Mr Chattertons Self Reliance Article...

[gsk3]

I've only read to Post #81 so far, but given my training (and the fact that I chose the training in the first place), it's unsurprising I agree with Bob, Guy, TSandM, Rjack, and others.

Someone may have mentioned this in the pages past where I've read thus far, but I'll toss it out there anyway:
If you don't have enough gas for your buddy, you don't have enough gas for yourself.

What does that mean? When I plan a dive, I account for enough gas to get myself and one of my teammates back to the surface, assuming an elevated gas consumption rate due to stress. Let's just look at this purely selfishly. This insulates me from:
1) Losing half my gas (having to isolate one tank if diving manifolded doubles, or any failure if diving independent tanks)
2) Losing all my gas (because my teammate carries gas for me)
3) My teammate losing all his/her gas (ok, I have a hard time thinking entirely selfishly )

Suppose everything had gone right in my dive, and my teammate is out of gas. I either a) have enough gas to get us both back safely, or b) don't. Planning for option (b) means that not only is contingency (2) above not available to me, but contingency (1) isn't either. The fact that I didn't have enough in reserve if my teammate needed it and I hadn't lost any gas necessarily means that I didn't have enough in reserve if I did lose gas.

 

[HowardE]

The problem I see with much of the objection to John's original article was that John wasn't talking about buddy diving in the first place. He was talking about being a self-reliant diver

IF YOU ARE DIVING DEEP (like 200' or more) and IF you can't be self reliant, THEN you shouldn't be there.

There's NOTHING WRONG with having a plan and a plan with a buddy, and team gas management, but that wasn't what the blog was about... The blog was about being SELF-RELIANT. Being able to rely on yourself and your skills to save yourself. That's all.

The problem is divers who don't have a plan and expect that if they mess up someone else will save them. That was his point. Plain and simple. The latest blog does provide further insight into divers like dead Ed.

John has a lot of opinions... Shadow Diver | John Chatterton | reflections from my underwater world

 

[DaleC]

The problem with group think is you begin assuming based on association. Unless you have read everything those listed above have written, how do you know you agree with them?

 

[danvolker]

The problem I see with much of the objection to John's original article was that John wasn't talking about buddy diving in the first place. He was talking about being a self-reliant diver

IF YOU ARE DIVING DEEP (like 200' or more) and IF you can't be self reliant, THEN you shouldn't be there.

There's NOTHING WRONG with having a plan and a plan with a buddy, and team gas management, but that wasn't what the blog was about... The blog was about being SELF-RELIANT. Being able to rely on yourself and your skills to save yourself. That's all.

The problem is divers who don't have a plan and expect that if they mess up someone else will save them. That was his point. Plain and simple. The latest blog does provide further insight into divers like dead Ed.

John has a lot of opinions... Shadow Diver | John Chatterton | reflections from my underwater world

Howard, I don't think anyone that read the article he posted initially, or the first few pages of posts in this thread, could agree with you on this. John was clearly saying the buddy diving is not a viable system, and that self reliance is....and that each of us has no responsibility to help another diver underwater.

If I was going to throw you a bone, it would be that Chatterton was talking about diving off of boats that had huge swarms of horrifically trained and incorrectly prepared, non-self reliant divers getting in the water with him----huge groups that had no business in being on a tech dive in the first place.

Given that scenario, John's attitide or behaviors don't seem so impossible to understand....This is close to the opposite of how we experienced tech diving in South Florida in the 90's, where the norm was that everyone on the boat had good skills, and there was typically more gas than was needed by a good margin, for every diver. Not only have I never seen boats with divers like John talked about, I have never even heard of anything remotely resembling this in South Florida. Perhaps the big difference is the artifact collecting aspect of the wrecks he was on....where so many divers lose their brain power over the chance they might make time to pull out this last incredible find, before they head up to the first deco stop...
In fact, if this is the issue, we have something similar here in S Fl when mini-lobster season comes around each year, with many divers going after just one or 2 more bugs, running out of air, and then either screaming up to the surface, or grabbing someone else's air. Of course, from the 90's on, I never dove in groups where anyone was like this, and always avoided boats that were novice or mixed boats, as these boats always had limited choices as to what sites they dared drop people on. In the 70's it was pretty normal to run OOA for many spearfishing divers, but this was in non-technical depths, and the plan ahead of time was just a quick free ascent to the surface, the OOA incident being a non-issue to many back in those days.
So Howard, this is as close to a bone or an olive branch that I am willing to do... I think a better solition is to not do technical dives on boats with people aboard that will get in the water with drastically insufficient training or skills, or planning, and put you in a position to support them that should never have occuured. Choice of the boat, and choice of your buddies is the moral of this story--to me.

 

[boulderjohn]

I used to teach writing. The main thing I stressed to students is that their goal as writers was to be understood. Writers always know what they mean, which blinds them to the possibility that their writing was not clear enough for a reader to understand it. Never blame your reader if they misunderstand you, I told them. If you see a lot of misunderstanding, then you need to revise your content.

When the article and resulting thread first appeared, I and others who questioned some of it were told that we did not understand it because we have "a reading comprehension problem," a fault that plagued me throughout my Ph.D studies in English literature. No clarification for that misunderstanding was offered. Howard wrote some explanations that seemed to directly contradict the specific wording in the article and the specific response that John gave earlier. Direct requests for clarification from the author himself went unanswered.

And so I really don't know what he actually meant, and can therefore offer no meaningful response. It seems to me that by this point we should be able to discuss whether or not we agree with his position rather than be puzzling out what that position might be, as if we were arguing over the hidden meanings in the quatrains of Nostradamus.

 

[TSandM]

John, that reminds me of a very amusing experience I had in college. We were studying a book, and the author was attending our class. The instructor gave a lecture on interpreting symbolism in the book. At the end of the lecture, the author took the podium and the first thing he said was, "Wow, I never intended to put any of that in there . . . "

Communication is often imperfect, and it's worst when the perspectives of author and reader are wildly divergent, so that everything is interpreted quite differently.

 

[chrpai]

If I was going to throw you a bone, it would be that Chatterton was talking about diving off of boats that had huge swarms of horrifically trained and incorrectly prepared, non-self reliant divers getting in the water with him----huge groups that had no business in being on a tech dive in the first place.

According to some accounts that I've read, that sounds like some wreck diving circles in the N.E. in the 1990's...

 

[DevonDiver]

Explain how your gas plan works when I have an incident at 250', lose all my gas and come to you panic breathing at 10x my normal working SAC....

 

[PfcAJ]

10x? Really? Come on.

 

[danvolker]

Devon, why not add that you just had your leg slashed by a Man-eating Shark , and your breathing was 10X, due to your having to fight off a giant octopus

On a more serious note, if you really want to go after the basis for GUE Dive Planning, you should direct this question to Guy Shockey or to Jarrod Jablonski. This could eliminate 15 pages of more argument and posturing by both sides