Speaking for myself, I always make sure I bring a student, or even an ordinary dive buddy, back alive, no matter what.
That's a pretty arrogant response, especially with the rest of how you have responded. Your input in this thread was pretty empty other than spouting rhetoric about being a great and selfless person and how you would do anything blah blah. There is no way you can "make sure" you bring a student back alive in
every single emergency scenario. You are being unrealistic, likely you are only human and there is only so much you can do. For example if a student had a heart attack at 90 feet and lost consciousness you couldn't say that you can "make sure" that student comes back alive.
Truth is none of us were there, the threadstarter didn't give enough details for us to really make a judgement on what could have been differently. That would help us all give constructive criticism. As for your input though, it would be much better if it were constructive criticism as to how all instructors or divemasters for that matter can do a better job and react in a panic situation. To follow a student into a situation where you would both face certain death isn't smart. You can no longer help a student if you are dead yourself. Most training agencies teach this common sense approach. Now how bout some constructive criticism on how this entire situation could have been prevented or at a minimum have had less injurious results.
-In this situation, the instructor still would have had no way to prevent an embolism, you would not have time to convince a student to breathe in an uncontrolled ascent, if they were holding their breath, even for a few seconds they could embolize and unless you could completely stop the ascent, you would not be able to force them to breath.
-There may have been signs that this student would panic before this dive, situational awareness may have been able to prevent the situation from occurring at all. Of course there is the chance that this was a model student that panicked for the first time and had shown no signs of distress earlier in the course.
- What was causing the ascent? Was the student finning to the surface? Did the student ditch their weights or did the ascent become uncontrolled as air expanded in their BC and/or drysuit. As an instructor you should weight yourself heavier than you would normally weight yourself, if you weight yourself to be neutral at the end of your dive there is little you can do to slow an ascent other than fanning yourself out. If the student still had weights intact the instructor could have taken control from behind, controlled finning and taken control of airdumps, purging air from both him or herself and from the student.
Now lets redirect this thread back to a positive direction. Could we have done better in this scenario? What would you have realistically done? Would you risk both of you paralyzed or dead? Opinions? What input can we have for others that might prevent or reduce injury in future scenarios for our other friends here?
The input that Peardiver07 added is exactly the type of information that adds to these threads!!!
What little piece could I contribute? Be sure to pull the dumps on the students BC/drysuit while holding them so that you are both negative in the water, that makes a fast decent very difficult.
) becuase we enjoy bringing new people into the activity.
