I( somehow missed these comments earlier--reading too quickly I guess.
Personally, I've yet to see a diver complete a full safety stop. Can you believe it? I was shocked after getting certified. The safety pause is what I see in the real world.
Your real world is extremely different from mine. In my two decades of diving, I don't believe I have ever seen a recreational diver consciously stop for a safety stop and not do it all. It might have happened, but if so, I was certainly not aware of it. I am talking about thousands and thousands of divers observed.
Steve, I dive the Florida Gulf Coast. Perhaps my experience is unique because we have a lot of private spearfishing and divers want to get out of the water.
Okay--that explains it.
The spearfishermen in the Gulf Coast have a reputation for being a different breed of diver, although I did not expect that their characteristic behaviors extended to the Florida edge. I thought it was more of a Louisiana thing.
ScubaBoard has a general policy of not deleting threads. It nearly never happens. One of the only times I remember us doing it was in a thread about Gulf Coast spearfishing.
It began discussing a fatality. Two divers had been on a boat fishing all day, enjoying beers as they did. As dusk approached, they decided to go after the fish on scuba, using spears. They put on AL 80s (it was not clear if they were completely or only partially full) and went into the water by an oil rig. One of them decided to go alone after the big groupers that hang out at 200 feet. It was getting pretty dark when he decided to head on down alone. He never returned.
As you might guess, some people participating in the discussion thought the diver had taken some unnecessary risks.
The thread was then flooded with comments by new SB members, all Gulf Coast spearfishers. They insisted that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the dive plan. That's how people dive. Diving is dangerous. Sometimes you die when you dive, even when doing nothing wrong--as was true in this case. In their arguments, they referred to standard diving practices that were standard only to them--nobody else knew what they were talking about. The thread got quite belligerent, so much so that we deleted the whole thing rather than simply shut it down. We thought the many posts advocating dive practices most people consider to be unsafe were violations of one of our ToS--we do not allow the promotion of unsafe practices.
I am not saying all Gulf Coast spearfishers follow different rules from the rest of the world, but some clearly do.