors that "tour" them around and babysit them. They are not looking for challenges and are quite content to look around a shallow reef.

I would say that well trained DMs or guides are very important. These people might have had excellent instructors and been very contentious divers when they first started but doing 4 dives a year erodes their skills over time. Of course they might not have had proper training or not been good divers coming out of class either. The main point here is...

When these folks want to dive, then, what's the safest way? They want to be led, and they want to be followed, and they're willing to pay folks to do it. I reckon the best we can do is take their money and keep a very close eye on 'em. :)

Excellent post Rick. We may not think this is the best way but that is the reality.

EDIT: I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting to dive that way as long as they keep track of their gas and listen to the DMs.
 
TheRedHead:
Hey, Tedtim. I dive regularly in the pool too. The point I was trying to make is the initial "love affair" that prompted us to drive 360 miles RT to the quarry (in the summer, yes, it was nuts!) reinforced our basic OW class. If we had not felt that we could dive independently after OW and waited for opportunities to dive with an instructor or DM, it would not have been as beneficial. At that time, I didn't know about any of these arguments and I just wanted to dive. It never occurred to me that I couldn't or shouldn't.

When I was first certified I was diving several days a week. We have a quarry close to where I live that we had unlimited access to back then. After my OW class, I teamed up with a friend who was certified but hadn't dived in a while and we took an AOW class together. All of our diving together was AFTER the AOW class.

If I could only even count the number of times that we tried to descend in that quarry and lost eachother having to surface to reunite and start over. LOL

Once it got cold, his cheezy reg promptly started free flowing on every dive (and yes it had been serviced) so we had more eventful descents and ascents.
About the time my wife started diving it didn't take long to find out why it's important to be able to deal with a flooded or missing mask midwater.

When we went on a trip with a local shop. On one deepish dive the vis and current was bad so my wife and I were to chicken to leave the down line. We went up and hung out closer to the boat and got to watch as the rest of the group came racing back with half of them out of air. LOL and they were all watching their guages just like they had been taught. They just didn't know when to turn and head back.

We didn't get hurt but we sure came close about a million times and it was exactly the things that we were taught and hadn't yet relearned that kept getting us into trouble.
 
Unfortunately when you travel to other places you are going to come across people you don't feel are as experienced as you or the so called "casual diver", when we go to Maui 95% of the time when we are on a boat we are with people who we feel are less experienced than us and well frankly are a little scary. When we dive a boat, they always have 2 DM's that take 2 groups, we play along and do our dive, we try to stay out of the way of the other divers and pay attention to the DM guiding the dive, more out of respect, we are also DM's. I don't think condoning the "casual diver" for there lack of skills is ok, I think if you are in the water you should be able to at a minimum know how your gear works and how to be safe. I give the DM's alot a credit who work at resorts they deal with a large variety of people which requires a large amount of patience.
 
I am really baffled lately by some of the attitudes? Are you resentful that there are less experienced Divers in the world? Are you resentful that some folks are more experienced?

Do you resent that some busy, career involved individuals or parents that are busily trying to raise/nuture their kids can only tear themselves away to enjoy our sport for only 4 days - A week a year. That some of these like diving but prefer (and are willing to pay for) the accompaning Divemasters to assist and show them things thay would likely never be able to find on their own. They may find themselves with more time, disposable income and opportunities to become more accomplished, more frequent, divers later in life.

Do you resent that that some of you had longer, more strenuous certifications or some had lousy shorter certifications?

I for one enjoy diving. I would NEVER have considered a No VIZ dive early on, nor would I have made a 150 foot dive during my 4-10 dives per year period of life.

I have however managed to maintain my fascination with it for some 17 years and hope to be able do it for another 17!

I hope to do some more personally challenging dives yet also hope to have the opportunity to do some more 30 foot/60 + minute Key Largo/Bonaire reef dives too. I might even dive accompanied by a (another) Divemaster if I do something that is outside my comfort zone or different from my experience level, who knows!

Can't we all enjoy our diving and accept others (WHERE they are) in their Dive experiences and hope/help them progress as safe/r responsible dive buddies and aquaintences WITHOUT bashing and dissecting their every action/mistake or deviations from OUR chosen certification paths?

I really was trying to stay away from the tired old "Can't we ALL just Get Along?" cliche BUT . . . . .
 
I can see a lot of points of view on this thread. I've dived with tourists who needed DMs, understand the concern about lack of stills too. Personally, I could not dive 4 days per year. It would be too frustrating and painful. I have noticed recently more a shift from posters urging all new divers to get rescue certified to more of a emphasis on the failure of OW training. I have to wonder how this makes new divers feel? Maybe that would make a good thread.
 
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