My dive incident

[Mr Carcharodon]

Aozger,

One of the best things you can do for yourself is debrief after each dive. It can be helpful to the get inputs from a buddy but you should take your own counsel as well.

Take the time time to write down what happened during the dive, what went well and badly and what you would do next time. It is an opportunity to make the lessons learned stick in your mind.

The lessons I would take away from your experience are (1) call ahead and verify the plan for the dive charter if there is any doubt up front; (2) do not hesitate to abort a dive early on if there are gear issues; (3) if there are significant configuration changes, like changing a wetsuit, a checkout dive in shallow water is a really good idea, and (4) being slightly overweighted is better than being underweighted.

Also ideally you should learn some more about decompression. The chances of getting bent on that dive were low. And you put yourself through an ordeal that was likely needless. I hesitated to mention that one since I do not have a good place to point you to learn more.

Anyway please do not let this experience scare you away from diving. Florida is a great place to dive, and there is a lot to see. Good luck.

 

[Offgassing]

Forgot to also mention that...

• It was November in NJ so water temps in low 50s
• The guy was wearing a 3mm suit and no gloves
• Pretty sure he didn't have a light (140' off NJ on an overcast day is basically a NIGHT dive)

Oh yeah, he was also diving a rebreather he recently bought on Craig's List and "repaired" himself.

RJP! I need closure! What happend!

 

[RJP]

Also, you have less than 20 dives and have taken both Advanced Open Water and Nitrox???????!!!!! I have heard of this before and I must say that is an inexcusable practice by instructors who know better.

Of course that's a silly assertion.



Anyone with a realistic knowledge of just how "advanced" an Advanced Open Water course really is (or isn't) understands that this course is nothing more than "Open Water - Part 2" and there is really no reason whatsoever that it cannot be taken the very next day after receiving your temporary OW c-card.

Similarly, there is nothing magical, advanced or particularly challenging about diving with EANx. Other than learning how to use an analyzer and how to properly label tank contents, all of the skills for diving EANx are already present in the basic OW course materials.

Of course I may be a somewhat biased "case in point" seeing as I received my EANx two weeks after completing PADI OW dives 1-4 in West Palm Beach (Did EANx through TDI which required no dives.) Two weeks after that I did AOW on vacation in Hawaii, which comprised logged dives 5-9 for me.

By then I knew I was hooked, but the only way to continue to dive at home in NJ was in a dry suit, so when I got back I signed up for a drysuit course, which my LDS offers in a well-done combination along with Peak Performance Buoyancy over the course of two academic sessions, two pool sessions, and a weekend of diving - two drysuit certification dives on Sat and two PPB dives on Sunday.

Quarry was nice, but what I really wanted to do was dive off the NJ coast! If you've never done it, you can take my word that it's a bit different than "pretty fishy" dives in the Caribbean. So I opted to do my first real NJ dives as part of a great Boat Diver course my LDS runs. Yeah, Boat Diver is typically a throw-away cert, but this program is well thought out and covers all of the specifics/idiosyncrasies/local adaptations/etc that are particular to diving on NJ dive boats...and allows you to do your first two NJ dives with an instructor.

So at this point I had now received OW, AOW, and four specialty certifications with a grand total of 15 logged dives.

Now I know everyone is screaming CARD COLLECTOR! and furiously typing derisive replies, but don't look at what I did from a certification standpoint. Look at it from a TRAINING standpoint...

When I entered the water on dive #16 - my first "independent" dive without an instructor - I was still a newbie for-sure. However I was a newbie who had just gone through what amounted to a 4-month long "basic skills certification" program that was conducted by experienced tech/wreck/cave oriented instructors and was comprised of:

• 20+ hours of home study, reading, videos, etc
• 15+ hours of academic classroom sessions
• 10 confined-water sessions of 1-2hrs each
• 15 open water dives
• 12 knowledge reviews
• 3 graded exams

I can read the replies now, saying that instead of doing all that training I should have "just gone out and done some diving" and the like. Call it bragging if you want, but I can assure you that by dive #16 I was a more competent, confident, and conscientious diver than the vast majority of people with 100's of dives. Not because I possess any sort of innate, super-human ability to be a highly-skilled diver, but simply because I received the TRAINING to be one.

Long-story short, don't underestimate the value and importance of investing in HIGH-QUALITY INSTRUCTION very early on in your dive career. It's the foundation of everything else you do...

 

[Atom]

Also, you have less than 20 dives and have taken both Advanced Open Water and Nitrox???????!!!!! I have heard of this before and I must say that is an inexcusable practice by instructors who know better. It is so much better to take your beginning class and dive at that level as you practice, enjoy, and work out the bugs and details of diving (such as proper weighting/buoyancy).

I plead guilty to the same "offense". I did my OW while on an extended trip in SE-Asia. I REALLY liked it, during the course I was paired with the same buddy for all the dives, we got along well together and decided to do AOW right after since we were both really comfortable in the water and were having a good time. Look at it this way, the course is 5 dives, 2 of them are Deep & Navigation, then you choose 3 amongst a bunch of cool things... we did night, PBB & Computer/MultiLevel. I knew I was doing those with a good buddy (and the shop was nice too), it looked really interesting, too interesting not to do it now, and it's 5 more training dives where you can get feedback from an instructor. Of all those things only deep could be considered maybe something you wouldn't want a beginning diver to learn.

Diving deep isn't "hard" but it requires awareness of what you're doing (watch your gas, have a sensible plan, understand narcosis and how it could affect you, ...) would you rather experience that during a proper course? Or with a DM that will lead you there with minimal preparation because it's low season and they would rather have you on the boat than off the boat? I guarantee you that OW divers will go deeper than 60' before AOW if they don't do it soon after the course, especially if diving in SE-Asia. I know this sounds like a stupid argument for doing the deep dive, but I think it's better to be trained early than just wing it with a DM.

Now about nitrox (which I did right after AOW), at that point I wanted to do a liveaboard on the similian islands and I thought nitrox would be a good skill to add, it would enable me to do more/longer dives in the context of a liveaboard. What's so complicated about nitrox that you need further dive experience before doing the class? Nothing you learn while diving will help you understand how to compute EAD, MOD, pp02 and track your CNS clock. The actual diving is the same. The planing is different, but it's just a bit of math (I did my first nitrox dives post certification by calculating EAD, and then using a standard dive table to plan them, wasn't complicated at all), you either get the maths or you don't no amount of diving will help you with that. And I'd even add, doing the nitrox cert introduces you to more concepts like oxygen toxicity that while not a concern for rec OW dives is always good to know about.

I understand that the skill level of divers will vary after their OW cert, and that some divers will barely be able to do a dive properly (I witnessed that on my 1st dive in Phi Phi, poor girl just couldn't control her position in the water column the DM had to fight hard to prevent her from popping to the surface every 2 minutes) but sometimes the training work and the students are ready to move on. Now if the course could be named "Open Water II" that would be much more representative of what it is in real life. I once got asked if I was an 'advanced' diver, I had around 50 dives, AOW/nitrox and some other specialties, I just couldn't get to declaring myself advanced. I think that at that point for 50 dives I had covered a variety of diving scenarios (from 28C to 0C water temperature, from crystal clear water to really bad vis, from 0 current to fairly strong, some boat dives, some shore dives, boardies, wetsuit, drysuit, ice dives, night dives, lakes dives, river dives, ocean dives some drift dives, some dive in current where you have to get back where you started, reefs, wrecks, mud, ...) but 50 dives is not a lot of experience when you think about it. I eventually figured out the other person just wanted to know if I had done AOW, and had to declare myself an 'advanced' diver to that person.

I'd like to add something about dive charters and new divers. It seems all areas do it differently, and you don't know what you don't know, so when you're booking dives, don't hesitate to ask questions about how things are handled, it'll help you know what you're getting into. My first charters were in SE-Asia, where it's group diving following the DM (with some buddy pairing by the DM if you were not traveling with a buddy), the DMs were quite attentive to the whole group. The next boat ride was on the St-Lawrence for the FQAS cert, different but somewhat similar since we had a DM observing us and having us do some skills (the joy of diving in Quebec). After that it was in Florida, I knew from having talked to other divers and from reading threads on scubaboard, that it would be buddy dives, with no DM in the water, so as soon as I got on the boat I asked the DM if he knew any diver that needed a buddy, both times the DM hooked me up with another diver and we made some plans before going in. It's not hard to buddy up with somebody on a dive boat, but do something about it if you want it to happen, ask the DM, talk to the other divers, ... don't just sit there and wait till 30 seconds before stepping into the pool.

Forgot to also mention that...

• It was November in NJ so water temps in low 50s
• The guy was wearing a 3mm suit and no gloves
• Pretty sure he didn't have a light (140' off NJ on an overcast day is basically a NIGHT dive)

Oh yeah, he was also diving a rebreather he recently bought on Craig's List and "repaired" himself.

!!!! You're joking? Right? So what happened?

 

[TSandM]

Also, you have less than 20 dives and have taken both Advanced Open Water and Nitrox???????!!!!!

I'm with RJP. AOW is just OW2. I did it immediately after OW, because I was too scared to try to dive without an instructor. And then I did a few days in Maui, and came back and did PPB and Nav and Deep, because I knew I still sucked as a diver. At the end of all of it, I had a bunch of cards and I still couldn't dive my way out of a wet paper bag. But I'd tried, folks, I'd tried.

I see nothing at all wrong with the OP having done those classes. Honestly, Nitrox is an intellectual concept -- there is nothing different about diving it, except to be aware of your MOD, which it sounds as though the OP was and the rest of his diving group wasn't, unless they weren't on Nitrox.

There are a lot of things here that make me shake my head. Lack of a real gut-level commitment to buddy diving on the part of everybody involved. Lack of buddy checks. Lack of a well-laid-out dive plan. Lack of communication underwater. Lack of training.

These things, and a whole bunch more, are the reason that I ended up pursuing the path in diving that I did. I dive as a part of a committed team. We make a tacit agreement with our teammates to present ourselves with adequate personal skills and adequately maintained and appropriate equipment to complete the proposed dive. We have a plan and it is SPOKEN and agreed upon. We do buddy checks, and equipment checks, and bubble checks. We descend together, dive together, help one another solve problems, and ascend together. We have a lot of fun in the process. I think many people would have a lot more fun if they followed that general guideline for diving.

Off my soapbox, but this one hit a bunch of nerves.

 

[RJP]

RJP! I need closure! What happend!

Fortunately for this guy, I think both Darwin and Murphy must have had the weekend off...



He tagged along behind my buddy and me. (Remember, "We dive alone together.")

The viz was crap (2ft even with a 21w HID) and it was literally NIGHT-DIVE dark below 100fsw. There were trap lines all over the wreck and monofilament and fishing nets were everywhere. As soon as my buddy and I hit the bottom at 140' we spent about two minutes trying to get our bearings and figure out where to tie in. Didn't take much longer for us both to agree that this dive was going no-where and thumb it - in large part due to the nagging thought of having to conduct a rescue (or recovery) of Mr No-Buddy. So we turned him around and sent him back up ahead of us.

 

[adamtodd]

Hey man, I am glad you are OK. The Cert.'s are not really so important. Expirence is, and I don't nessesarly think it is bad to do OW and AOW together, or Nitrox for that matter.. What matters is you take it upon yourself to dive within your limits, and refine your skills at that limit before moving on.

Anyways you should learn from all this well. Keep on diving. I put myself in dangerous situations before- and was naive about the role of the DM. It is good that you have learned these lessons early.
Good Luck!

 

[mnaalb]

I had driven 2.5 hours there the night before and stayed at a hotel. I just did not want to waste it.

Where do you live? I would probably be 4 to 5 hours from west palm (to the north). In the Gainesville area. I would dive with you. I have been diving over a year and a half. Have about 40 dives. AOW but no nitrox yet. I also live near quite a few springs which may be ideal to get some dives under your belt. The only issue I have is my weird work schedule. I dive sometimes with a guy from church and sometimes with a guy I met through the dive shop I certified through. My son also recently got his certification but his temporary has expired and I am trying to patiently deal with his instructor to get him to see why he has not gotten his perminant c-card. Let me know if you want to dive sometime. I am very conservative in my diving and dive planning as I am still honing my skills to some degree, plus diving with your kid adds a little extra concern as well.

 

[idocsteve]

I do not recommend that the diver who started this thread pursue the SDI Solo Diving certificate.

 

[DCBC]

How can that be the instructor's fault?
...To me, failing to fix the buoyancy problem was poor judgement not ignorance (or poor instruction).

Wouldn't poor instruction be the instructor's fault?

In addition, the diver said he spent 10 minutes trying to descend. That means that he was diving without a buddy for 10 minutes...I thought new divers are taught to come up after a minute or two of buddy separation. Another example of questionable judgement?

Unless this wasn't taught? And where was the DM all this time? It works both ways. Perhaps the DM wasn't taught properly either...

Drift diving in 90 or 100 feet of water IS advanced diving. It is scary that poorly qualified divers attempt to do these dives. Even if the DM stayed with the customer, what action should the DM have taken?...I would have just told him to give up on the descent and go back and get some lead.

Agreed. The DM shouldn't have allowed him to do the dive in the first-place. The DM should have insured the diver was returned to the boat safely and not just abandon him. The DM knew he was a new diver. You don't abandon divers for which you are responsible for.

However, this is the way that many people need in order to really learn to dive. They need to get scared, put themselves in a situation that is out of their control, acknowledge that they made poor decisions and also realize that they need more experience before trying a similar dive.

I don't believe people require to be frightened to learn how to dive properly. That's why proper training is needed.