LiteHedded
Contributor
well that sounds like a bummer. but it also sounds like ten years ago 
Lessons learned- embarrassing but true
- Thread starter Diver0001
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If nothing else, an evening with JP and A-M would involve some great food and probably some great wines as well . . . they are fun people as well as good divers.
PfcAJ
Contributor
This situation doesn't sound too different from my understanding of how Michael Kane came into the DIR community.
Yes, that's pretty much exactly the story that Michael told me the evening I met him!
beester
Contributor
Heya Diver0001,
I'm just back from 3 weeks of MX cave diving (first week getting my GUE C2 training with Chris yoohoo)... so my response is a bit late but I hope still warranted!
First of all, big kuudos on your report, self-analyses and reaction to off and on the cuff remarks. It's not easy to do so and willingly put yourself under scrutiny of armchair and real divers. Reliving an incident like that is not easy.
I know because in 2008 I had a similar incident on a North Sea wreck dive... (you can look it up I posted it on scubaboard on which the responses were kinda nice... duikforum was another story). I'll get back to that later.
The only remark on the course dive and incident I still have is something I read a bit earlier and is getting to me now because of my recent exposure to GUE training again. In the training I took a couple of weeks ago we had a lot of simulated scenarios, failures mounting on top of eachother, etc... some of them right at turn pressure (meaning more than an hour in a cave). However these are relatively speaking risk free because of a couple of notions which are very clear to all the trainee divers:
- Only the instructor initiates failures. If at any moment anybody (including our instructor) has a real failure this is immediately clear. No student will ever initiate a simulated failure
- Failures happen only on the egressing part of a dive (in a cave after turning around, on a tech dive when you call the dive to go back to the surface line or free ascend starts).
Both of this will make sure that there are absolutely no misunderstandings on REAL vs SIMULATED failures/incidents. Although the procedure of solving those incidents are exactly the same you don't want to have an underwater questionmark in your head about the status of your teammembers. So maybe this is something which needs to be discussed (if not already) with your instructor and the trainee diver (already trimix) certified going on to become instructor.
Last remark (from a very gun ho just passed certificate gue diver... yes you tend to be like that after passing a gue course for a few weeks... it's permitted ). One of the big pointers which I took home with me is... that over-communication is also very bad. The procedures should be in place so everybody knows what needs to be done and you only communicate slowly if someone is not doing it or reacting as should. And if the communication is not coming through you act and clean up the mess later... not playing the man but the ball and looking forward to how to solve it, not who messed up.
Coming back to your relation with DIR (dir-nl) and GUE... Since I'm Belgian and a regular reader (not poster) on duikforum... I think I understand a bit the background. Matter of fact, after my North Sea incident I was looking at GUE but postponed it because of the very very black and white arguments on duikforum and elitist attitude of some of the posters. Only after talking to some very humble Belgian GUE divers (who were at that moment already T2-C2 and doing serious video dive projects on deep jutland wrecks and lot caves) I changed my mind and did fundies with a German instructor (Derk Remmers) in 2010. I don't know what made this happen, the real divers doing the dives or just the followers with a fundies certificate being "gun ho"... maybe a bit of both, but it's very sure that this is just a Dutch microcosmos and not related to GUE as a global group of people. I've dived with Belgian, UK, German, Italian, US, Canadian, French, Swedish, Russian, Croatian and yes also a lot of Dutch GUE divers and all of them are very nice people without any of that elitist bull****. As a matter of fact I did my C1 with JP and 2 Dutch divers.
So maybe (hopefully) enough water has passed under the bridge ;-)
I'm just back from 3 weeks of MX cave diving (first week getting my GUE C2 training with Chris yoohoo
)... so my response is a bit late but I hope still warranted!First of all, big kuudos on your report, self-analyses and reaction to off and on the cuff remarks. It's not easy to do so and willingly put yourself under scrutiny of armchair and real divers. Reliving an incident like that is not easy.
I know because in 2008 I had a similar incident on a North Sea wreck dive... (you can look it up I posted it on scubaboard on which the responses were kinda nice... duikforum was another story). I'll get back to that later.
The only remark on the course dive and incident I still have is something I read a bit earlier and is getting to me now because of my recent exposure to GUE training again. In the training I took a couple of weeks ago we had a lot of simulated scenarios, failures mounting on top of eachother, etc... some of them right at turn pressure (meaning more than an hour in a cave). However these are relatively speaking risk free because of a couple of notions which are very clear to all the trainee divers:
- Only the instructor initiates failures. If at any moment anybody (including our instructor) has a real failure this is immediately clear. No student will ever initiate a simulated failure
- Failures happen only on the egressing part of a dive (in a cave after turning around, on a tech dive when you call the dive to go back to the surface line or free ascend starts).
Both of this will make sure that there are absolutely no misunderstandings on REAL vs SIMULATED failures/incidents. Although the procedure of solving those incidents are exactly the same you don't want to have an underwater questionmark in your head about the status of your teammembers. So maybe this is something which needs to be discussed (if not already) with your instructor and the trainee diver (already trimix) certified going on to become instructor.
Last remark (from a very gun ho just passed certificate gue diver... yes you tend to be like that after passing a gue course for a few weeks... it's permitted
). One of the big pointers which I took home with me is... that over-communication is also very bad. The procedures should be in place so everybody knows what needs to be done and you only communicate slowly if someone is not doing it or reacting as should. And if the communication is not coming through you act and clean up the mess later... not playing the man but the ball and looking forward to how to solve it, not who messed up. Coming back to your relation with DIR (dir-nl) and GUE... Since I'm Belgian and a regular reader (not poster) on duikforum... I think I understand a bit the background. Matter of fact, after my North Sea incident I was looking at GUE but postponed it because of the very very black and white arguments on duikforum and elitist attitude of some of the posters. Only after talking to some very humble Belgian GUE divers (who were at that moment already T2-C2 and doing serious video dive projects on deep jutland wrecks and lot caves) I changed my mind and did fundies with a German instructor (Derk Remmers) in 2010. I don't know what made this happen, the real divers doing the dives or just the followers with a fundies certificate being "gun ho"... maybe a bit of both, but it's very sure that this is just a Dutch microcosmos and not related to GUE as a global group of people. I've dived with Belgian, UK, German, Italian, US, Canadian, French, Swedish, Russian, Croatian and yes also a lot of Dutch GUE divers and all of them are very nice people without any of that elitist bull****. As a matter of fact I did my C1 with JP and 2 Dutch divers.
So maybe (hopefully) enough water has passed under the bridge ;-)
I never set out to make the incident we had become about the politics of the Dutch DIR community. I think that JP among others are working hard to fight this image.
What I wrote has inspired some to say, "if you were DIR this would not have happened". I'm happy to openly receive this bit of advice.
R..
GUE training starts by placing the divers at a certain base level, which due to its rigidity will ensure better that those divers have certain skills and function in the same way independently of where they have been trained.
With other agencies, procedures can vary, but that is no excuse for divers with poor skills. I don't know why that happens... maybe it's due to those agencies being larger and it's harder to control everybody, or instructors who have started with different philosophies, have been instructors for a long time and haven't adapted so much... I don't know, but it puzzles me.
I don't necessarily see divers being different as a bad thing. I have dived with people with different backgrounds and equipment and all went smoothly. It all depends on the divers.
And diving with someone from GUE may reduce the risks of that person being a bad diver, but it also does not make it disappear. As we have seen, there are many reports of conflicts between GUE and non-GUE divers and they may be good in the water, but overall I don't think they have the best attitude. I also know of a GUE diver (and Fundamentals instructor) who was diving with a non-GUE diver, finished his ration deco, the other diver still had some minutes on the dive computer and he just went up, leaving the other diver (and furthermore he was the one with the SMB). A GUE card does not guarantee a good behaviour either.
With other agencies, procedures can vary, but that is no excuse for divers with poor skills. I don't know why that happens... maybe it's due to those agencies being larger and it's harder to control everybody, or instructors who have started with different philosophies, have been instructors for a long time and haven't adapted so much... I don't know, but it puzzles me.
I don't necessarily see divers being different as a bad thing. I have dived with people with different backgrounds and equipment and all went smoothly. It all depends on the divers.
And diving with someone from GUE may reduce the risks of that person being a bad diver, but it also does not make it disappear. As we have seen, there are many reports of conflicts between GUE and non-GUE divers and they may be good in the water, but overall I don't think they have the best attitude. I also know of a GUE diver (and Fundamentals instructor) who was diving with a non-GUE diver, finished his ration deco, the other diver still had some minutes on the dive computer and he just went up, leaving the other diver (and furthermore he was the one with the SMB). A GUE card does not guarantee a good behaviour either.
LiteHedded
Contributor
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