Incident on 80m (avg) - 30 min BT dive

[beester]

Where did I write "it makes it OK"?
Where is the vetting by GUE divers that they were dealing with one of theirs? What is this bashing of non GUE divers bringing to the analysis of this incident?

I'm sorry but I don't get this emphasis on GUE or non GUE? Maybe I'm misreading something but the only GUE vs NON GUE thing that popped up in this topic was off topic and was about instructors and how they teach.

For your information diver X is GUE trained. This was confirmed by the JJ divers, he had finished a GUE fundies class. In fact he must like GUE because his double 18 set had a GUE sticker on it.

Assuming the OP would have dived with a non GUE diver had he known he wasn't GUE-certified (but from my understanding, this a purely rethorical hypothesis), he ended up with a diver who lost it during the ascent. Why is that? Did the diver push the boundaries and dive outside his comfort zone? Nothing in the description of the dive indicates it was particularly challenging. Was he experiencing something unusual? Was he stressed by the overbearing attitude of his buddy team (too much love kills love)?
After all, everyone seemed to know each other (edit: actually, I reread the 1st post and what I first remembered was incorrect: X was known by the two guys the OP knew well), and they had not warned the OP about the dire unpreparedness of X beforehand.
I get the angst and frustration of the OP, but I find the analysis a bit lacking in empathy...

Aren't you reading too much into this?

Facts are:
- it was an engaging dive (I'm not sure about you but every dive with 1 hour of deco or more is an engaging dive in my book. This was a dive with a runtime of 155 minutes and 2 hours of deco). Your mileage may vary of course.

- We only acted on the tank rotation, before that it was just reminding him about stuff and communicating and making sure he was on the correct gas. I mean in our GUE context (team diving) a solo tank switch is not done, so it's the job of the team to make sure that everybody makes the correct gas switch. If you think this is overbearing, or too much love then you clearly have a different take on team diving. In your opinion should I have left him alone during his tank rotation when he was sinking, when we saw he had only 50b of O² (at his breathing rate at that moment 5 min of gas), leave him to his devices? Don't think so.

- Unpreparedness: I'm assuming that the JJ divers had done quite some dives with him, maybe not up to this range but still. Why would they otherwise invite him to this dive? (To be honest I can contact one of the JJ divers and ask him this).

- Empathy: I'm fully empathic, but it has no place in a analyses. It has a place on board after the dive, and we were fully empathic then, helping him out. I try to stick to "my facts" as I saw them. You are very right that a real analyses needs the point of view of X as well. I'll reach out to the JJ divers, but I'm not sure I'll be able to manage this because he does not speak english very well. However I refuse to deal with your assumptions. Never in these posts do I attack diver X. I'm not saying (and I don't believe) he is a stupid diver, or has no skill or whatever. We are all human and we all make mistakes. I am harsh on myself and the only reason I post this is because I think we as a community can learn from this, but also for me to get pointers on how to improve my handling of the situation. Finally I protect all divers involved by not disclosing any specifics which could identify both X, the JJ divers or my RB80 friend.

 

[cathal]

First of all well done on managing an 'interesting' ascent. I hope one day if I find myself in that situation I can match your outcome i.e no one was hurt and everyone got to go home! Secondly thank you for your honest, objective and fair reporting of this dive. This type diving is a recreational pastime that is not governed by any statutory government agency who could impose mandatory checks on qualifications like in aviation. So all you can do is what you have done, take a lessons learned approach from a thorough debrief of the dive and well done once again.

 

[uwxplorer]

I am not critical of the OP, who did a great job in presenting the fact as he experienced them. I was just wondering whether maybe, just maybe, there were other elements of information which could shed additional light to the root cause of the problems. If you are sick or incapacitated for whatever reason, for instance, maintaining buoyancy, following a protocol, etc, can become a problem.
I was under the impression that the analysis leaned heavily towards concluding X was out of his element and not trained the "right" way...

 

[Germie]

We talk about an incident, happely it was not a real accident, happely, but a more or less dangerous situation. A diver who was certified, agency isn't important went into a dive an some things went almost wrong. That is what I read.
Then let's go to some details and questions:
-Diver X is certified full trimix diver. Ok, that means he has been at least 1 time to about 72-75m as that is the minimum depth of most full trimix courses. It does not say he did a long bottomtime or went deeper.
-Diver X seems to have done some normoxic dives with some other teammembers without problems. We don't know about the maximum deco in this dives.
-Has Diver X more experience on full trimix dives? If yes, what was the maximum amount of deco he has done? how many dives in the 80+ region?
-What was the maximum depth of diver X before doing this dive to 80m?
-Has someone of the team asked him or told you about his experience? Has he done a recent full trimix dives?

EVERY diver can get into a sort of freeze by stress. This can be depth, lenght of deco, etc. This can happing at every moment in every dive. This is mentioned in courses too. 80m is a SERIOUS depth, 2 hours of deco is REALLY LONG. If you are not so experienced, this can give you stress. Other factors can contribute too and even an experienced diver can get into trouble, don't forget that.
Maybe diver X wrote down his decoplan so in details as he was already a little bit worried about the dive. Did you ask him why he wrote down all the details of the diveplan? It is a normal question and maybe he likes this, or maybe he will tell you that he is a little bit worried.

Then you went diving. All went fine? No signes of stress? ok. Then the way up. Crap 2 hours deco can be a thought by diver X. He could have thought, how will I survive this? "I have never handled this" he can be thinking. Forget the first switch? Stress? Do a solo switch? Stress? Not holding bouyancy, holding a line, stress? 50 bars oxygen left, stress? Bottle rotation, not done for a long time, stress?

Have you talked with diver X about this (language problem?)? Did he gave arguments? Was there support in case the SAC of a diver would be higher as expected? (how can 50 bars left be possible, not check before the dive or higher RMV/SAC than expected?)

If you want to learn from this, the agency someone is certified is not important. It is the rest of the background. AND if the diver who got in trouble (diver X) wants to talk about it and see things went wrong. Everybody must learn. Maybe this dive was too much for him. Even if he is certified.
Maybe he is not willing to talk and ignore things (yes, that can happen too). But if you want to learn from this, you need to know the opinion from diver X too.
Most important is that you talk with your team about the dive is such at thing happened. Then you know if you can dive again with him or not.

And don't forget, every diver has to learn. Refusing a diver by being less experienced will not help him further. But maybe doing a 20 minute bottomtime instead of a 30 minute can build up experience and can give you all a nice dive without stress. Maybe take him not to this dive, but do another nice dive with him. Less deep, less deco. Maybe invite him to practise the rotations when being at home again so he can become more confident with this.
And if it is really a person who thinks he does nothhing

 

[leadduck]

(...) The diveshop owner told us X was a GUE trained tech diver, and introduced us. He knew all the other divers and we did a light T1 dive with him, with everything going as planned, nothing out of the ordinary.
(...)

The wreck lies in 88m depth (bottom) and we planned for an avg of 80m (260ft) and 25-30' bottom time
(...)

So what did we learn:

- Not to take a referral for granted when it comes to this kind of dives. The JJ divers told me he was GUE trained but apparently when asking he told us he had done fundies but had then continued doing TX training with another agency (ie not knowing all our procedures?). Not sure how to approach this in the future.

(...)

I'm not a tech diver but even for the dives that I do, whenever I get a new buddy, I found the small talk before the dive very important, no matter what others had told me about him. Not like a formal interview, but just chatting for a minute about each others experience, training, last dives, how does everyone feel today, when was the last time of each team member that they did that kind of dive we'll do now, ..., getting to know each other, really quick and easy. Also my PADI RD instructor taught that the best way to avoid needing rescue skills is to never omit the small talk before the dive, it's not for fun but you do it on purpose and it can save you so much trouble.
So I'm surprised that tech divers don't do the small talk before an 88m dive with 2hrs deco? That looks like a grave mistake to me, whereas the way you handled the problem under water seems to be executed perfectly (I can't judge).

 

[beester]

I'm not a tech diver but even for the dives that I do, whenever I get a new buddy, I found the small talk before the dive very important, no matter what others had told me about him. Not like a formal interview, but just chatting for a minute about each others experience, training, last dives, how does everyone feel today, when was the last time of each team member that they did that kind of dive we'll do now, ..., getting to know each other, really quick and easy. Also my PADI RD instructor taught that the best way to avoid needing rescue skills is to never omit the small talk before the dive, it's not for fun but you do it on purpose and it can save you so much trouble.
So I'm surprised that tech divers don't do the small talk before an 88m dive with 2hrs deco? That looks like a grave mistake to me, whereas the way you handled the problem under water seems to be executed perfectly (I can't judge).

Heya Leadduck. You are totally right a quick fact check and talk before a dive is very warranted. Specially if you don't know eachother. That is sound advice.

You can't know this but what lured us in not doing this is GUE and it's very standardised way of diving. This means that it's possible to dive with people that you can barely communicate with on the surface (language barrier) but still do technical dives with. Because all procedures are the same, we "speak" the same language underwater. Gas plan is easy, deco is easy, switch depths are easy, deco gasses are easy, how to handle equipment... all that is standardised.

That being said... maybe because it's so standardised we did get lured into safety and didn't have the little talk (maybe with hand and feet if there was a language barrier... or involve the JJ divers who did speak diver X his language).

 

[beester]

We talk about an incident, happely it was not a real accident, happely, but a more or less dangerous situation. A diver who was certified, agency isn't important went into a dive an some things went almost wrong. That is what I read.
Then let's go to some details and questions:
-Diver X is certified full trimix diver. Ok, that means he has been at least 1 time to about 72-75m as that is the minimum depth of most full trimix courses. It does not say he did a long bottomtime or went deeper.
-Diver X seems to have done some normoxic dives with some other teammembers without problems. We don't know about the maximum deco in this dives.
-Has Diver X more experience on full trimix dives? If yes, what was the maximum amount of deco he has done? how many dives in the 80+ region?
-What was the maximum depth of diver X before doing this dive to 80m?
-Has someone of the team asked him or told you about his experience? Has he done a recent full trimix dives?

Unfortunately Germie I don't know this. You are totally right that we need diver X his point of view. Unfortunately he's not part of my diving team, we met him during wreck dives abroad. So I can't answer above questions. I'll forward them to the JJ divers, because X is in their diving circle. Hopefully they'll be able to get some feedback. Although I'm not sure that they want to talk about it (I already texted them).

I was assuming (yes I know assumption is the mother of all fck ups) that he was GUE T2. To be honest after the T2 course you are normally ready to do 70-80m dives (you've done gas failures and gas sharing ascends from that depth... you've been taskloaded to the hilt at depth and trained to that depth so shouldn't be a big issue). Doing a 2 h deco dive to that depth right after course is something else of course. Same goes for other federations.

EVERY diver can get into a sort of freeze by stress. This can be depth, lenght of deco, etc. This can happing at every moment in every dive. This is mentioned in courses too. 80m is a SERIOUS depth, 2 hours of deco is REALLY LONG. If you are not so experienced, this can give you stress. Other factors can contribute too and even an experienced diver can get into trouble, don't forget that.

For sure... we are all human and fallible... we all make mistakes. Within my inner circle I am very open to my fellow divers/friends. If I feel not at ease I'll mention it before the dive and together we'll evaluate if we do the dive or not. If we do the dive I know they will be mentally already sandwiching me (cave term as you know, to indicate that you try to protect the most exposed diver). Same goes when I'm slowly extending my range. I will tell out that the dive we are going to do is a next step for me and that they need to watch out for me. In a group that you don't know very well it of course is much harder to speak out (peer pressure, don't want to sound "weak, whatever). I've been victim to that as well in the past. I'm not sure what happened, was it just a one off where he had a bad day, or was diver X trying to expose himself to bigger dives to quickly I don't know.

Maybe diver X wrote down his decoplan so in details as he was already a little bit worried about the dive. Did you ask him why he wrote down all the details of the diveplan? It is a normal question and maybe he likes this, or maybe he will tell you that he is a little bit worried.

Then you went diving. All went fine? No signes of stress? ok. Then the way up. Crap 2 hours deco can be a thought by diver X. He could have thought, how will I survive this? "I have never handled this" he can be thinking. Forget the first switch? Stress? Do a solo switch? Stress? Not holding bouyancy, holding a line, stress? 50 bars oxygen left, stress? Bottle rotation, not done for a long time, stress?

We didn't get the clue when he was planning in a different way. To be honest I made a mental note of it but was too "Belgian" to comment on it. I felt at that time that everybody can note the plan down in whatever way he wants. But you were right that might have been an indicator of stress (trying to note down every little detail). Unfortunately I didn't catch it.

On the boat there was no indication whatsoever that something was amiss. I'm tuned to looking for stressed divers on the boat (unneccessary fiddling with equipment, being very loud or very quiet, repeating the plan too many times) . None of that was the case.

Like I stated in my inital post the descend was a bit slow (we waited for him) but nothing special, bottom phase was ok (he was a bit absent but reacted fine to our plan to extend to 30'). First indication for me was the solo gas switch at 57m, but I just took note of it and me and my buddy (RB80) double checked that he was breathing the correct gas.

You are totally right on everything else. For him to move on from this scare is to get some mentoring and some gentle briefs. If I was diver X I would have been very scared and would need some time to process everything. I would also feel guilt and blame and would not be sure if I would continue diving. But that's me. In any case I do hope that his network (JJ divers and others) will keep track of him, get him back in the water and slowly mentor him into bigger things again.

If I find anything out from the JJ divers I'll post accordingly.

 

[Germie]

The problem with this is that you sometimes see stress only afterwards, you missed the signs/signals when it happened. That is really difficult.

I know how difficult it can be to ask the right questions before a dive and be aware of signals someone is not comfortable. Some divers look experienced if you talk with them but are not. Or really lie.
The ones who tell you 'I am not so experienced at this depth' are not the ones you have to worry about. They know their weaknesses, or are at least not ignoring them. You only have to think by yourself or by your team, can we handle an more inexperienced diver on this dive? The 'if you don't feel confident to do the dive solo, then don't do it' is right in this. It is not telling you you have to dive solo, it is a DIR approach that you too, that every teammember must feel good enough to do the dive AND be able to help a teammember. If not, then you have to talk about it. Every experienced diver was an inexperienced diver, so give everybody a chance. But do it within your abilities.
I guess the ccr divers where most experienced. Did they react on "mistakes" of diver X? Or let they do it the other oc divers? This is importent for YOU for learning from this. You wrote you are not the most experienced diver on this level. Not wrong, but then ask by yourself: did you feel confident enough to do 30 minutes at 80m self sufficient in a team or in this team? Or better: Did you feel confident enough to do this dive with a team of less experienced divers than you are (ok, maybe you didn't know the team experience, but you can ask this yourself now)? If not, not wrong, but maybe you reacted a little bit stressed too on the first signs (soloswitch, holding a line, etc). If someone does a soloswitch and I see it is the right cylinder, I will not make a problem under water, think we will discuss this afterwards. If someone says cramp and grap a line, ok, everything is safe, just ask about it after the dive. A slow bottlerotation. Just relax and maybe help. Talk about it after the dive. Maybe just not focussed enough today because of workstress. Not holding bouyancy. PLEASE let a diver grap a line. You sign it to the diver that he looses bouyance, maybe grap him to get the right depth again, but if there is an option as a line or smb, USE THIS. NO STRESS. Stressing under water by you or another teammember can make MORE stress by diver X. Holding a line means at that moment it is in control ( I agree a diver at this level do not need a line, but). That is most important. See the dive this way.

Then back to some things before the dive:
Ok, you don't know a lot about a diver: Then try to find a way to ask about some details. Like SAC/RMV, maximum bottomtime he did at depth X, have done 80m dives with 3 stages, etc. A diver with a high RMV will not fit in your gasplan. Are there options for extra gas? On a 80m dive with 30 minutes bottomtime I really want to know if there is extra gas available in case of...... Just a 50% or 100% on the boat, only going down by a yellow smb for example is not a bad idea.
Another important thing to know in mixed teams: did the JJ divers had teambailout or bailout for their own? This means on a ccr you need at least 3 cylinders if you do bailout for your own. In teambailout for the ccr divers this means they are NOT carrying cylinders for the OC divers. Doing 2 hours deco will mean for some oc divers that one ali 80 with 50% and 1 with 100% is not enough to hold 1/3 reserve. Is talked about this? Was it really 1 team or was it more 2 teams?

Is talked about who is the deco captain? Who switches first, second, third is less important, but someone must be more or less the 'boss'. Normally this is one of the most experienced divers, but there can be a reason to let this do by a less experienced diver to gain experience. From what I read here, a diveplan is made, everybody agreed, but if you don't know the experience from every diver, some more details can be needed. If you are not so experienced this can help you to relax. Or diver X. And this was not discussed?

Yes, I have taken less experienced divers on more demanding dives. But I told other teammembers then: I will be responsible for him. We play the game, but if something goes wrong I will be with him. Then not 3 divers reacting, which can give more stress.

And remember: nobody is perfect, everybody can get into panic or make mistakes. I will be only angry after such a dive if diver X would ignore his mistakes. (yes such divers are there too). Most will give you a reason if you talk to them. And then you can learn and diver X (and the rest of the team).

 

[Centrals]

I had never dived with an complete stranger in any tec dive.

 

[RayfromTX]

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