Most importing thing you learned during your Rescue course

[HJeffreyM]

I have to agree with those who've said:
1. Stop, Think, Act
and
2. If you pay attention to others, you can avoid a possible rescue situation before it happens.

Case in point: Diving with my wife and our private dive guide, I noticed the DG's 1st stage had a slow leak at the beginning of the dive. He hadn't noticed it. He went back to the surface while my wife and I waited on the line and in a minute or two he had had fixed his problem and returned to the dive. no problem, no rescue needed.

 

[MX727]

How to safely approach a potential victim, especially one who is either on the verge of panicking or is in full-blown panic. How to wrest oneself away from the grip of a panicking victim.

That's what I was going to post.

 

[on_two_wheels]

What did I reinforce? Common sense emergency response procedures I've learned over 20 years of LE career...just adding water.

What did I learn? No matter what shop you go through, instructors aren't usually eager to take the slow route to your certification and that you'll learn more from quality mentorship than most courses.

 

[SeaHorse81]

I learned that there's a lot more a person my size (5'4", 112#) can do than I would have thought.

I learned there are more ways of enlisting the help of others than I would have thought, and that it is important to get the assistance of others in any way you can (even if it's just the onlooker on shore who's calling 911). Rescues can be hard, physical work, and it's important to conserve your strength. For example, don't use all your strength on the tow in so that you are unable to function once you get to or near the shore. You need to last through the whole rescue or until somebody can take over/assist, so you need to pace yourself.

Establishing positive buoyancy for the victim at the surface is critical for the obvious reasons, but also for a couple that I hadn't thought of: If you're going to end up grappling with a panicked diver (despite every attempt to avoid that), you want it to be happening at the surface rather than below. Also, the victim wants out of the water more than anything else, so your best escape from a panicked diver is to descend.

 

[SEMO Scuba]

How to avoid turning 1 victim into 2...

I agree

If I had to pick one most important thing this was it for me.

 

[flots am]

So I'll be doing my rescue course this weekend, and I was just interested to hear what others learned that they didn't know before in THEIR rescue course.

Preventing emergency is much better than trying to handle one that's actually occurred.

If something sounds dangerous, it's still dangerous even if your instructor tells you "It's OK"

flots.

 

[lcollar]

Sometimes it might be best to hang back safely out of reach and wait a bit to rescue a now unconcious diver at the surface than attempt to man-handle someone much bigger than yourself who's only thought at the moment is to somehow climb on top of you to get out of the water. It only took a couple good dunkings for me to learn this important concept.

 

[scuba nube]

Mark, I just did the rescue course a couple of weekends ago at Two Jack Lake. The thing I found the most personaly challenging was surfacing an unresponsive diver, towing them into shore while stripping gear and doing rescue breaths. They throw a lot at you over the course of the weekend. Pace yourself, enjoy yourself!

 

[RonFrank]

I learned the only thing worst than rescuing a large dude (6'4" 250) is rescuing a large dude in a speedo!

 

[scubadobadoo]

The simple phrase, "Stop, breath, think, then act," has been very helpful to me.