No buddy, no help.
- Thread starter Adventure-Ocean
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ScubaSteve
Wow.....what a DB
The OP has failed to provide way too many "facts" about the story he eludes to in the first post to allow any of the people reading this thread to understand what the heck he is trying to say. With facts, he could indicate how a buddy could have helped. As it stands, a guy jumped in the water with lead boots on and was surprised when he drowned for some reason. For all we know he could have jumped in with no helmet, no tank, no mask, no suit, SS air off, tank empty....we know nothing as to what the circumstances were so a buddy would have been of no use IMO.
gmanstan
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OP
Adventure-Ocean
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Obviously I am new to this forum and must take the time to learn more. The only two threads I posted was an effort to use true stories that can help teach or remind us about diving safety. This is a rough group. Most writers are trying to find lies or hidden agendas. I dove for over 40 years in a beautiful part of the world. I worked as a marine tech at a University for 20 years, supervising dive trips for the professors and students collecting data. Any advice as to how I can use all those years to positively contribute to this forum will be appreciated. I do not have to make up facts. The truth I've experienced in all those years are outstanding enough.
ScubaSteve
Wow.....what a DB
Without information and details, there is no reason to judge anything from your story other than its legitimacy. Provide details and perhaps something good come from this thread.
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Buddy diving is a good idea with a good buddy. If the buddy sucks then, in my opinion, solo is much safer.
flots am
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For some divers, situational awareness seems to require having major screw-ups, and surviving them. I'm not sure it can be successfully taught in class.
flots.
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I'm not sure your examples to date are relevent to the type of diving most people can relate to. Of the three examples I've seen so far, one guy went to 275 feet while still uncertified, one went shallow but apparently didn't know how to equalize and hurt himself, and this guy jumped off a boat in lead boots apparently without the benefit of a breathing apparatus. Did he really expect not to sink and drown?
These are not really learning experiences, as most people aren't dumb enough to do them ... and one could reasonably expect death or injury to be the likely outcome.
Your premise in the first two examples was "don't try to teach unless you're an instructor". I'd say that premise has merit in most cases ... but the fact is that a lot of people can and do learn an awful lot about diving from more experienced divers who are not instructors. It's more a matter of using good judgment about what you should and shouldn't attempt to do.
Your premise in this thread is "don't dive without a buddy" ... but it's dubious at best that a buddy would've made any difference in this case. I'd say a better premise is "don't jump off a boat in lead boots unless you're attached to something you can breathe from". Otherwise, drowning is pretty much an inevitable consequence.
In both cases, I think the moral of the story should be that diving is as much about making good decisions as it is about following rules of thumb that are generally intended to help reduce the risk potential of diving, but are not a panacea in all cases. Like all rules of thumb, they apply more in some cases than in others ... and the trick is learning how to discern when to use them and when they're not really going to be all that useful.
I don't think people are trying to be mean ... they're just looking for some sense of why you're posting these stories. Take some time, and build up your credibility as a contributor. If you're asking for advice, I'd say poke around the forums a bit and use your experiences to add context to some existing threads before trying to initiate topics that purport to tell people what to do ... there's a whole world of different perspectives in here, and we rarely agree on anything. Learn how to contribute, and whose opinion is worth taking seriously. I think I was on ScubaBoard a good month before I started a thread ... and that was more than 11 years ago when it was a much more close-knit community.
And welcome to ScubaBoard ... it can be a bit daunting at first ... but it grows on ya ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
These are not really learning experiences, as most people aren't dumb enough to do them ... and one could reasonably expect death or injury to be the likely outcome.
Your premise in the first two examples was "don't try to teach unless you're an instructor". I'd say that premise has merit in most cases ... but the fact is that a lot of people can and do learn an awful lot about diving from more experienced divers who are not instructors. It's more a matter of using good judgment about what you should and shouldn't attempt to do.
Your premise in this thread is "don't dive without a buddy" ... but it's dubious at best that a buddy would've made any difference in this case. I'd say a better premise is "don't jump off a boat in lead boots unless you're attached to something you can breathe from". Otherwise, drowning is pretty much an inevitable consequence.
In both cases, I think the moral of the story should be that diving is as much about making good decisions as it is about following rules of thumb that are generally intended to help reduce the risk potential of diving, but are not a panacea in all cases. Like all rules of thumb, they apply more in some cases than in others ... and the trick is learning how to discern when to use them and when they're not really going to be all that useful.
I don't think people are trying to be mean ... they're just looking for some sense of why you're posting these stories. Take some time, and build up your credibility as a contributor. If you're asking for advice, I'd say poke around the forums a bit and use your experiences to add context to some existing threads before trying to initiate topics that purport to tell people what to do ... there's a whole world of different perspectives in here, and we rarely agree on anything. Learn how to contribute, and whose opinion is worth taking seriously. I think I was on ScubaBoard a good month before I started a thread ... and that was more than 11 years ago when it was a much more close-knit community.
And welcome to ScubaBoard ... it can be a bit daunting at first ... but it grows on ya ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
EastEndDiver
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Still waiting on an answer to my previous post which is quoted above.
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Oh, it can be ... if you know what to teach.
Situational awareness starts with a new learned behavior ... the act of consciously looking around. All our lives we've been conditioned to awareness based on peripheral vision and effectively unlimited visibility. Putting on a mask radically reduces the first ... putting your head underwater radically reduces the second. We have to modify our behavior in order to maintain our awareness ... turning our head more to compensate for the reduced peripheral vision ... moving slowly and looking around more often to compensate for the reduced visibility. The task-loading of an environment that we're initially struggling just to move around in tends to make us more inwardly focused on what we're doing ... rather than what our buddy's doing ... and that takes mental bandwidth that we don't normally have to expend on simple things like moving around. So to compensate we make assumptions. We know where our buddy is "supposed" to be ... and what our buddy is "supposed" to be doing ... and there's a tendency to assume that unless something grabs our attention everything's as it's "supposed" to be.
But what if it isn't? What if your buddy's having a problem while you're assuming he's not? How will you know if you're not looking at him with some regularity?
Yes ... this most assuredly can be successfully taught in a class ... I've been doing it for nine years. And I know plenty of instructors who've been teaching it for far longer than I have ... I learned it from one of them. It involves learning techniques for positioning yourselves to be easily seen ... with techniques in communicating with hand and light signals ... and with the aspects of planning and conducting a dive based on the premise of predictable behavior.
Good dive buddies don't assume. If you see something interesting, you don't just swim toward it without first getting your buddy's attention. This is a learned behavior ... and the sooner you learn it the easier and more natural it is to achieve it.
Situational awareness doesn't require screw-ups. It requires an understanding that there's more to being a dive buddy than just jumping in the water with another diver ... and making a conscious effort to learning how to conduct a dive with another person. That's an ongoing learning process ... but there's no reason in the world why you can't begin that process from day one of OW class ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
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