Question Near incident. What should I have done?

[happy-diver]

1. The two divers under instruction should follow him closely, me and my partner after, and the other 5 divers behind.

The other 5 divers in our group weren't respecting the order (I think because they were taking pictures and didn't want the beginners in front of them to disrupt visibility).

These instructor guys know every inch of these wrecks, and how many bars it takes from point to point

So off you all go la de da with a couple of students just on a dive not following some basic instructions


I have removed cameras from people during dives and I'm just another diver customer dude having fun


Thing is with these ScubaBoard frowned upon so called trustme dives is people do them and then don't
So the thing is once you've decided to hand your responsibility for the dive over you should stick with it

Yes that's the dive plan and you know what we do with the dive plan


So what happens, is those thoughts start eating away at your brain, and the anxiety starts to creep in
and then just after that the instructor guide dude pops his little head around the corner and beckons

Great feeling

 

[NW Dive Dawg]

I think the problem started with a flawed and incomplete plan that was set forth by the instructor. Only experience can help you to better recognise a "bad" plan when you hear it. My guess is that these students simply trusted the plan as sound since it was coming from an instructor. Bad idea.

Any and all plans can and do change. You didn't change the plan so your decision to implement a revised plan based on your concerns was warranted. The fact that all persons came back safely supports your decision.

What ever happened to "in the event of separation, search / wait for one minute, then surface". Did this instructor not listen to himself the day he taught that?

I'm curious as to what the visibility was on this dive? A robust marker strobe on the ascent line might have been something worth considering.

Up here in the PNW......particularly on hunting / gathering dives, we typically have vis conditions that can make separation quite common. Our plan is typically....."if we get separated, get your Lingcod and scallops and we'll meet back at the boat in an hour". Not saying it's a good plan, but at least it's a plan that we're all agreed on ahead of time..

 

[johndiver999]

Training is to dive in pair and if something goes wrong when you're in a pair. Sharing air here is only a reasonable option because there's 2 pairs here. What if OP's equipment were to fail after they've been sharing air and stayed at the bottom wondering and hoping the instructor-guide would turn up, now you have two divers sharing the near empty tank of the anxious diver, at depth, and probably both panicking.

As a general rule, if you're sharing air, you should be on the way up.

In general, I agree that if you are sharing air, then you should be going up - unless there is some compelling reason NOT to.

Failing to come up the anchor line and follow the dive plan is a compelling reason to not, necessarily immediately begin an ascent. It is a balancing of risks and it is dependent on conditions, the emotional status and skills of the divers involved, the reserve capacities of the divers involved and who knows what else, but I have zero fear of sharing air for 100 seconds (at a moderate depth) in an attempt to resolve the situation in the safest manner. Obviously, you do not sit there on the bottom sharing a nearly empty tank while waiting for dumbass instructor to show.

Perhaps in that situation, attempting to share air would throw the low on air diver into a panic, but I still think it is an OPTION that should have been considered. I think I would have offered the air to the diver who was becoming low and if they seemed too stressed or rejected it, then the other obvious answer is to get the hell out of dodge immediately.

Personally, I would not want to be subject to the increased danger of being chopped up by a boat and ascending in the wrong place if it can easily and safely be avoided.

 

[inquis]

As a general rule, if you're sharing air, you should be on the way up.

No, as a general rule, the dive is over. This is an example where going back to the anchor is far more desirable than surfacing directly. Ship traffic is another situation where it is more desirable to swim some at depth. Obviously, doing so requires that to have been included in the dive planning.

 

[dmaziuk]

Is penetrating a wreck normal for the number of dives most of you had?

Presumably we're talking swim-throughs with "visible exit" or whatever the definition is -- as distinct from full "overhead environment". Yes, it is normal in some places.

Doing that with a single guide per 9 divers may be a bit of a stretch, you'd probably want a second DM in the rear. And if 2 of them are on their training dive and the guide's supposed to be also "instructing" them, that's a sh*tshow.

 

[rhwestfall]

Is penetrating a wreck normal for the number of dives most of you had?

YEAH, I'm trying to figure out in what certification program overhead is a component of AOW experience?

 

[Youssef]

My second rule of diving is that you can call a dive at any time

What’s the first?

 

[Scuba Lawyer]

To the OP - you did nothing wrong. You made the best decision given your knowledge of the circumstances at the time. Be proud of your resourcefulness. You made a plan and followed it. Bravo to you!

Not to be too long winded, but the following recent experience of mine seems appropriate to share. For those of you who don't know me, I have a tad bit of experience UW. Of course the last scuba class I taught was 38 years ago so anything beyond buddy breathing techniques is a mystery to me. Oh yea, Lyndon Johnson was President when I was first taught to dive.

Fastforward to last November. I'm in Hawaii doing stuff (not a dive trip) and have a morning off so I book a local tourist 2-tank boat dive. There was me, a guy with about 25 dives under his belt and two ladies newly minted with c-cards. Young Divemaster Lady (she kept calling me grandpa) repeated over and over and over and over her three rules: 1. No one goes deeper than 60 feet; 2. No one stays down more than 45 minutes; and 3. No one, and I mean no one, gets more than 10 feet away from her the entire dive so she can "rescue us." Fine, whatever. I just want to get wet.

First dive we were swimming along a wall at 50 feet. All of a sudden Divemaster Lady heads over the wall and the other folks follow her. I hung back and watched the group head down to what I estimate was 120 feet and stay a minute or so then come back up. WTF?

We get back on the boat and Divemaster Lady yells, screams, berates and generally belittles me for not sticking 10 feet from her on the entire dive (Rule #3). My response to her in front of the others was not very gentlemanly. To sum it up. I told her that she is the one who broke her own Rule #1 and that I really didn't want to be near 4 potentially narc'd out divers who might have decided to do a death spiral into the abyss. She forbid me from making the 2nd dive so there, she got me, put me in my place she did.

Upon our return the dive shop/boat owner was at the dock to meet us because she had called him to "deal with me." What she didn't know was that I had a very nice phone conversation with the owner during the entirety of waiting out the 2nd dive. He and I had many friends in common and had even had the same NAUI ITC Instructor way back when. It was fun to watch Divemaster Lady's face when she was, then and there handed her final paycheck and told to turn over the keys to the shop. I had a number of Mai Tai's that night reminiscing about a great day in the diving world.

 

[Knockneed Man]

Instructors fault. He should have only been with the students and a DM should have been assigned to the remainder. This would have solved everything before it became a problem. But given the situation you should have swam over and close to the wreck to go back up the anchor line.

What’s the first?

Don’t get dead

He had a grand total of two dives after OW and this was his first dive below 18 meters ever. I understand why he'd look to me for guidance on how to proceed given I'm the most experienced diver in our friend group

This is the problem I have with students completing their OW and then immediately going for AOW. New OW divers need to get more experience by completing dives within their ability, ie: not the dive described here, before moving on to AOW. A handful of dives in an OW class, followed by two dives, and then an AOW class, does not an advanced diver make.

 

[Jai Bar]

From the description it sounds like a dive to Thistlegorm, or similar.

I am not sure how proficient you are with deploying a SMB and whether you checked that you have sufficient line to deploy from 20 meters. However, in a scenario of 5 non experienced divers- one with 50 bar at 25m, with mask clearing issues, perhaps separation problem and a possibly on the verge of panicking- to begin a drift with strong currents in the blue, five non experienced divers clinging on a single smb- you were probably lucky that the furious instructor found you. God knows what could have happened with you drifting strong currents into the open sea.

What you should have done is to wait, relax your breath and especially calm the diver with mask and air problem. Make turn a couple of times a 360-degree turns and look for the instructor and rest of group. Dont know from your description how long you waited, but in this scenario one minute is probably enough because one diver on verge of panic and very shorton air and most like fast air consumption. If no contact with instrucor or group, you should have gone to the nearest anchor line that you see- even if it belongs to a different boat than yours, go up along it- skip safety stop if the diver with less than 50 bar is already emptying last bars. Share air if needed, or frequently there is a cylinder tied to the anchore line in this types of dives that you can use. Safety stop if one diver out of air is not mandatory. You go out of the water and if on wrong boat they will either take you or call for help.

The instructor upon not finding you should have aborted the dive, no safety stops, make sure the rest of group climb back to boat and initiate search and rescue protocol if not finding you on the anchor line or on surface.

Should you have failed to find any anchor line- usually there are too many of them but lets assume you were alone- then execute your plan to go up together with smb. Establish positive buoyancy on the surface, make sure everyone ditched weights and are ok, make smb visible if requires inflating and if boat still visible try call attention and wait for help.

Anyway mixing the group like described, was wrong to begin with. Many operators restrict this dive to experienced divers for obvious reasons.