San Diego Dive Fatality 9-29-09
- Thread starter crispix
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When I wear weights they are ditchable with a single action. IOW I agree with Thal - weights outside the crotch strap.You pays your money and takes your chances. I hedge my bet by using a rubber belt with a wire buckle ... that does not get dropped accidentally nor does it fall off like the standard buckles. So with the odds of that sort of incident reduced, the problem becomes reducing the odds of not being able to get rid of the belt when you most need to.
Rick
Originally Posted by drdaddy
As a psychologist I have seen three kinds of patients. The wisest learns from the mistakes of others, the second learns from his/her own mistakes, and the third never learns.
I heard there were 3 kinds
Ones that learn from books, ones that learn by watching others and people like me that learn by peeing on the electric fence for myself.
As a psychologist I have seen three kinds of patients. The wisest learns from the mistakes of others, the second learns from his/her own mistakes, and the third never learns.
I heard there were 3 kinds
Ones that learn from books, ones that learn by watching others and people like me that learn by peeing on the electric fence for myself.
I never want to "ditch" my weights, so mine stay on the inside of my crotch strap. I might want to "remove" my weight belt, and that is simple.
Now, if I am removing my gear in the water (like I often do when re-boarding the Zodiac), I simply disconnect my waist/crotch strap first, then hand up the weight belt.
I don't dive a wetsuit. I am not going to lose my BC and my drysuit, so I won't be in a situation where I cannot maintain at the surface.
The only reason to remove my weights underwater is if I am a body recovery, and then you may feel free to cut it off.
With newer divers, I see more problems with weightbelts coming off when they shouldn't rather than the unbelievably rare and avoidable need to "ditch" them.
JMHO...
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IF the industry would just stop selling the crap that they pass off as weightbelts the paradigm would flip and you'd see rare need to ditch a belt and even rarer problems with belts coming off all by themselves.
fisheater
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Can you elaborate? What weightbelt features are the problem/ the solution?
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It would also cease to be an issue if instructors would stop overweighting students in the first place and instruct them that they do not need to have all of their weight ditchable. For someone properly weighted dropping 2-4 lbs is more than sufficient to get positive and stay that way. When you have students wearing 20-30 lbs in a pool and they are not carrying alot of excess "natural buoyancy" that is just pure laziness on the part of the instructor. Teaching proper weighting from day one will also eliminate many issues. If a student does not know how much weight they need and where to put it by the time they get to OW for their checkouts the instructor has failed to adequately address the subject or the student was not paying attention. In either case they are not ready to be certified.
Ken Kurtis
Contributor
And yet - every year - many divers DO run out of air and some die. So if everyone knows not to do it, why do they continue to do it?
It's not that there's nothing to be learned from this. There's always something to be learned from every accident, fatal or not. The troubling thing from my standpoint as an instructor and forensic consultant is that it's the same lessons over and over again.
The question is not why is there nothing to learn. The question is: Why aren't these lessons taking hold in people's brains? Why are the same mistakes (generally) made over and over again?
Part of the problem is that divers do the dive simply assuming things will be fine rather than assuming things will go wrong and being prepared to deal with those contingencies.
For instance, divers surface at the end of a dive with a kelp bed separating them and the boat. No big deal. But 99% of time the discussion will be "Let's swim under the kelp back to the boat." End of story.
The discussion should also include: (1) What if we get separated, (2) What if we get entangled, (3) What if the kelp pops off a weightbelt, (4) What if we don't have enough air to make it through, (5) Should we go side-by-side on in-line, (6) Who's leading, (7) Who's navigating, (8) Who's in charge, and whatever else you can come up with.
As far as this particular accident goes (which I've only loosely been following), the lessons would seem to include (1) Monitoring air consumption, (2) Buddy separation, (3) Buddy awareness, (4) Lost buddy procedures, (5) Self-reliance, (6) Controlling panic within one's self, (7) Rescue techniques, (8) Overweighting, (9) Weighting properly for the thickness of the wetsuit worn, (10) BC inflation (orally) even if out of air, and probably others that we could all come up with over time and a little thoughtful analysis.
There's plenty of things to learn here if you want to open your mind and really examine what happened, see what other options there were, see how it relates to your diving, and resolve not to get caught in the same situation.
- Ken
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