Please be prepared to dive. Avoid an incident

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Bratface

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Location
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Dear Fellow Divers,

There have been too many threads during the month of May about accidents, other incidents and near misses. While my dive season is year round, it is early in the season for most on this board. Please prepare yourselves and your equipment for your next dive trip wherever it may be.

Make sure you are physically fit by visiting your doctor if you haven't had a physical in a few years or if you have any health issues, taking medications, etc.

Prepare your body for your next trip by strengthening your muscles with a little daily walking. This will also help build your endurance and make breathing under stress easier.

Make sure your gear has been serviced and is in good working order. Repair or replace what needs to be done. Don't tell yourself it will be ok this time.

If you need to review some skills or take a refresher, get to your local dive shop and make arrangements.

Know your limits. If you haven't been trained for wreck diving or cave penetration, please don't do that. We may eventually get to read about you on this board if you do. Don't dive too deep, stay too long, or dive if you are tired or feeling a little bit ill.

Thanks for reading this. I suppose you could say this is my rant about dive safety, but I do want everyone to enjoy themselves. I would much rather read about the incredible dive you made and the awesome things you saw than how sad I will be to know you made your last dive.

Love always and dive safe,
Brat
 
Well said and great advice to all. We went to the pool last Monday to do a gear check before Bonaire next week...just to make sure everything was as it should be.
 
Contact your prospective DCs and ask about the possibility of a check dive or even a Scuba Review. Often they are a cheap and low stress alternative to suddenly finding yourself about to jump off a perfectly good boat in the middle of the ocean.
 
Very well said. I try to workout 4 to 5 days a week. Also try to dive 1 or 2 times a week as long as the weather is OK. Bought my reg last september and will take it in soon to be serviced, better safe then sorry.
 
How many accidents have there be so far this year compared to the same period last year? Is there any agency that tracks these kind of numbers either nationally or internationally?
 
How many accidents have there be so far this year compared to the same period last year? Is there any agency that tracks these kind of numbers either nationally or internationally?

I would think that DAN keeps track of these accidents and the numbers.


Great advice in this article.
 
How many accidents have there be so far this year compared to the same period last year? Is there any agency that tracks these kind of numbers either nationally or internationally?

I would think that DAN keeps track of these accidents and the numbers.

DAN does its best with limited resources, and it is the best source for this information that I know. Since this has been discussed a million times on ScubaBoard, if there were a better resource, we should have heard about it by now. (IN fact, there have been several threads in which people have been challenged to provide a better resource, and none has surfaced.) The report only covers a small part of the world overall, so if there is a massive amount of deaths one year in the Philippines, for example, it won't have an impact. The DAN report comes out annually, but it is complete only up to a couple of years before. We won't have any idea of this year's numbers for a couple of years.

The reports have been coming out for over 40 years now. In general, the total numbers of fatalities for the last decade are significantly lower than the total number of fatalities for the first decade.
 
Good post. Also, even if you dive regularly, treat every dive (no matter how "benign") as if something bad can happen. Regardless of your experience level.
 
Great post, bratface. I totally agree with everything you said. I am in the water at least a couple times a month, but wife and dive buddy has less frequent dive time. She always does a pool re-orientation before a dive trip, and when we arrive at a dive destination, if the plan allows, we do our first dive as a controlled shore dive to limited depth to confirm our earlier gear check and orient ourselves to local conditions. I do way to few scuba refreshers. Given the traffic in our shop and trip participants, there really should be more.
DivemasterDennis
 
Good post, but naturally as SCUBA season starts rolling around now there are going to be more fatalities and accidents as more and more people start dusting off their gear after not diving for a whole year, and people getting certified and immediately diving beyond their limits.

People, if you haven't been diving lately, as it's been said before, ATTEND A REORIENTATION TO SCUBA! If you can't, hire a very competent divemaster until you feel comfortable with yourself, even still if you can't do that, reread your OW manual. that's where the basic information that is most overlooked is that causes the most fatalities!
 

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