Lessons learned- embarrassing but true

[Diver0001]

so what are your thoughts on the class? what is going to happen next in the class according to the instructor?

Well... I'll respond to what I've noticed.

1) First of all, there is the usual thing on this thread that you see whenever something goes wrong on a dive. Someone pipes up with "your instructor sucks, this course sucks, the other student's suck you're not getting good enough training etc." I've heard all this before and I"m an instructor myself, albeit not for this course so I feel completely comfortable ignoring that as naive internet posturing. What is important in any diving course (or any course at all for that matter) is where you're at at the END of the course, not part way through. This incident tells me that one of the students is struggling and that there are issues with team cohesion. Those are issues that need work.

Of course all of that was debriefed in considerable detail and the instructor told us that due to these issues we'll be adding more dives to this course, although how many more is not clear. The team also debriefed our plan and decided to revise it such that we have more flexibility next time round.

2) Secondly, the point about the instructor being in a rebreather. I know next to nothing about rebreathers because I normally never dive with people who use them. However, they are becoming more and more common in technical diving and I have no problem at ALL taking this opportunity to learn more about them, both in theory and in practice. Someone mentioned that the instructor needs to model what he wants to see. My point would be that he is doing exactly that with respect to planning, procedure, dive execution, communication and a host of other aspects. We are not beginning divers, however, so I see no need, nor do I have any desire, for my instructor to teach me how to dive in my own gear. The gear I'm using for this course is exactly the same gear I've been diving in for over 10 years and if the instructor dove gear similar to mine then it would add nothing. I've literally learned more by having him in a rebreather.

3) This team was not put together randomly. I know this instructor very well and in terms of just pure diving skills I don't think there's much that I'll take home from this. He knows me very well and knows that I usually dive with the same group of people and that myself and my usual buddies (who he also knows) have a way of executing these dives that works like a machine. So what he decided to do in order to challenge me on some level in this course is (a) pair me up with someone who is less experienced generally and whose experience is mostly in caves and (b) someone who is poor at communication.

The same goes for the other divers. The cave guy has issues with buoyancy control (obviously) and is being forced to face them by being paired up with a diver (me) who is perfectly at ease executing large portions of the deco while swimming in mid water without any reference and is able to do that with a high level of accuracy. He has to face his issue with buoyancy control to the same extent that I have to face my issue with assuming that a diver at his level won't have serious buoyancy issues (more about this in a minute).

The other diver is working on becoming an instructor but is vague and passive about communication, which is contrary to the other two divers who are active and concise in communication under water. His issue, and the reason he is diving with us (he is already Tx certified) is to learn this manner of communication as part of his process of becoming an instructor.

So what has happened here is that the instructor has deliberately assembled THIS team in order to create challenges/conditions that he thinks we can all learn from. He could have assembled a team that works to our individual strengths but his philosophy is that if everything goes smoothly, you probably didn't learn much. So the team is assembled so that each of the divers works into at least one of the other divers' weakness. This is a conscious choice and a good one, if you ask me, at this level of training.

4) I don't personally like diving with guys who work into my allergies. This is the reason I normally dive with a very carefully selected group of divers and not just anybody. I found this incident embarrassing because of the failure of the team and having participated in a bit of a CF. I could easily lay back and say, "oh well, the other guys had some problems but they were not my problems and I'm glad I helped solve them". To me this was a team effort and the team fell apart. This is very confrontational to me but it was also EXACTLY the reason that I decided to take this course and EXACTLY the reason why I asked this particular instructor to teach it. We all say complacency kills and it does. I was getting the feeling that my diving was getting too routine and when I contacted the instructor about it and we talked about it I told him that I thought I needed to be the student again and to confront complacency. Well.... if nothing else, that worked.

5) I've also come way from this with a strong appreciation for standardizing aspects of behaviour as well as gear (ie. the GUE method). The course I'm taking is TDI but a big part of this course has become about getting the team on one page.... i.e. dialing in behaviour. Since we all come from different backgrounds we have to actively work on dynamics. GUE people can gloat now and say, "I told you so", and you would be largely right. It won't change the fact that I'm going to finish this course, but you'll all be happy that the coin has fallen. This experience will also help me teach better OW courses too because I'll be using some of what I'm learning from this in my own teaching.

6) Getting back to the diver with the buoyancy issues. Once again, I'm not the instructor but to be perfectly honest his buoyancy control needs work. More work than I personally think he can put into it while in the middle of a course. At the end of the day, his skills at the END of the course are what's important here but that last dive proved to me at any rate, that he shouldn't be doing mid-water ascents with a deco obligation until he tightens this up. Losing buoyancy control AND over compensating is like first starting a fire and then throwing a bomb into it. I think it's logical to wonder if the student washed out because of this. He hasn't (yet) but he's getting a BIG benefit of the doubt from the instructor because he was diving with someone else's drysuit and was obviously fighting it. The instructor wants to give him a fair shake and see him in his own gear doing the same thing. Personally, I think that's going a bit easy. I might have said to this student to go out and log 10 dives with this kind of ascent between this dive and the next time we try one for the course. As it is, I'm a bit concerned about this student but it's not my call to make. I think if this happens again he should wash out for now and focus on buoyancy control in mid-water for a season. Again, not my call.

7) Someone asked how many dives we've done together. I've done 5 with the cave guy and 3 with with the guy who has communication issues. We got lucky on the first few dives that it all went fine but this dive really brought some stuff to the surface that will help us tighten up the right things going forward. It's left me with a bit of a hang-over but with eyes on the goal I think it was a valuable dive.

R..

 

[beester]

Hi Diver0001,

First of all take below remarks with a grain of salt. Remarking / giving critique is always hard to do in a balanced way on a forum. It's much easier face to face.

That being said. Referring to the points you made: WHAT WAS THE GOAL OF THE TRAINING / THIS COURSE? = TRIMIX DIVING. To do so requires theoretical and in water training. Preferably in a environment that simulates as best as possible the environment in which you'll do those dives but at the same time limits risks and is safe.

Having cluster Fks in training can be a learning moment but I rather simulate such a fk up than actually experiencing it To your points

1) Is a given... we are all human and we all do the best we can and sometimes fail, or fck up. Thanks for posting your experiences.

2) Rebreather: Again what was the goal of the training? It was not intro to rebreathers, but Trimix diving. Since non of the students taking the class were rebreather divers I believe the instructor should have been on OC as well. Cool that you learned something about rebreather operation during this class but it's not the goal and it adds risks (on descends and ascends, tank rotation, gasswitches). Trainng is partially also "monkey see monkey do" and it's more difficult if your instructor is diving a totally different setup.

3) Non matched team = good additional taskloading. The goal is to become trimix divers, it's not adding taskloading by setting up very dissimilar teams. We are all human and there will always be different backgrounds, and dive-styles or experiences (yes also within GUE), so coping with that during dives is a necessity. However seeking it before the class starts by setting up dissimilar teams is very strange. The taskloading should be in the procedures for trimix diving not in "let's put diver A and diver B together in 1 team because I know they have totally different experiences and backgrounds and it will make the class harder"?

4) There is no I in TIEAM : When I did fundies in 2010, I went into that course wanting to improve me (coming btw from a totally non GUE background and no 100 GUE preppy training dives in vinkeveen so I could get my tech pass). I came out of that course with a much bigger sense on how to improve the team. To help the team you need much more awareness, and that was the main building block for me in Fundies. TEAM-AWARENESS. Something you realise more when you are not diving with your favourite buddy you are very much attuned to.

5) Same procedures, communication, equipment (last) makes technical diving much easier FULL STOP. Is it the only way... no but then you'll need a lot of communication.

6) Or take a fundies. No matter what technical training you'll pursuit, no matter which training agency a fundamentals course is always a good idea. For everybody. I'm thinking of doing another fundies course next year, this time with my wife. I'm sure I'll learn again even though I've got some other gue technical certifications.

7) If you are not standardised and coming from a very dissimilar background some more dives and discussions might have been in order. That being said I did GUE C1 with 2 guys I had never dived with before. No problem whatsoever.

Cheers
B

 

[LiteHedded]

is this a normoxic trimix course?

 

[TSandM]

I read this story, and remembered a tale told by GDI years ago, about a trimix class he was teaching where a student lost buoyancy control and began to fall, well beyond the MOD of the gas she was breathing, and he had to do a flying swoop down to something like 160 to retrieve her. Scary stuff.

I do believe that cave diving and open water technical diving are two very different things. I am reasonably good at the former, and weak in the latter, and for precisely the reason your class buddy struggled. Midwater, with no visual reference, is VERY different from the cave environment. Both the instructor for your class, and the diver himself, should have realized that, and set things up to do some critical skills work in much shallower water, until the diver was clearly solid with task-loading without a visual reference. Anything else, I think, is borrowing trouble.

On the other hand, I have borrowed dry suits in the past with no issues -- as long as the dump valve is correctly situated, one dry suit dives much like another (if it fits, of course). Why would an experienced diver be having buoyancy problems simply from being in a different suit? If the suit was improperly made, or did not fit and restricted the diver's motion, that's a different thing, but he should (with that much experience) be able to say it was not safe to incur a deco obligation in a suit that wasn't functioning properly, I would think.

Now, maybe all these things had been dealt with earlier in the class, and it was a surprise to everyone (including to the divers themselves) when things fell apart. But I will say that, having done an awful lot of training classes, I really like a carefully constructed sequence with incremental stress, where the divers don't advance until the team is starting to gel well and are clearly ready to handle a higher level of function. It doesn't sound as though you had built a working team prior to this dive, or am I wrong?

This dive would have stressed me to the max. I could NOT have allowed the diver who left to go back alone, nor could I have dealt with the third diver deciding NOT to incur the additional deco to swim in with him. Split teams terrify me; I always think of the double fatality in California, where the tech diver took the OOG recreational diver to the surface and left his buddy to do his deco, and both the rec diver and the abandoned buddy died.

 

[LiteHedded]

I read this story, and remembered a tale told by GDI years ago, about a trimix class he was teaching where a student lost buoyancy control and began to fall, well beyond the MOD of the gas she was breathing, and he had to do a flying swoop down to something like 160 to retrieve her. Scary stuff.

I do believe that cave diving and open water technical diving are two very different things. I am reasonably good at the former, and weak in the latter, and for precisely the reason your class buddy struggled. Midwater, with no visual reference, is VERY different from the cave environment. Both the instructor for your class, and the diver himself, should have realized that, and set things up to do some critical skills work in much shallower water, until the diver was clearly solid with task-loading without a visual reference. Anything else, I think, is borrowing trouble.

On the other hand, I have borrowed dry suits in the past with no issues -- as long as the dump valve is correctly situated, one dry suit dives much like another (if it fits, of course). Why would an experienced diver be having buoyancy problems simply from being in a different suit? If the suit was improperly made, or did not fit and restricted the diver's motion, that's a different thing, but he should (with that much experience) be able to say it was not safe to incur a deco obligation in a suit that wasn't functioning properly, I would think.

Now, maybe all these things had been dealt with earlier in the class, and it was a surprise to everyone (including to the divers themselves) when things fell apart. But I will say that, having done an awful lot of training classes, I really like a carefully constructed sequence with incremental stress, where the divers don't advance until the team is starting to gel well and are clearly ready to handle a higher level of function. It doesn't sound as though you had built a working team prior to this dive, or am I wrong?

This dive would have stressed me to the max. I could NOT have allowed the diver who left to go back alone, nor could I have dealt with the third diver deciding NOT to incur the additional deco to swim in with him. Split teams terrify me; I always think of the double fatality in California, where the tech diver took the OOG recreational diver to the surface and left his buddy to do his deco, and both the rec diver and the abandoned buddy died.

sounds like in this case the instructor was dicking with the rebreather and another student was doing the rescuing. this class is just bad news. hope it goes ok

 

[Diver0001]

On the other hand, I have borrowed dry suits in the past with no issues -- as long as the dump valve is correctly situated, one dry suit dives much like another (if it fits, of course). Why would an experienced diver be having buoyancy problems simply from being in a different suit? If the suit was improperly made, or did not fit and restricted the diver's motion, that's a different thing, but he should (with that much experience) be able to say it was not safe to incur a deco obligation in a suit that wasn't functioning properly, I would think.

I think it's a general picture, tbh. I mean when I dove with you and Peter I borrowed a drysuit too and I didn't have to fight it. There are reasons why things happen and then there are the reasons people give to explain it.

The instructor was as surprised about this as I was. Previous dives didn't indicate any problems of this nature and it wasn't until he tried engaging in this type of ascent that it came out. someone suggested that the instructor must have deliberately set this up, which is complete nonsense, of course. Once it happened, however, it would be foolish not to look at what could be gained from it.

It doesn't sound as though you had built a working team prior to this dive, or am I wrong?

Team not working. That's true. I'm not having much trouble diving with the cave guy apart from his challenges in mid-water. The other guy is a more difficult for me because of passive communication and getting distracted (my interpretation) by his own thoughts.

This dive would have stressed me to the max. I could NOT have allowed the diver who left to go back alone, nor could I have dealt with the third diver deciding NOT to incur the additional deco to swim in with him. Split teams terrify me; I always think of the double fatality in California, where the tech diver took the OOG recreational diver to the surface and left his buddy to do his deco, and both the rec diver and the abandoned buddy died.

Yeah, as I said, this dive bothered me as well. I think he didn't want to incur the extra deco due somewhat to inexperience. I think this was also the reason why he overcompensated when he ascended too far. I think he freaked out because he wasn't on the map anymore and just dumped everything in a knee-jerk reaction.

R..

---------- Post added December 22nd, 2014 at 10:29 PM ----------

sounds like in this case the instructor was dicking with the rebreather and another student was doing the rescuing. this class is just bad news. hope it goes ok

Well. once again, this isn't accurate. Myself and the instructor were both under the other diver when he started sinking. We both had the instinct to grab him and we both did, arresting his decent.

In the process the light slipped off the instructor's hand and when I saw that he didn't reach down to pick it up, I did. When I went to hand it back I could see him adjusting his computer. I can't see how adjusting his set point equates to dicking with the computer while the other diver did the rescuing when he also had ahold of the diver's manifold and we were working together to stop him from sinking any further.

I know a couple of you want to fault the instructor for this. That's what happens every time a student diver makes a mistake.

R..

 

[LiteHedded]

I think it's a general picture, tbh. I mean when I dove with you and Peter I borrowed a drysuit too and I didn't have to fight it. There are reasons why things happen and then there are the reasons people give to explain it.

The instructor was as surprised about this as I was. Previous dives didn't indicate any problems of this nature and it wasn't until he tried engaging in this type of ascent that it came out. someone suggested that the instructor must have deliberately set this up, which is complete nonsense, of course. Once it happened, however, it would be foolish not to look at what could be gained from it.


Team not working. That's true. I'm not having much trouble diving with the cave guy apart from his challenges. The other guy is a more difficult for me because of passive communication and getting distracted (my interpretation) by his own thoughts.



Yeah, as I said, this dive bothered me as well.

R..

---------- Post added December 22nd, 2014 at 10:29 PM ----------



Well. once again, this isn't accurate. Myself and the instructor were both under the other diver when he started sinking. We both had the instinct to grab him and we both did, arresting his decent.

In the process the light slipped off the instructor's hand and when I saw that he didn't reach down to pick it up, I did. When I went to hand it back I could see him adjusting his computer. I can't see how adjusting his set point equates to dicking with the computer while the other diver did the rescuing when he also had ahold of the diver's manifold and we were working together to stop him from sinking any further.

I know a couple of you want to fault the instructor for this. That's what happens every time a student diver makes a mistake.

R..

i must have misunderstood the sequence of events with the diver rescue.

There is a lot of blame here to go around. Do you agree that some of it lies with the instructor?

 

[Diver0001]

i must have misunderstood the sequence of events with the diver rescue.

There is a lot of blame here to go around. Do you agree that some of it lies with the instructor?

I think assigning blame is secondary to the question of what we do next. When discussing an incident we also forget that everything before that point had a very different flow.

I've already said that I don't fault the instructor for his gear choice. Where I do think he could have been more uncompromising was in the suggestion that the diver who borrowed the drysuit try it out first. As a general principle you don't want to be trying out new gear in this kind of setting. The diver chose not to and was very convinced that it wouldn't be a problem. The instructor let that go a little too easily, in retrospect. Of course at this level of training you have to own your choices and take personal responsibility for your decisions, so primarily I would fault the other diver if we must assign blame; however, in letting it go the instructor made the assumption that it would be ok. And as we all know, assumption is mother of all **** ups and I think that his lesson is to insist on verification next time.

The same holds, btw, for myself and the other student. We both accepted his assurances that it would be ok. We are equally to blame.

R..

 

[TSandM]

A few years back, we had a serious team separation in Dos Pisos. It was largely my fault, but there were a lot of factors, and one could have assigned proportional blame to most of the people on the dive to some degree. In fact, when we exited the cave, that's what we fell to doing in the parking area, as we broke down our gear. After ten minutes or so of discussion, Danny Riordan's quiet voice broke into our arguments, and said, "You can deal with something like this in two ways. You can try to assign blame, or you can simply figure out why what happened happened, and what you can do to prevent it from happening again.". I have NEVER forgotten this. It may not sound very different, but it is; one way is destructive and the other is constructive.

Your buddy learned that new gear needs to be shaken down before big dives. You perhaps learned that you should dial back the dives you do with people with whom you are not yet comfortable. Your instructor perhaps learned that he needs to be more proactive and perhaps authoritative, even when his students don't seem like the sorts who ought to need that. Instead of deciding who caused the problem, it works better to decide what each and every diver could have done to make things go differently. Accepting this kind of responsibility for identifying needed changes also helps build a team.

 

[Diver0001]

Instead of deciding who caused the problem, it works better to decide what each and every diver could have done to make things go differently. Accepting this kind of responsibility for identifying needed changes also helps build a team.

Exactly. Works in my day-job as well

R..