I continue to keep up with deaths in the diving community so if you don't mind I might just stick around and even express my opinion from time to time.
Good...I hope you do. The more divers who read this forum, the fewer dive fatalities we will have. But I'm just curious: if you truly feel there is nothing to learn here, why read in here at all? Is it just morbid curiosity?
However, the main point as far as I can tell is that the diver ran out of air and didn't know how to take his weight belt off. I'm sure most experienced divers in Florida can do that.
One would think. But HE was an experienced diver too. Apparently he messed up. Are you going to tell me that you don't think there's a single diver who might read this thread and gain a useful REMINDER? Divers who are years out of their cert classes can forget the basics. Reminders like this make the difference.
Most people, without reading a diver death report know that diving is different in any area other than in their local area.
Sure, most divers SHOULD know this. But I can't tell you how many times I've heard of divers coming to SoCal and heading right out to dive, without having done any research. I've seen them on the local dive boats. I've HELPED non-local divers, by giving them just some basic info about kelp - because we were about to dive in it, which they thought was very cool, but gosh they'd never actually SEEN it before. Yes, that happens.
I'm not saying these threads are not worthwhile. I like to know what happened just like the next person.
But why? Just curious. I'm here to learn, improve my awareness, and gain useful reminders.
It's overstating the case to say that nothing can be learned in any thread but when you look at the actual cause of most recreational diving deaths there is little to be learned in most cases from the actual cause.
Once again, I disagree. In another thread in this forum, we're discussing a death on lobster season opening night. Some first-hand information just came to light that the problem may have been lack of understanding of hand-signals - that the diver may have been trying to signal to his buddy that he was low on air, and the buddy misinterpreted the signal to mean that he wanted her to check HER air. She did, then went on with the dive, and lost him in the dark. He ultimately ran out of air. And died.
I know for a FACT that there are lots of divers who do not discuss hand signals in advance. I've had divers watch my husband and me go through our hand-signal routine during our buddy check, and heard them say, "Oh, yeah, we should do that too." So, maybe some diver will read that thread, and the next time they are diving with an instabuddy, will remember to do the hand-signal run-through before they jump in.
See how this works?
Are you saying that some people wouldn't know to not run out of air without reading of this incident?
No. In this thread, I've been saying that people might not realize how to avoid getting
tangled in kelp (which sounds like it was the initiation of the incident), or how to get out of it, if they didn't read about this incident. And now that they have, they might just LEARN about kelp before they go and dive in it.
My point is that it's useful to read about the mistakes that divers make, especially the ones that cost them their lives. It reinforces the behaviors and practices that we learned in training, and SHOULD know instinctively - but don't always.
But this has been said over and over...and I'm pretty much done saying it. I've got a trip to the Galapagos to plan for. Where I will know what to expect, because I
did the research in advance.