Mr Chattertons Self Reliance Article...

[DevonDiver]

What most on Scubaboard DON'T KNOW, is that there WAS a movement where many in the Dive Industry DID PUSH the "EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF" concept back in the early and mid 90's......the your air is your air, etc. This was not just Chatterton, and not just Rennaker...there were plenty saying this... and Chatterton did not accidentally just touch on this verbiage now.....and he should clearly have figured out what the potential feedback would be from this agenda now, given how it played in the past.

Dan, I think it's unfair to automatically assume that John's post was defined by a 20 year-old concept. Perhaps your response is more motivated by this, than John's message was?

Just worth thinking about...

 

[danvolker]

I'm still waiting for any objective evidence that the issue here is that an otherwise renowned wreck diver had terrible buoyancy and therefore defaulted to solo diving. Quite unlike all GUE divers, who are just per se better divers and would never silt so long as they had any clearance at all.

Volker's continuing attempts to smear the skills of a class of others by unsubstantiated generalizations are both contemptuous, and facially laughable. Seriously, nobody knew about buoyancy and trim and silting back then? They just couldn't figure it out, even though any diver with any innate feel for the water at all figures it out pretty quickly?

Nobody's gotten that much smarter since 1991. More standardized and refined, yes. But the basics of not silting up a wreck you're penetrating without a line? Yeah, no.

Lecter, GUE did not exist even in the late 90's....In the 80's and early 90's, you had basic open water and Advanced, DM or Instructor courses, but nothing remotely like Peak control Buoyancy for ocean divers... I am thinking that the influence of many cave divers began filtering into tech diving by the late 90's....
There were no tech diving classes in the 80's, or in the early 90's.
While plenty of deep divers could hold stop depths just fine, there was no emphasis or real concern among wreck divers about swimming head up and feet down, or about silting the bottom...

Ask around to some of the divers on SB that were doing fairly deep wreck dives in the 80's and early 90's....See what they say....
Again, I don't consider this my smearing anyone--- I said very clearly that no one doing deep ocean in the early 90's was exhibiting today's ideas of buoyancy and trim.

As to how easy it is to get this to be perfect, I think most divers that have gone through fundies would disagree about how intuitive this is

 

[beaverdivers]

Ask around to some of the divers on SB that were doing fairly deep wreck dives in the 80's and early 90's....See what they say....
Again, I don't consider this my smearing anyone--- I said very clearly that no one doing deep ocean in the early 90's was exhibiting today's ideas of buoyancy and trim.

Since you asked, we had a very keen group of divers doing deep ocean dives w/ proper trim and buoyancy in the 80's & 90's.


Your statement " There were no tech diving classes in the 80's, or in the early 90's " is false. IANTD was found in 1985. TDI began in 1993.

 

[danvolker]

Since you asked, we had a very keen group of divers doing deep ocean dives w/ proper trim and buoyancy in the 80's & 90's.


Your statement " There were no tech diving classes in the 80's, or in the early 90's " is false. IANTD was found in 1985. TDI began in 1993.

If I recall correctly, Michael Menduno coined the term Technical diving in around 1993....but "Technical diving" as something you could get quality instruction from, was a very long way from where technical instruction is today....meaning tech instruction in 94 to at least 96 was pretty much hit or mis, with lots of mis.

I was very active in deep diving in the 80's and 90's, but no where in South Florida did you see high skill set technical diving till after the mid 90's.
But hey, maybe you dove someplace that was further along than we were.. I am just commenting on what I experienced.

 

[nakatomi]

I was very active in deep diving in the 80's and 90's, but no where in South Florida did you see high skill set technical diving till after the mid 90's.

Quite clearly the "high skill" sets you are referring to have existed for ages. For the record, they existed long before the people that you now like to attribute these skills to, even took up the sport of diving and even well before some of these people were actually born. So the fact is, the very people who are apparently your role models, learned these skills from other divers, they did not invent them. These exact skills originated and were applied as early as in the 60s in the cave diving community, needless to say, many divers also introduced these skills to wreck and technical diving.
Quite possibly you have read the books Shadow Divers and The Last Dive, there's a lot of reference to these skill sets and the people using them on those dives. And of course this is not only the exact era, these books specifically detail the exact dives you so often make reference to. Your making assumptions and insinuating that it just *might* have been otherwise is completely unfounded.

Oliver

 

[BDSC]

Scubaboard is unique in Discussion groups, in the very large body of frequent posters that will constantly weigh in on what they think, and disagree the moment they see it is called for. In the case of Chatterton, I think that because some see him as a "famous author", and a famous diver, that he should be allowed to push his agenda, and be treated more kindly and gently than each of us treats each other. We should try and be PC with him.....

You make a good point on how certain people may be treated differently because of who they are. About a year or so ago on another diving forum that is primarily dedicated to photography, Howard Hall posted a short video clip of some stuff he and his wife had shot in Cocos I believe. It was by no means a final product but some unedited video. Well because it was Howard Hall, folks came on there oohing and aahing over the "incredible video". No one dared say something negative. Then one person, who is quite accomplished in video himself, spoke the truth and commented how the color seemed off in some spots, etc. Folks went nuts. How dare he say something negative about the video! Doing something like that may keep H. H. from coming back and posting again. Funny thing is, once he pointed out some weakness in the video, other folks started to admit the same thing.

You see the same thing on SB. There are certain posters who are more "revered" than others. People tend not to want to disagree with them even if they really think they are wrong about something or they will "respectfully disagree" while others may be blasted for the way they are thinking.

I don't agree with everything you say Dan but I find you to be a valuable member of SB and don't see you as a bully at all. Just someone passionate about what you believe. Heck, it's because of you I now dive with longer blade fins!

 

[lowviz]

...//...I don't agree with everything you say Dan but I find you to be a valuable member of SB and don't see you as a bully at all. ...//...

Neither do I. I see you as a harpy that relentlessly pursues anyone of unlike mind. I've made two attempts at a last post, both were modded out. maybe this one will stick.

 

[danvolker]

Quite clearly the "high skill" sets you are referring to have existed for ages. For the record, they existed long before the people that you now like to attribute these skills to, even took up the sport of diving and even well before some of these people were actually born. So the fact is, the very people who are apparently your role models, learned these skills from other divers, they did not invent them. These exact skills originated and were applied as early as in the 60s in the cave diving community, needless to say, many divers also introduced these skills to wreck and technical diving.
Quite possibly you have read the books Shadow Divers and The Last Dive, there's a lot of reference to these skill sets and the people using them on those dives. And of course this is not only the exact era, these books specifically detail the exact dives you so often make reference to. Your making assumptions and insinuating that it just *might* have been otherwise is completely unfounded.

Oliver

Oliver,
you are and lecter are wrong about this. The buoyancy and trim that is seen today by well skilled tech divers, came largely from the cave diving world where learning techniques that would not stir up silt, were more critical.
The truth of this can be seen when you consider WHEN you began seeing significant numbers of tech divers or even tech instructors, using the frog kick.
There is no question that when you have to be close to the bottom, that frog kick is less silt producing than flutter ( and modified flutter with the fins at more like 90 degrees , was certainly not being used either) ....
You just did not see wreck divers doing frog kicks in the 80s, and not in the 90's till maybe around 98 or so....Even now, it has only become cpmmon to see this in the last 4 years--common as a skill set you EXPECT in tech divers.
In cave divers this was normative in the early 90's and even in to the 80's.

My guess is that populations of tech divers, that got the opportunity to dive with cave divers, were more likely to be exposed to skills that would be appealing to them.
I have NEVER said that WKPP invented the skills....you guys are aggressively making stuff up now
Many cave groups were out there, and the skills began to spread.... However, where the skills and proficiency were never mandated, you wont have an expectation of a high level of this skill being commonly used.

I don't think think that frogkick or several other of the cave diving techniques, were commonly used by the NE wreck community in the 80's or early to mid nineties.

And if I am dead wrong about all this, then why are these skills so absent in most of the diving population today, and this to the degree that most divers find a course like Fundies to be extremely difficult to pass?

---------- Post added February 18th, 2013 at 11:03 AM ----------

Quite clearly the "high skill" sets you are referring to have existed for ages. For the record, they existed long before the people that you now like to attribute these skills to, ...there's a lot of reference to these skill sets and the people using them on those dives. And of course this is not only the exact era, these books specifically detail the exact dives you so often make reference to. Your making assumptions and insinuating that it just *might* have been otherwise is completely unfounded.

Oliver

My diving on charter boats, most weekends through the 80's and 90's', put me into a very large population or cross section of divers and skill levels. One that would have statistical significance even, for this time period, when compared to the divers seen in water in the same time period, by most here on scubaboard that are posting your viewpoint right now.
Then in the tech diving explosion of interest that occurred around 96 and 97, a very large number of tech divers was visiting South florida due to what they heard on the Tech Diver list and rec.scuba, and other internet forums, about great 200 to 280 foot deep dives off of north miami, Lauderdale and Palm Beach. We had a real tech movement, plenty of boats catering to this, but there were very few with the skill sets we are now discussing--few that would frog kick when near bottom over silt, and few that did not swim at least slightly head up and feet down.... This began changing after 97---certainly the buzz about this on internet boards, would contribute to the interest of tech divers, in what they might want to look into, skill wise.

 

[DaleC]

I was just thinking about this thread/article as I was diving yesterday. What would one think if they saw two sidemount divers on a boat (with two tanks each) discussing OOA air share options with each other pre-dive. Would any little alarm bells start to go off? Kinda what John was getting at I think.

 

[danvolker]

I was just thinking about this thread/article as I was diving yesterday. What would one think if they saw two sidemount divers on a boat (with two tanks each) discussing OOA air share options with each other pre-dive. Would any little alarm bells start to go off? Kinda what John was getting at I think.

Wouldn't the proper assumption be, that they had not buddied with each other before, and that they planned to dive this dive together--in a team fashion, so they were attempting to get on the same page.....
When the pilot jumps into the cockpit of a 747 and begins running down a checklist of things before taking off--I would not want him to stop doing this, because it indicated a lack of belief in the plane or the mechanics. I would not see a down side to the pilot going through the checklist.

---------- Post added February 18th, 2013 at 11:21 AM ----------

I would like to know if there are underwater films of the 80's or early 90's, where you can see divers swimming in mid water and near the bottom.....Shows that had been on TV, videos that were shot by divers and saved....things that we could watch now via youtube or equivalent, and that would demonstrate skill sets for the population of divers in question, back when the video was shot. Of course, there would have to be some proof of the date the video was shot In fact, my guess is that there would have been plenty of tech videos for explorations and training that would have been shot in those days...IANTD or TDI videos....something showing a wreck dive or deep reef... any thoughts?