Please tell me Who was at fault?

[suzette]

Seems pretty simple to me!

In a normal drift dive on the East Coast, it is the responsibility of everyone following the "flag person" to stay with them. The person carrying the flag should not have to heard the cats. In a situation where you are swimming and not drifting, I would still follow the above situation. You are carrying the flag. They need to stay with you. Four people might be too much if the visibility is limited. Should have been two buddy teams.

This is my thought exactly- a separation plan should have been made, but on all dives I've been on where you're following the person with the flag, you do NOT allow them out of your sight. If they had trouble or some reason that they had to stop, they should have alerted the flag carrier with an audible signal so that he wasn't put in that situation.

 

[FritzCat66]

Twelve feet? Shiesh, just surface and wave or yell at one another, NBD.

 

[Teamcasa]

The failure happened on the beach. No one clearly stated what and how to handle individual buddy separation or the separation by the buddy pairs. Communicate, agree and follow through.

 

[diver 85]

Problem I ran across about 25 years ago.......Let it go in one ear & out the other while telling your wife, 'honey, please swim a little faster in the future'...


btw, the real culprit is 2 fold----(1) YOUR dive buddy for leaving you & (2) the 2nd pair(the 'girls') for not their own dive flag......but getting back to (1), who's worried about a 12 foot dive

 

[Zinc]

The only person NOT lost is the one with the flag.

It's the others responsibility to keep up, not loose sight, or surface to locate.

 

[Gombessa]

The only person NOT lost is the one with the flag.

It's the others responsibility to keep up, not loose sight, or surface to locate.

That makes it sound like the person holding the flag has no responsibility at all for keeping the group together or managing pace. Under typical dive circumstances, I cannot see this being a good model.

 

[Scott L]

Everyone gets a piece of the prize, but I'd save the biggest slice for the flagman, who should have stayed with his buddy. There were two teams there, of two divers each, trying to dive as a foursome. If the foursome split, everyone still had a buddy.

. Additionally, much stress is removed from such situations with all divers carrying sizable SMB's with proper skills to deploy...

 

[flots am]

That makes it sound like the person holding the flag has no responsibility at all for keeping the group together or managing pace. Under typical dive circumstances, I cannot see this being a good model.

Towing a decent size buoy with a flag on it is not a trivial task.

I would expect the flag guy to go slow enough to not lose the girls, and the flag guy's buddy, who has no responsibility except to stay with the flag guy, to do so.

Flots.

 

[kaerius]

My buddies use a signal for "slow down," it's holding one arm out in front of you, hand open and palm down, and slowly passing the other hand (also hand open, palm down) over your first arm, from elbow to wrist.

Signals can vary depending on who trained you or where you trained. The slow down signal I learned(which also doubles as calm down), is simply both hands in front of you, palm down, raising them and slowly lowering them back down. The added perk on this one is that it's intuitive even if someone hasn't actually been taught the sign.

 

[Thalassamania]

The flagman should not have stopped, there was no reason. The other male diver should have noticed that he had and stopped. When the other male did not, the flagman should have followed the other male diver and stayed with him. The women are not relevant at this point in the tale.