Negative entry vs Using a downline

[Greenjuice]

I do believe there is a law of primacy, but it has nothing to do with the equipment you use. For me, it is a solid basis in skin diving techniques and general comfort/skill in the water. If you have that, the equipment is just what you happen to be using that dive. This is why I am so opposed to discussions where the gear is placed in a position of greater importance than it need be. Because the focus is wrong.

That makes sense; it is much harder to unlearn something that you were first taught to be right. And once that focus is taken off, while acknowledging there has to be a safety margin, it allows the task of the dive itself to take centre place.

I believe this is accordance another law in educational psychology, which is the law of requirement.

If you are looking for an elusive pygmy seahorse, mandarinfish or hairy octopus you'll be looking for a buddy team with the skills of those habitats to match needs and aims of *that* dive. These skills may be much more mental than physical. It may require equipment that is non-standard and not needed for diving (e.g., magnifying glass, Lembeh sticks or supermacro lens attachments) that would give the team an advantage in achieving the tasks of that dive.

This might seem trivial to some, but there are people (like BBC or National Geographic documentary teams) who will pay big money to observe these critters. On many rec trips I have seen more unsuccessful dives than successful ones.

However, I have seen enough to know that is it definitely not down to just luck. There are individuals who achieve much higher success rates (I am not claiming to be one of them) than the average. They get good at what they do because they trained and developed their skills for it. It does all start with the right focus.

It necessarily follows that there are situations where choices on teams and standardisation must and do dominate. But it should equally be acknowledged that there are situations where this may not be appropriate.

To keep true to the title of this thread, I would say all the variations in the choices made have their roots an individual's education, learning and experiences. As all experience is learning, we become what we are trained to be.

I don't want to turn this into a comparison between different dive agencies, but just to state a personal note of observation, that part of the widespread success and adoption of PADI appears to be the strong roots in educational psychology. You can see it in their approach and clever teaching materials they produce.

That modular approach may have many other reason$ (oops, excuse the typo!), but does acknowledge variations in dive scenarios and needs to match. There is even one to recognise fish (UW naturalist)!


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[chillyinCanada]

If you are looking. It may require equipment that is non-standard and not needed for diving (e.g., magnifying glass, Lembeh sticks or supermacro lens attachments) that would give the team an advantage in achieving the tasks of that k[/QUOTE]


What the heck do you mean that a magnifying glass is non-standard equipment?

 

[Greenjuice]

What the heck do you mean that a magnifying glass is non-standard equipment?

Ah yes, I'd forgotten the pair my optician gave me when I hit my 50s! Thank goodness it's not yet listed amongst the medical conditions on the disclaimer forms!



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[AfterDark]

TC....I know you don't want to dive with me or my buddies, even though we would welcome you....but....I can get a boat in Palm Beach to run a line down to a wreck on a "fast current day" in Palm Beach when you are here....And I guarantee you won't be able to pull your way down....when it is just medium/normal in palm beach on a baby wreck like the Mispah, you would be spun like a fishing lure....on some of the wrecks that get full gulf stream intrusion, they can have double the current on the Mispah.....This is no slam on you....You could be Arnold Swarzenegger in his prime, or an Olympic Decathalete, whatever.....pulling down a line in a full Palm Beach current won't happen----If by some miracle you did pull it off to a 100 foot wreck---and this is not as strong as the currents on the 165 foot deep wrecks or 225 like the Skycliff...even if you did get down, you would blow huge gas, and your muscles would have been pushed....maybe no big deal, but if you stay down to near max no-deco time, then this kind of exertion puts you into extreme risk for DCS....Which is why the boats in Lauderdale are most likely to abort period, if the DM trying to set the hook, says it is ripping. They don't practice hot drops in Lauderdale, so they just tell their groups the current is ripping too fast to dive these wrecks on days like that ( the Gulf stream meanders in and out by many miles in any given day--when it gets close to shore, it means the current is ripping...it can get to within 1 /4 of a mile of shore in Palm Beach....but is normally many miles further out off of Lauderdale( which is why they don't get slammed with currents like Palm beach)... The plus for the big currents, is healthy reefs and more fish. But there are divers that hate currents and drift diving. We can't all like the same thing






Ha ha... In Bob's scenario, where I know I am surface swimming a good distance, the snorkel is kit for the dive...George would do the same in that scenario. Thing is, there are only a very few scenarios like this off S fl....Normally, it would be useless, so not normally part of my dive gear for the day...Though..you can tuck one into the backplate pouch just in case...like the Halcyon one man liferaft. I don't..Just saying.

So Dan when the current is that strong do you still dive the wrecks? I ask because with or with out a down line with a current that strong most ops would find another time or place to dive. Any current that strong shouldn't be dived IMO.

 

[jadairiii]

....But really, you've never heard of a diver dying while diving wearing a wing in which the COD was drowning.. ....

Not on the surface, always on the bottom. But if you know of a diver that made it to the surface, inflated their wing then went face down and drowned, let me know. And not due to heart failure.

.. or that no drowned diver has ever told you it was because they were unconscious on the surface face down?

.

I lack the ability to speak to the dead.

.. .....I do have various equipment from diving's past but that's more because I enjoy studying and diving with it.

I take my RAM (heavy yoke) out every so often but for the novelty of it, I will keep the Farallon. One piece of "vintage" gear that goes with me on almost every dive is my Scubapro "Box" for my gear....even on tech dives!

 

[danvolker]

So Dan when the current is that strong do you still dive the wrecks? I ask because with or with out a down line with a current that strong most ops would find another time or place to dive. Any current that strong shouldn't be dived IMO.

Well the thing is, in Palm Beach, we just had these big currents that would mean most of the time, anchoring the boat or a big ball with a line, just would not work--divers would be tying to pull down a line that was NOT straight down, but more like 40 degrees--and pulling down would almost feel like pulling up....and with their body spinning around and the hanging on for dear life, most divers would not, or could not do this.....and sometimes the big float balls would get pulled so hard by the current, that the line would actually pull the float ball down and we would see it later on the bottom, totally collapsed from the pressure....So Frank Hammett I believe is the Captain that figured out the drift dive techniques for Palm Beach first, in the late 50's, and perfected this in the 60's....By the 70's, there were other boats doing drift drops on reefs AND wreck also....but this was very much like the Captain getting a technical diving course himself that required major learning....Some captains would be come very good at this, with "Rainman like" skills in estimating each diver's descent rates from seeing them dive just a few times....and knowing how to drop similar groups of divers so that they would have effortless dives into the wrecks, and then they could just come up anywhere--and the Captain would be waiting wherever they came up.

So even on the worst days when the current is from complete Gulf Stream intrusion ( almost like we were in the middle of the Gulf Stream) The captain approaches the gps or visual mark for the wreck....and then stops the boat on top of it...and waits a minute...and sees how far he has drifted off the wreck ( obviously GPS made this easier for the captains than the visual marks--but they did do this PERFECTLY with visuals) ..So when you know how far the current moves the boat in a minute, you have a good idea of how far the divers are going to be moved in the minute "a group" might take to get down. This is a basic part of the calculation, but there is much more to be good, rather than poor at this....to be good, you need to have a sense of the different rates of top current, mid current , and bottom current--and be very good at judging an individual group of divers( that drop the same) as to how long it will take them to fall out of the mid water column, and get to the low current water by the bottom....and then the captain also has to calculate WIND hitting the boat, and how much that has thrown off the drift calculations, and they have to figure a correction for this....multiple vectors, lots of multiples....this really takes a captain wired for advanced physics....except most that I have seen that are the best, do this more like a Rainman thing, than like a purposeful series of physics calculations( which would work also).

One of the best today, anywhere is Captain Lynne Simmons in Boynton....She used to be able to drop us on tech wrecks like the skycliffe, sitting at around 225 feet, with the biggest currents of any of our wrecks ( gulf stream comes in very close by the wreck)--we could have a 5 mph current and a wind blowing the boat sideways, and Lynn would ask George, Bill and I if we wanted to be on the wheelhouse, or this end, or that --she would just be able to drop us on anything---she would tell us to dive....we would drop....we would be head down vertical like freedivers, and like freedivers, we would be descending negative, and like freedivers, we would NOT be exerting at all--we would be doing a easy paced kick to increase the rate of falling...heart rates at resting....and in a minute we would have fallen close to 150 feet or more, and we would be seeing the ship looming up--coming right at us...And there was the object she told us she would put us on....we would then just need to decide what depth we wanted to be at as it raced toward us....This is a weird feeling.....You add gas to your BC at the height of the top of the ship....and see the ship in the distance, just coming AT you....fast.....As it approaches, and get's bigger and bigger, you decide WHERE you want to duck out of the current. There are a few techniques we use, my favorites are borrowed from white water kayaking...the Eddie Out concept like when you go down current of a rock, and the current reverses.

{Tangent/Split Alert..... This sudden 5 foot or 10 foot sprint a diver will do to go from resting in the water collumn, watching the ship approach them at warp speed, is where "what fins you have chosen" can become a good or bad choice as the current increases from 1 mph to 2, to 3 and so on....with each mile an hour increase, the fin choice becomes more important....and while anyone that knows me knows I don't say good things about Jet Fins, they actually do the job VERY well here...drifting in, they are nice big powerful stabilzers...and there is no work....when you get ready to make your beeline for the "eddie out maneuver" to get into the lee side of a structure, the Jets let the diver suddenly just SHOOT into the sweet spot without effort. Not really going to be a problem for a split fin diver with 1 or 2 mph currents, but as you approach 3 mph currents, what happens is they see they are about at the sprint point to head down the 5 or 10 feet...and they start kicking fast, but the flimsy and sloppy split blades take a few seconds to get them up to their fast speed...and the diver did not really have a few seconds...they had one second....I have tried many fins for this, and pretty much all paddles will do this fine, Force Fins can do it well, and so will freedive fins...but splits do you no favors here...End Tangent }


So one option is to stay just above the top of the ship, and as it gets to you, plan on swimming down with a short sprint ( maybe 10 feet) either to a large structure protection on the deck--the lee side of the wheelhouse for example....or, if you miss that, there is the lee side of the hull of the ship...as long as you get near this downstream side , the current will HELP you come back in next to the wall of the structure, and it will be light and easy to move in...and then on a day like this, the dive can still be easy, but you need a sense of white water physics--where will there be hydraulics--where will there be eddies that are going to move you this way or that...when you have done this 20 or 30 times on medium days, you already have the feel of what will happen--it is just happening MORE now, so it could not be LEARNED on a day like this....but when learned on the easy and medium days, you just think to yourself--we will go in here....take a run down the corridor on the top of the deck from "there" to "there", then swim along over to the hold..or whatever--you plan your dive at this point, like a whitewater kayaker looking at waves and boulders, or like a mogul skier planning his run.

The really high current ( full gulf Stream at maybe 5mph) is easy for the divers with the history of diving medium and big currents, in that they know what they need to do, and exactly how to do it....And they know they can do it...On the full intrusion days, it is not actually EASY for the diver in this case to swim through each path they plan on, as with this kind of monster current, there can be eddies in the eddies, and one minute everything is fine, and all of a sudden, you are getting spun...but...you know where to move to be out of the spin, and then you re-adjust how careful you are in some areas. If it is a wreck with penetration, you can be completely out of the current for the entire penetration, so this can make the dive better as well.

So what I am saying, is that even on the worst days for tech wrecks, the drift will work for people with plenty of time doing medium Palm beach currents( lets's say 3mph)....While it might not seem like it, just adding one or 2 miles per hour to this is an ENORMOUS difference to a diver...So, even in Palm Beach, on a day when the gulf stream is in very close to shore, many of the boats will chose NOT to do wrecks, unless their divers are 100% experienced on high current drops. When the current is just 2 to 3 mph, it is ideal for learning, and you can see what you have to do when you watch an experienced diver doing it, and it is easy to do the same.....and the dive becomes very easy, and with no exertion to speak of. And this is how it is most of the time on a wreck like the Mispah.

And when you are ready to come up, you just drift off the wreck, and begin your leisurely ascent....A DM will have unhooked a torpedo float, or, will shoot a bag, at some point around now for most charters....and if you surface a half mile from where the wreck was ( with safety stop this is probable), the boat will be right there when you come up. Each diver is supposed to have an SMB, in case they get blown off the wreck, so that the boat will know of the separation, and they can pick up the errant diver, then go back to waiting on the main group....and in any event, it is easy enough to predict the "line" that divers will form in on the surface...the vector....

 

[lv2dive]

I find it kind of hard to believe that there is all this incredulity around Dan's statements about hot drops. There are, quite simply, parts of the world where it is really not best practice to hook into the wreck (at least, all the time). A captain that knows what he/she is doing can do a pretty good job of dropping a team on a wreck the vast majority of the time. Pulling down a line 150 feet, 200 feet, or more, with a raging current that would rip one's mask off, does not make sense. Forget someone's bubbles not making it up three feet - they aren't making it up three inches before they are history.

To another point - yes if you want to hit the wreck FOR SURE - it's nice to have a downline. But if the current is as strong as it often gets in WPB and other places, especially if the wreck is deep - it may well not be worth it. Someone talking about using finger muscles has absolutely no idea of the amount of effort it takes to get down a line in strong current. Period.

All just MHO of course. And I can't believe there are over 400 posts and I just added one LOL.

 

[AfterDark]

Dan are the currents still as strong at depth or do they slack off? I've worked in 5 knot currents it wasn't fun. Is it just a drift dive? Penetration? Do you hang on and pull yourself along. I'm curious about the fun factor.

The whole process sounds fascinating and fun too. Is that the fun factor the drop?

Not for you Dan but, I don't get this hand over hand thing. What's that? Negative means one sinks. I've pulled myself laterally along a wreck or the bottom but never up or down I hold on to the line and regulate my buoyancy so I go in the direction I need to go with some kicking. That's why we wear weights and BC's or have I been doing that wrong all these years?

 

[T.C.]

I find it kind of hard to believe that there is all this incredulity around Dan's statements about hot drops. There are, quite simply, parts of the world where it is really not best practice to hook into the wreck (at least, all the time).

And there are parts where it is. That's what we've all agreed; it depends on the place, time and conditions.

To another point - yes if you want to hit the wreck FOR SURE - it's nice to have a downline. But if the current is as strong as it often gets in WPB and other places, especially if the wreck is deep - it may well not be worth it. Someone talking about using finger muscles has absolutely no idea of the amount of effort it takes to get down a line in strong current. Period.

As I said, I've dove lines in heavy current. My fingers were the only thing that got tired, and that was holding on at the safety stop. I'm not saying thats the only muscles I used. Nice job as misreading. If you're working so hard diving that you're breathing rate increases, you're doing something wrong, somewhere. It may be that you (generically, not you in particular) need more exercise.

---------- Post added April 13th, 2014 at 07:31 AM ----------

Now we are being silly. When I got certed by Frank Hammet we did learn how to use a bottle without a regulator.

Actually the real minimalism is just the bucket. And it's also real vintage dive gear too.

Remember, we're not the first to explore the seas.

Diving bell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[danvolker]

Dan are the currents still as strong at depth or do they slack off? I've worked in 5 knot currents it wasn't fun. Is it just a drift dive? Penetration? Do you hang on and pull yourself along. I'm curious about the fun factor.

The whole process sounds fascinating and fun too. Is that the fun factor the drop?

The hardest currents are on the Skycliffe off Boynton on fast days, or the 280 foot hopper barges off Singer Island....The current on the Hopper barge was once so bad that I found myself drifting in with 100 foot vis, 40 feet off the bottom( 240 feet deep).....with nothing but blue in all directions, my buddy Nigel at my side, with me holding a line to a huge red Float ball we would attach to the wreck so the captain could track us...this was before I discovered the torpedo floats..this was around 1995, and deep air.
So Nigel and I are just litterally FLYING over the bottom 40 feet below us...it was like we were airplanes...We could see valleys and blowouts in the sand below us, from "intense underwater storms" much like the effects you might see in a desert wasteland with monstrous dunes in some places.....The reverie goes on for about 20 seconds( really a long time when your mind is on 1000% adrenaline for this) , and then Holy Sh*t...look at that wreck zooming up at us.....It begins as a tiny spec at the furthest reaches of what you can see, and then rapidly begins to fill your horizon.....I look for a good place to eddie out of this huge 5.5 mph current, the top surface is very littered with junk, so being close is not a smart approach plan....and then I see one of those huge ropes the big boats would tie up with...a Hawser--maybe 3 inch diameter...it is floating up off the deck...and we are moving so fast, I realize even at 20 feet before the ship, we may have waited too long to make it to the deck and out of current....I begin sprinting forward to get slack on my line to the ball, and down, and in 4 seconds my hand is on the Hauser....Without that big rope, I would have overshot and would have had to bomb to the bottom and then go hand over hand in the sand till reaching the eddie and still water near the hull on the lee side....

So I have the hawser, and in the next second, the hawser is taught, I have moved as far downcurrent over the deck as it will allow, and the line in my hand to the monster mooring ball, has spun me 180 degrees and the mooring ball is now downcurrent of me instead of behind me, and it is pulling HARD .... I almost feel like my arms and shoulders will get separated.... Nigel had grabbed on to the mooring line also, so I was holding him and the mooring ball against the pull of the current....At first, I could hang on, but not pull down....then in the next 10 seconds, it began getting to be less of a pull. What I did not know, was that the moment the line went taut, it sunk the monster ball....and then a few seconds later, at a depth of 50 feet, it hit our Safety Diver, Jim Abernethy, in the back....and he thought he had been hit by a big shark in that instant

From then on, the ball headed down, collapsed, and the drag lessened....I was able to pull myself down to the deck...where I hooked off the tines of the hook on the line...and Nigel and I began moving along the corridors out of the current...About 10 seconds later, we saw the tines on the hook straighten, and the line blew off the wreck....So we figured we had maybe 8 minutes we could spend before we would incur too much deco penalty to get up to a depth where we could shoot a bag with a spool. This ended up being easy --the boat over us from us at 30 foot stop on...The dive plan had been 25 minutes on the wreck, but NOT without the mooring ball --which we imagined could be miles away with the boat following it...so we decided caution was better than the original plan.....he actually had an important mission on this dive, or it would have meant an immediate abort, given the expectations of the captain....

As to the dive, you could feel the interface between the fast moving water blowing over the ship, and the water in protection of structure...It was like a barrier of sorts...you could put your hand up and feel it.... You could grab the side of the ship, hold yourself, and stick you head up into it...but, doing so was going to auto purge your reg, and if your mask was not dead straight, pointed into the current, and a good fitting low volume mask, it would be gone in an instant....but you really knew this, so it was not like this was a danger--you just would not do anything that stupid--even with our pathetic deep air IQ's at 280....

We would move with caution, using hand holds most of the time, even when apparently out of the current....just in case movement got us into an eddy that we did not see coming--an eddie on and eddie....

It was nice moving along the length of the ship in the down current direction, we would not want to have moved up current, even in the protection...We saw plenty of 400 pound Warsaw Groupers, moving along in the out-of-current areas, and we copied their movements to a large degree...they had lots of experience in these eddies, and were masters of "not working" here.....

Had we tried up current, or into an eddie, there would have been work load, and on deep air, you can't let yourself work....that makes CO2 buildup, and that KILLS....So everything we did, except for my initial grab of the Hauser, was not aerobic or work...This was a learning dive...we learned that you can't use a big monster float ball on a high current tech wreck....it is begging for a CO2 blackout, and we would never do this again.
We would either use torpedos after this, or shooting an smb with an overpressure relief valve after we left the wreck.
Even the torpedo is marginal at 280 in the big current, as even the cave line will begin to PULL against the current over the huge scope that is payed out....on a 100 foot deep wreck, the torpedos don't really have enough scope out, to build up much pull, so they will work fine for even the highest current days on these shallow wrecks.

On this particular deep dive on the hopper barge, we were not penetrating....on most of the ships that you can penetrate here, once inside, there is no current, even on the big days....though if you come to a big hole in the wall some place during your penetration, you would need to be thinking about where eddies might get created, and if there is anything sharp you could get knocked into by the current coming in to the hole--if there is current coming in. You just have to be aware.....It makes it all the more fun, having to read the terrain, and plan your path...like kayaking whitewater or skiing moguls.

Again, this is the condition of the full Gulf Stream intrusion...you don't get this on the 100 foot deep wrecks.....on the worst day ever, maybe 4 mph for a couple of the 100 footers...usually 2 to 3 mph....and 2 to 3 mph, while too fast for a diver to swim against, is easy to drift drop, and navigate around on in the protection of a wreck.
And doing 30 or 40 dives like this, just gives you the ability to know every thing you need to about the faster current days or deeper wrecks with bigger currents. It might also help you to decide on a pair of fins you can do your "blast to the protection" with....whether jets or Force fin, or just a nice large pair of standard paddles. Freedive fins are not the ideal fins here....I can make them work, because of so much time in them on wrecks, but they can catch eddies when you don't want them to, and your feet are suddenly getting pulled....or, there is always the penetration you might want to do, and freedive fins are so long that they can scrape the ceiling and knock silt off the ceiling--which may be a problem---or not....but with Jet's or Extra Force Fins, you would not have this to concern yourself with. For the very short sprint interval, there is no speed advantage at all with the freedive fin. In fact, with the soft freedive fins most scuba divers would use, the jets will outsprint them in the first 5 feet of sudden explosion in a sprint...which goes to - "will you overshoot" , or, will you make it to the sweet spot