Satire on a thousand ways to die

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That reminds me one of funniest post ever! (Have saved it) don't know who wrote it:

When my buddy and I were diving the U-869 on air with John Chatterton and Richie Kohler a few years ago, my buddy's split fins silted the place up so bad that I couldn't find my Spare-Air. I got so nervous I mistakenly hit the "up elevator" lever on my SeaQuest i-3 BCD. Ordinarily, this would have sent me shooting to the surface, but fortunately some monofilament got tangled around my Air-2. When I cut the line with the 11" knife strapped to my calf, I mistakenly poked the purge valve in my HydrOptix mask. I tried to use my tank banger to get my buddy's attention, but by that time he had gotten one of his suicide clips tangled up in the retractor I use to attach my dry snorkle to the transmitter of my air-integrated wireless compass, which I bought on-line instead of at the LDS that I stopped supporting ever since I signed up for e-learning. I believe that was right about the time I had the regs I bought at Leisure Pro serviced at the local Jiffy-Lube but didn’t actually test them myself before going on a special “Storm Tracker” live-aboard trip that I signed up for because they were offering a special "Take Fish ID, Get Your IDC Free" promotion. Unfortunately I missed that trip because of the systemic fungal infection I contracted when the Halcyon p-valve I installed myself in my cave-cut trilam dry suit failed while I was solo-diving for golf balls on a rebreather. Which I only did for the money, ever since the captain of the boat I crew on started making me tip the passengers $10/tank on every charter that I work. Of course, if I had done my OW training with an instructor that has daguerrotype YMCA or LA County c-cards in his wallet none of this would have happened.

I'm writing a book about the whole saga...

Shallow Divers:The true story of two Americans who risked everything to solve the mystery of every "you're gonna die" cliche on ScubaBoard

Ironically, it seems that Gary Gentile is now claiming that I actually did not experience every cliche myself, based on a series of interviews he did with the girlfriend of the brother of a guy I shared a room with on Spring Break in 1987 and is now threatening to expose the REAL story of how all the trouble actually began when NetDoc started radioing the Coast Guard to ask whether he could log pool dives as "real dives".

I will happily refute Gary's assertions in an on-line interview on ScubaBoard, wherein I will respond to any and all questions with "get a BP/W" while wearing my mask on my forehead.

PS - it's not the agency, it's the instructor!
 
Diving without a dry suit
The "you're gonna die!" syndrome, IMO, grew from a certain specific group of people who were advocating their style of gear and diving techniques. They had a strong tendency to go over the top in their arguments, greatly exaggerating the advantages of what they did and greatly exaggerating the dangers of their opposition. They learned this from their leaders, who were very much of that ilk. When I was first on ScubaBoard, I was using standard dive gear, and one of the reasons I would not consider going with a BP/W, long hose, necklace regulator was some of those outrageous exaggerations. One guy in particular stated on several occasions that ALL traditional alternate air regulators come loose, drag in the silt, and become damaged to the point that they will not work when needed; if you ever try to use one, it simply will not work.

So why do I have "Diving with a dry suit" quoted above?

A number of years ago, one of the most prominent of those exaggerators was very active on ScubaBoard, and I wrote to him privately to suggest that his methodology of gross exaggeration was counterproductive, as it had been with the me and the guy saying that I or my buddy was going to die if I used a conventional alternate air source. He disagreed. That rhetorical strategy, he believed, was highly effective. About that time he was (secretly) hired to promote certain things on scuba social media. He was famous, someone figured, so the public would listen to him. For example, he was supposed to promote diving in the Palm Beach area, and, true to form, he wrote as if Palm Beach County had to world's greatest diving, bar none, and you would be an absolute imbecile to waste your time diving in, say, Pompano Beach, which is an hour away.

So what about dry suits? One of the things he was hired to promote was heated vests that would be worn under wetsuits. In his posts on the topic, only idiots would dive with dry suits because of the inherent danger associated with their use. Every year, he said, many divers lose buoyancy control and head to the surface upside down because their feet got over inflated, and they all die dangling upside down from the surface. The only exceptions to this were the divers who were lucky enough to have had their dry suit training through GUE. For everyone else, wearing a drysuit was like playing Russian Roulette, so they needed to get rid of those drysuits and get the new and exciting heated vests for their wetsuits.

He was banned from ScubaBoard for other reasons not long after that.
 
I propose DiveZoneScuba and DiveTalk cohost a show together on such matters. Perhaps he’ll return to threads after starting them.
 
Performing a deep stop.
Skipping a safety stop in an emergency situation.
Not having a boat diving specialty and diving from a dive boat.
 
Since people argue most of these from both sides, you have to include the inverse of each.
 
Any thing to do with failure points.

And before I get flamed for suggesting this, I only suggest it because it tends to be an overblown concern, and it is interesting how the avoid/reduce failure points mentality is pushed for some things and then completely ignored for other things.

-Z
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/peregrine/

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