Question Near incident. What should I have done?

[Seaweed Doc]

I told him this at the surface, he said I should know this applies to buddy separation, not instructor-student separation

Wow. Oh wow. I had resolved to read through the whole thread before replying but this pisses me off.

If I lose track of a student when instructing, they darn well better be getting themselves to the surface after looking for a minute. There is no "it's different with instructor-student" situations rule and I sure as h**l don't want some never-dove-in-cold-murky-water instructor telling students differently. In his situation, I can see why he thought it might be ok. Vis is good, I'll see you as soon as we're out, right? Dangerous jerk.

I'll reply later with my compendium of this incompetents' errors.

 

[Miyaru]

As a side note... any diver can call the dive at any time, no questions asked... or has that changed recently?

That rule still applies today.

What's even more mysterious to me is that all the adult male divers including me were using a 15L tank. My friend was told by the instructor to not use 15L on day 1 because he should learn his buoyancy on 12L, and then repeatedly denied the 15L tank on the basis that he should stick to what he started with given he's a beginner still perfecting his buoyancy. I assume the instructor just wanted an excuse to finish the dives earlier, and by the end we had had this conversation so many times with him he just didn't want to back down.

Burning through air on every dive and still refusing a larger cylinder... because of some weird idea that you can't learn buoyancy control with a 15 liter cylinder?

Were those cylinders steel or aluminum?

 

[OctopusLover]

Burning through air on every dive and still refusing a larger cylinder... because of some weird idea that you can't learn buoyancy control with a 15 liter cylinder?

Were those cylinders steel or aluminum?

Steel. I really believe he was using this as an excuse, as it allowed him to make shorter dives because otherwise I'm as baffled as you are

 

[The Chairman]

OctopusLover you did great. Good decision-making.

Thanks. This is still my take-a-way as well. Could you have done better? Sure. You're not there yet, but I am confident that you will be. Keep kicking. Keep learning.

 

[KenE]

I will re-iterate what has been said, but in a slightly different manner. You have learned a lot, but also accomplished a lot during this situation. **** happens, it doesn't matter how or why, it just does, in this case it did and you responded. You developed a plan and was ready to execute it. Was it the best plan, maybe or maybe not, but it would have kept the group alive to dive another day. The anchor line is better than open water, but open water is better than drowning. The important issue is you created a plan and did not panic. That in itself is an accomplishment, I have seen many panic and respond without a valid plan.

 

[rgkv]

Diving in the Red sea, one year ago. I was on a dive with 7 others, the dive master, leader from the boat was my dive buddy. we were on a wreck dive, team leader entered the boat, I followed behind. torches on, all going well as we came accross some holes in a bulkhead of some sort separating another side of the boat, the holes were rot in the metal and had pieces projecting into the holes, leader made in through a hole, I admit i was slower navigating through the hole, worried about the sharp metal pieces. I guess all my consentration was looking at what I was doing, got throught the hole and buddy is gone !!. looking around I notice the person behind me has one of his/her hoses tangeled on one of the pieces of metal, is not aware of it and struggling. I turn back, release her/his hose and let her/him go in front of me. I am still looking for my dive buddy, two more divers come threw a different hole in front of me. To me it looked like these two divers knew where they were going, Dive buddy was gone, a minute or so has passed, Im not waiting inside this ship hoping someone comes back for me, I decide to follow these two out and then, figure out where I am, look for my group or suface. so as we left the boat, my dive buddy spotted me and I rejoined the group with the dive ending. On the boat I got nothing but ****, was the cause of a backup, that I caused all the silt to be desturbed, that it was not my responsilbilty to help that person, that I should have gone and got someone to go back and help..{ that one blows me away, considering I am a rescue diver} was asked to apologize to all the divers for cutting the dives short.. Not really sure how I feel about it all, my only beef is my dive buddy, who knew I didnt know the way, not even looking back to see if I was following him out the boat. Havent dived with this group again

 

[Seaweed Doc]

OK, now I've read the whole thread. I will assign blame, primarily to the guide/instructor. But where to start?
I'm going to assume PADI (playing the odds and thinking most agencies offering AOW are likely similar).

1. You can mix students with non-students in an instructional dive per standards, but they do count against ratios. So if it's just one instructor, there shouldn't be more than 8 total customers (students and guided divers) in the group. Sounds like that's violation number 1. (Also, IMHO, there are limited times when this should happen. E.g., if you have somebody that just wants to refresh skills a bit, or wants to watch their friend or relative learn, or it's a person thinking of becoming a DM or somesuch. Putting folks who are in a class with folks expecting a guided tour is a disservice to the guided divers at best.)

2. If this dive was deeper than 18 m and you had not already done the deep dive of AOW, then there's a standards violation.

3. If this dive was deeper than 18 m the instructor is required to directly supervise the student divers throughout. Any separation is the instructors' fault.

4. If penetration was involved, the instructor is required to directly supervise the student throughout. Again, any separation is the instructors' fault.

5. Wreck penetration is not allowed for students doing dive 1 of the wreck course or a wreck dive as part of AOW. And while I could sort of see doing an easy "swim through" penetration (e.g., the bow deckhouse area on El Aguila in Roatan), that wasn't what this guy was doing: You couldn't see the group from the entry site.

6. We're so far out of line already that I hesitate to mention this, but what the heck. If you ARE doing a wreck penetration as part of a wreck course, your student : instructor ratio is 2:1. Even if this was a subsequent dive and otherwise legitimate from a training perspective, the fact that he took students plus the tourists into the wreck is yet another violation.

I'm not going to fault you (OP) for several things:

1. Not going to the anchor line and ascending in the blue. In that case, you don't know what you don't know. The dive briefing should have covered this. Could you have approached it differently? Sure, if you'd known. You didn't AND SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN EXPECTED TO.

2. Sharing air on the bottom for the purpose of conserving air is not something you are taught and not something I'd have done in this situation. For OW classes, the mantra is when a diver is out of air and their buddy is at hand, they should share air. There's no "well, if they're low maybe share air for awhile" drill you're taught. When I've had divers in classes low on air, I've brought them to the safety stop and while doing a lot of nothing for 3 minutes let them breathe off my tank or a pony. But they'd have to be nearly out on the bottom before I'd share air there, and we would be going straight to the surface once the diver was calmed down.

 

[Ez E]

Im by no means an expert and have leas than 20 dives under my belt as just an OW diver. I do want to say kudos OP. While there is probably blame to be laid on you and maybe that is deserved. But kudos for being attentive and recognizing a problem. You made a decision based off what you saw being expressed to you. A low air/out of air situation is nerve racking not only for the person low/out but also for the inexperienced divers around them.

Regardless of the hate you may have gotten I believe you potentially saved a life. You were dealing with 2 distressed divers(one with mask issues and the low air diver) and made a decision to surface off the anchor line. I cant comment on how dangerous that is because it is out of my wheelhouse. But you kept a person alive and more important you were aware of your surroundings and other divers to be able to act quickly.

Im sure I will get berated for chiming out n as inexperienced as I am. But I find your action admirable and appreciate that you are taking the time to reflect and grow in your actions.

Bravo OP. Some here may have acted perfectly in their perfectly trained manner. Others may have done what you did. And still others may have freaked completely out and caused a potentially deadly scenario.

 

[happy-diver]

This is not the case. The original plan, whatever it was, began with a penetration at 25m. The route he eventually tooks us on after the separation began at 20m and involved no further penetrations. If my friend ran out of air during the safety stop with the shallower no-penetration route I think it's safe to assume the deeper penetration route would have been worse?

As you are here attempting to re constuct what must have been a traumatic time faced with so much
detail and you've decided that your offshoot is in danger and headed for the surface, there is no way
you could know the outcome of staying with your group, as you did not do the same dive, with them

Instead you decided to freelance, split the dive group, and put two groups under unnecessary stress

With the outcome of either of these scenarios being, just another day in the world, just another dive

 

[SlugLife]

Not sure how I'd go about that, we are on an 8 day liveaboard, 9 people onboard and only one instructor. If I opt out of this I may as well opt out of the entire liveaboard or at least until my friends were certified.

My question would be when you discovered that the person instructing was also the person leading the dives.

Personally, I'd be quite pissed if I paid for some dives with a guide, only to learn the guide was also acting as an instructor during those dives. Not all dives need a guide of course, but it sounds like these dives were the kind you'd want and expect a guide for, given the swim-throughs, currents, and comments by the guide/instructor.

My friend was told by the instructor to not use 15L on day 1 because he should learn his buoyancy on 12L, and then repeatedly denied the 15L tank on the basis that he should stick to what he started with given he's a beginner still perfecting his buoyancy.

Given it's AOW, I consider that reasoning nonsense. Part of "perfect buoyancy" is learning how to adjust and adapt to 12 vs 15, or aluminum vs steel. However, even if we take what he said at face value, the safety concerns of running OOA are a much bigger problem than whatever inconvenience switching to a bigger tank might cause.

Some of the penetrations we did under the supervision of an experienced dive master took us so deep inside the wrecks we probably would not have found our way out on our own before emptying the contents of our cylinder.

I'm hearing "if we got separated, I'd be dead." Lots of things can go wrong in a penetration dive, lights fail, silt-outs, guide has a heart-attack, guide does something irresponsible, someone has a catastrophic equipment failure and the single guide can't safely get everyone out.

According to you we never should have entered the wreck in the first place if we didn't know the way out, and we would have therefore missed some of the most spectacular diving we have done in our entire lives, and we're just two of countless divers who have done the very same thing and lived to tell the tale.

I have zero cave training. I'm fairly sure if I decided to swim into a cave, but did so carefully, I'd come out safely 99/100 times. It's that last 1/100 or even 1/1000 were things go very wrong. That may sound small, but lots of us have done a few hundred or thousands of dives.