Incident During OW Training- What do you do?

[battles2a5]

Hi all. Well I'm new to this board and I am also new to diving. After a discover scuba 2-tank dive in Costa Rica, I decided to take a 2 week dive trip and get my OW and AOW. I'm up to about 21 dives now and have really taken a liking to the sport.

An incident that occured during my training has been bothering me. This happened during OW dive #3 of my OW training. We were in about 40 ft of water with pretty heavy surge that made visibility on the bottom pretty poor. We were kneeling on the bottom doing BC drills when the following incident occurred:

- I was doing a BC drill were you roll out of the BC, re-buckle the shoulder strap, then pull the BC back over your head and buckle everything back together.
- As soon as I rolled out of it I took my reg out so I could un-twist my air hose (as was instructed). When I put the reg back in my mouth, I pulled for air and got a mouth full of water. I coughed, tried again, and got the same result. As I mention above the bottom visibility was bad, and my BC apart, so I had trouble finding my octo.
- I ended up giving the "no air" signal to my instructor and swimming to him to get air.
- We reassembled my kit and once I had it back on, I was able to get air from my octo and we did a controlled ascent.

So here's the problem. Once we got back on shore I inspected my regulator. Upon inspection I noticed that my mouthpiece had split where it connects to the secondary. I could almost fit 2 fingers in the hole. So it makes sense that it would pull water. I also noticed that the entire mouthpiece was dry rotted. Now before I get flamed the first thing I thought of was "you are an idiot for going in the water with this thing" but we never really addressed pre-dive safetly to that level of detail during training. I completely accept a large part of the blame for going down with that mouthpiece, but how does a dive instructor or dive shop operator let ANYONE, let alone a brand new dive student, in the water with that sort of gear? After this incident, I inspected the other students' gear and found several mouthpieces that were in desparate need of replacement. I even instructed other divers with the shop to inspect their gear before they left the dock and we found several more that we replaced but would have been used on a dive.

Once I started my AOW, I was told that there were some other things that my first instructor never addressed in addition to the safety inspections. For instance, he never really addressed bouyancy checks, just loaded us down with enough weight to sink us once we deflated our BC's. There were some other issues as well.

Anyway, the long of the short is, what do you do in this situation? Do you report the dive shop to PADI? DAN? Is there any type of recourse for these type of incidents? I just can't help imagining somebody panicking and getting hurt (or worse) due to negligence when it could have been prevented if the proper people were notified.

Any insight from the more experienced folks here would be helpful.

Thanks!

(P.S. I have since developed my own safety checklist that I do meticulously for myself and my buddy before going down. I do NOT want that to ever happen again).

 

[PerroneFord]

Sounds pretty typical. Poor rental equipment, overweighted students. Easy money.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

If you feel that there was actual and willful negligence on the part of the shop or the instructor then by all means notify the agency that they represent. The fact that there was more than one bad mouthpiece really concerns me. Many times a shop will have alot of rentals reg sets and it is possible to overlook one that may not have been regularly used. More than that however is a sign of laziness, sloppiness, and perhaps neglecting to properly service the gear. My job as a DM candidate and manager of the shop is to at least visually inspect every piece of rental gear after it has been used either in the pool or elsewhere. We also keep detailed service records of our rental gear. Things like mouthpieces, o-rings, guages and the like are easy enough to check. Any problems at all and I replace these things or refer them to the owner for more extensive service. The weighting thing is another common though easily taught skill that gets overlooked by many from what I've read on this board and seen in actual practice. Basically it is nothing more than plain old fashioned laziness on the part of the instructor who sounds like he is trying to rush you through. To me it's unforgivable since it's a skill that takes maybe 5 minutes to demonstrate and have you do. On this I would defintiely report to the certifying agency since it is a BASIC issue that is covered in the PADI ow manual at least. To not show you and have you do it is a crock. This is why you keep a log to record what weight you use so next time you don't have to guess. And then each time you enter a different environment you do it again or when going from a skin to a 7mil you do it again and before long you no longer have to guess what weight you need. You either remember or you look in your log. You can notify PADI at their address and mark it attention to their Quality Control Dept. I would strongly advise you to do this. As long as lazy instructors are allowed to get away with this they will.

 

[mart1]

Send a report with all complaints to PADI, Quality Assurance department.

 

[battles2a5]

To give a more detailed description of the gear, the mouthpieces on my secondary AND octo were both dry-rotted. The other guy that was getting certified had 2 dry-rotted mouthpieces as well. We went out on a trip with 8-9 other divers and there were several (3-4) that needed new mouthpieces and 2 that had leaking secondarys (assuming bad exhaust valves??). So needless to say, equipment maintenance and safety was definitely in question and I would not call my mouthpiece an isolated incident.

On the flip side, I took my AOW with a different shop and was very impressed with the quality and upkeep of their gear, and the lessons I learned improved my diving greatly. The peak bouyancy performance dive changed the way I dive, literally. I never realized what an impact proper weighting had on my diving until I had some proper instruction.

So maybe I will contact PADI. I just keep thinking of trying to talk someone I care about into getting certified and unknowingly exposiing them to those risks. Thanks for the input

 

[cool_hardware52]

Battles,

The current state of basic dive training is kinda frightening. I don't mean to paint with a broad brush, there are very good instructors, but production line scuba mills abound.

Good Job not freaking out. BC half off, no octo, no vis, dive #3, many would bolt for the surface.

Guess you got a few unplanned lessons; you are ultimately responsible for your own gear, and there's a bunch of really necessary info they don't teach you in BOW.

Hopefully you can find local mentors. Not only are these folks a great way to fill in some of the missing details, and provide local knowledge, they can help you pre-qualify the instructors you might be considering for more training.

Tobin

 

[oly5050user]

Hi all. Well I'm new to this board and I am also new to diving. After a discover scuba 2-tank dive in Costa Rica, I decided to take a 2 week dive trip and get my OW and AOW. I'm up to about 21 dives now and have really taken a liking to the sport.

An incident that occured during my training has been bothering me. This happened during OW dive #3 of my OW training. We were in about 40 ft of water with pretty heavy surge that made visibility on the bottom pretty poor. We were kneeling on the bottom doing BC drills when the following incident occurred:

- I was doing a BC drill were you roll out of the BC, re-buckle the shoulder strap, then pull the BC back over your head and buckle everything back together.
- As soon as I rolled out of it I took my reg out so I could un-twist my air hose (as was instructed). When I put the reg back in my mouth, I pulled for air and got a mouth full of water. I coughed, tried again, and got the same result. As I mention above the bottom visibility was bad, and my BC apart, so I had trouble finding my octo.
- I ended up giving the "no air" signal to my instructor and swimming to him to get air.
- We reassembled my kit and once I had it back on, I was able to get air from my octo and we did a controlled ascent.

So here's the problem. Once we got back on shore I inspected my regulator. Upon inspection I noticed that my mouthpiece had split where it connects to the secondary. I could almost fit 2 fingers in the hole. So it makes sense that it would pull water. I also noticed that the entire mouthpiece was dry rotted. Now before I get flamed the first thing I thought of was "you are an idiot for going in the water with this thing" but we never really addressed pre-dive safetly to that level of detail during training. I completely accept a large part of the blame for going down with that mouthpiece, but how does a dive instructor or dive shop operator let ANYONE, let alone a brand new dive student, in the water with that sort of gear? After this incident, I inspected the other students' gear and found several mouthpieces that were in desparate need of replacement. I even instructed other divers with the shop to inspect their gear before they left the dock and we found several more that we replaced but would have been used on a dive.

Once I started my AOW, I was told that there were some other things that my first instructor never addressed in addition to the safety inspections. For instance, he never really addressed bouyancy checks, just loaded us down with enough weight to sink us once we deflated our BC's. There were some other issues as well.

Anyway, the long of the short is, what do you do in this situation? Do you report the dive shop to PADI? DAN? Is there any type of recourse for these type of incidents? I just can't help imagining somebody panicking and getting hurt (or worse) due to negligence when it could have been prevented if the proper people were notified.

Any insight from the more experienced folks here would be helpful.

Thanks!

(P.S. I have since developed my own safety checklist that I do meticulously for myself and my buddy before going down. I do NOT want that to ever happen again).

BCD removal/replacement IS NOT A SKILL to be done during ow 3..only in confined water..add this to the fact of faulty rental gear(which can happen ,as the last person who used it may not have reported that it broke-giving the dive facility a benefit of doubt)shows there is a problem with the facility you were at..

 

[TheRedHead]

Battles, buy yourself a good reg and keep it serviced. I've seen all kinds of crappy regulator rentals. I'm glad you came away unhurt!

 

[battles2a5]

Yep, I'm in the market for gear as we speak (er... type). I figure I'll be doing this for awhile so I'd rather pick up some good gear than run the risk of getting more bad rental equipment.

 

[Otter]

BCD removal/replacement IS NOT A SKILL to be done during ow 3..only in confined water..add this to the fact of faulty rental gear(which can happen ,as the last person who used it may not have reported that it broke-giving the dive facility a benefit of doubt)shows there is a problem with the facility you were at..

Or a troll. As you point out, at least for PADI, BC R&R underwater is not an O/W skill. Secondly, when taught in confined water, the student is not taught to (1) unsnap his shoulder buckle, (2) pull the BCD over his/her head, nor (3) to remove the reg.

If this is all on the up and up, then YES DEFINITELY CALL PADI and tell them about the INSTRUCTOR (not following STANDARDS as mentioned above, PLUS not teaching Buoyancy check NOR BWRAF safety check.)

If the instructor was really this deficient, I would suggest that you go back to the shop and tell them you want an new instructor and a free O/W class. Who knows what other skills you were not taught. At this point, it sounds like 20% of the basic skills are missing or incorrect. Based upon what you have said, I would strongly discourage you from AOW....you aren't ready to dive deep.