BoulderJohn, I have no idea why people do not dump weights. I haven't asked any dead people this question.
The fact is people wearing too much weight constituted 40% of dead divers. 90% of dead divers had weight still attached to their corpses.
Why this happens is conjecture, I was just summarizing the chapter on this subject (why divers die).
The readers who see my posts hopefully will recognize that the top 2 priorities for them scuba diving are:
1. watching their air 2. weight management.
While I can agree with your last comment, I think most experienced divers reading your posts will recognize that you are posting generally erroneous information on your way to those conclusions. The fact is that facts as to the primary causes of diving accidents are notoriously difficult to come by (since you can't interview the only person most likely to actually know), and the statistics you have been tossing out there as authoritative are not supported by DAN's data ... which is the most comprehensive data available on the subject.
What I'm reading from you amounts to basic agency-bashing, and in some cases clearly not supported by factual evidence. I taught scuba diving for NAUI for 12 years, and in the NAUI program buddy breathing was taught at the DM level ... levels below that were taught to share air using an octopus or other safe-second device. Buddy breathing was part of my YMCA OW class in 2001, but that class was based on the old LA County course of the 1970's, and while comprehensive it was in many ways old-fashioned. It also taught buddy breathing as one option, and generally only to be used if a safe second wasn't available.
As for having no idea why people do not dump weights, I'd think that someone with your obvious experience would have some ideas as to why it occurs. Generally it's because people haven't practiced the skill ... for obvious reasons ... and when faced with a moment of stress they haven't taught themselves to use the skill without conscious thought. Learning anything ... and scuba is no exception ... isn't the result of being told something in class, or of doing it once in a pool and once again during your checkout dives and then not ever practicing it again until faced with a stressful situation where that skill is needed. Learning a skill requires practicing it over and over and over until you can do it with no more conscious thought than walking or breathing. Then and only then can you count on that skill being available when you need it.
Every agency includes dumping weights in their OW curriculum. But classes don't teach you skills ... they only teach you how to learn them. Without repetition, you don't learn ... you only know. And there's a big difference between knowing something and having it available to be used in an emergency. When you're faced with a "Jesus take the wheel" moment, you aren't going to be likely to be mentally reviewing what was in Chapter 4 of your OW manual ... that reptilian part of your brain is going to take control and unless you've trained your body to respond pretty much automatically to the circumstances you're unlikely to be making good decisions or prioritizing correctly. That can be said of many different types of scuba accidents ... I've actually known people who ran themselves out of air trying desperately to get in that 3-minute safety stop knowing they were pushing their tank well past safe limits. Why? Because although they were taught that safety stops are optional, they were one of the skills that were learned through repetition during your training, and therefore the one that took precedence when stress got in the way of making good decisions.
I'm not going to bash what or how the agencies teach ... although I have some issues with how they're often taught, I think the right skills get covered in class. What we fail to do ... usually do to time or cost constraints ... it provide the repetitions needed to ingrain the skills. Nor to many instructors emphasize that diving is a situational activity, and there are no "checklists" of when you apply a given skill under all circumstances. There's a certain amount of judgment and good decision-making involved, and you don't learn those in a classroom.
Good judgment is the most important skill any diver can apply to their diving. If you analyze the data available for accidents, the conclusion you can come to is that most diving accidents didn't occur because a diver ran OOA, or didn't ditch their weights, or got separated from their buddy ... or any number of other proximate causes that will be listed. What ultimately caused the accident is that the divers failed to use good judgment at some point during the dive ... often before they ever got in the water. And that began the chain of events that ultimately led to a stressful situation ... often one that was completely within the diver's ability to correct ... that was mishandled.
OOA or failing to drop weights aren't the cause of the accident ... they're a symptom of the lack of judgment that ultimately led to it.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
