PfcAJ
Contributor
All you're ever going to get with these things are 2nd and 3rd hand accounts. Theres seriously never any type of 'report'.
Orange Grove fatality?
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Caveeagle
Contributor
Not all 'cavern' training is equal and your instructor play a big part of that. I would not say that the PADI 'cavern' class was very intense for me. In my experience, the NACD Intro/Basic was a much bigger step.
As far as OW/AOW students allowed into the overhead.. Yes, there are a couple places (Ginnie, Blue Grotto, Paradise) that allow you into the overhead without at least a cavern cert. Not that I agree.. but that's the case.
In the case of Ginnie Cavern (aka The Ballroom), there is no silt to speak of, a big perm line out, the cave entrance is grated off, and very little risk of getting lost. I have seen divers in there that made me cringe, so I do have reservations about this.
Blue Grotto is a potentially dangerous place of divers without proper training and gear configuration. There is plenty of silt, depths approaching 100' and plenty of dark corners to get lost in if you had a zero viz situation. My first visit there, we were not allowed to go past 'Peace Rock', but there does not seem to be any restrictions on OW divers bouncing their way around the circuit.
Paradise (private access like the previous two) is one of my favorite caverns. I know they will let you dive here as long as you have an OW cert. This another one that is potentially dangerous. 100' depths in the lower cavern, plenty of silt and cave passage that goes down to ~130'
I am grateful that the state parks seem to be strict about requiring cavern certs for places like Blue Hole(jug). It would really stink if we lost access to these amazing spots because of more incidents.
the places may let divers in without overhead training but the standards of the agencies don't permit instructors to bring students into that environment in OW training (or AOW) but they do.... and nobody seems to care
Caveeagle
Contributor
I know your right. Its just frustrating to see things posted that I am pretty sure are false. I don't really want to add fuel to the fire when I was NOT onsite and would hate to perpetuate misinformation.
Anyone know if the 'Freedom of Information Act' applies to these police reports? That may be the only way we can get 1st hand accounts of this type of stuff.
PfcAJ
Contributor
Well, speak up. Or PM someone and let them speak on behalf of an anonymous informant.
Well I did not want to name places were divers are allowed to go beyond their training and it is true that the places in question somehow have insurance for said individual to exceed their training and it is further true that some instructors or higher certified divers are willing to accompany OW divers thinking that the owner of the site by allowing said divers somehow exonerates them in the event of a mishap- it all boils down to a lack of incentive to train for the individuals that go into the overhead untrained. Further any instructor and their are many I have heard that trains an open water diver in any overhead and that diver is NOT in a formal cavern class are violating their agency standards and have no liabilty insurance for this, and are setting these students up for failure through complacence. They are hurting the training agency, the cavern instructors (myself included) The dive shop or retail businesses that rent or sell the gear. My standards say an OW student must swim fifty feet under water no breath. The limit for a cavern is 200 feet in the cavern go figure! Beyond training plain and simple. If cavern divers were REALLY cavern divers then maybe intro divers would be also. End of rant.
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That is the federal statute. In Florida the applicable act is called the "Sunshine Act".
Florida Attorney General - The "Sunshine" Law
Police records which are part of an open criminal investigation would be exempt (for obvious reasons). Most other records would not be exempt. There is even a guide to disclosure by law enforcement, you can prepare your disclosure request accordingly.
http://myfloridalegal.com/webfiles.nsf/WF/RMAS-9H6K6F/$file/2014LEGuide.pdf
Don't expect a "police report" to help you beyond knowing the bare minimum of facts (name, age, residence). Police don't do accident analysis. Most of what passes for "accident analysis" on the internet is: 1) speculative 2) an excuse for the living to justify how they couldn't possibly be as "dumb" as the deceased - a form of confirmation bias.
Unfortunate because the case studies in Exley's blueprint for survival "look" so outdated, yet they keep happening over and over. There could be an appendix of fatalities by rules broken nearly as long as the original book by now. But being printed on a typewriter with mostly examples from the 1960s and 70s (before a huge number of current cave divers were even born) unfortunately makes the whole book and lessons therein seem dated and quaint.
You are right they look outdated,but they are so relevant. Many of the cases cited were untrained divers entering the overhead,so we provide training with more agencies than I can count,but now we have problems with cave divers exceeding their level of training or untrained divers in the overhead. Why does the intro/basic cave level seem to have so many accidents- matter of fact the last accident at Peacock was an intro/basic cave diver doing visual jumps. We may never know all the facts to the recent incidence,but if the conjecture is true, eg intro diver not putting in a primary reel and jumping to Distance tunnel visually, then why are we wondering about having accidents, they are going to continue.
In some diver's eyes, they are outdated and in some respects it's hard to argue with that reasoning.
When I started diving, I was using a light with a lead acid battery and an over volted halogen bulb, and primary light failures were pretty common due to the bulb burning out or the short 90 minute or so battery life. Now, I dive with an LED primary with a mean time between failure that is probably around 10,000 hours and it's driven by a battery with a 10 hour burn time. In addition, both my LED back up lights put out more light than my very first primary light, and they step down progressively to provide a 30 hour burn time. Consequently, I don't worry nearly as much about light failure now as I did 20 years ago.
Lights out skills are however still paramount as you'll need them in zero viz, but I'm not sure that this is as obvious as it should be to many students, particularly when they've trained in areas where substantial silt isn't really an issue, and doesn't occur in training. Bad outcomes can result when their first exposure to a real life silt out occurs when they are somewhere off the gold line.
We also might want to start asking ourselves a few questions as a community:
1. Does the Intro certification still makes sense, given the tendency of Intro divers to exceed their limits?
2. Why are more Intro level divers breaking their limits?
3. Why do some Intro divers apparently violate those limits very shortly after getting Intro certified?
4. What role is being played by full cave certified team mates in encouraging, or tolerating this behavior?
5. Would we be better served with an intermediate cert with a couple more days of training that allowed limited navigation (for example, one or two jumps, gaps or tees), or would that just create the option for those divers to do dives with multiple navigational decisions and even greater penetration?
I don't know that the "zero to hero" approach has ever been a good thing - except perhaps for those early cave divers who were practicing the art before any certs existed and eventually needed cards - as too many divers probably take their freshly printed C-card way too far and ignore the value of gaining experience in the first 500-1000 ft of a number of systems before they start moving deeper. But perhaps we should increase the minimum level of training for someone going past Cavern.
The NACD and NSS-CDS approach assumes the Intro/Basic diver will fairly quickly move on to the apprentice level and full cave certification or go directly to Cave/Full Cave. In contrast, some other agencies have taken a position that allowing limited navigation at an intermediate training certification allows that certification to become an end in itself, and that's an attraction for a certain percentage of cave divers that don't ever desire or envision getting very far off the gold line.
We should be asking ourselves how do the accident rates compare between, for example, NACD Intro to Cave which takes 8 dives, usually over 4 days and NAUI Cave 1 which takes 4-5 days and allows two navigational decisions?
We also might want to ask ourselves whether our training standards and expectations have slipped, and whether we might be reducing the value of a greater number of training days and longer dives in training. For example Cavern and Intro used to take 4 days but now it seems some agencies allow divers to knock out that combination with 8 dives in just 3 days, but with less bottom time. Even if they meet the training requirements in that time period, there is still value in getting another couple dives under the supervision of an instructor who can further refine the student's skills and impart additional knowledge in the process.
There are different approaches and training standards out there, maybe it's time we started looking at the outcomes and accident rates for those different approaches when it comes to divers who are trained to some intermediate level.
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