Scuba diver dies after being found floating at Kurnell, NSW, Australia

[mdb]

We will really never know what happened with the well loved and respected Marcia.

Her legacy is already apparent. Divers old and new are learning from this and other threads.

I had a great mentor in Joe Zell, the founder of Wenoka. Joe told me: "
You must always be a teacher and a student."

RIP Marcia you are being warmly remembered.

 

[mathauck0814]

It continues to be said that she was "too experienced" and "too comfortable" and that this should not have happened to someone like that. I wonder if this isn't a mechanism to make us feel better about our own scenarios.

I'm very experienced in Southern California conditions. I'm quite experienced in others and wholly unexperienced in still others.

I don't believe for a moment that a woman whose natural condition was perfect visibility and tropical waters was "too experienced" or "too comfortable" to make the assumed mistakes which have been raised here in temperate waters off NSW.

Being an instructor does not make you an expert. Diving daily in the same environment does not make you an expert. Being comfortable in a wetsuit and minimal gear does not give you license to confidently disregard the none-to-subtle differences of cold water diving.

 

[je76]

Failure to observe or properly follow the "buddy system" is never the cause of a diver's death in my eyes unless that teammate plays an active part (i.e. snatching a reg) in his teammates death.

Our discipline requires we prepare for all possibilities and a very important part of that is that at any moment buddy separation is imminent. As such I dive by the rule that I must always be prepared to finish any dive (whether aborting or otherwise) alone. This includes being prepared and accepting responsibility for my own personal safety. This is my go/no go line. Do I sometimes solo dive, yes. Do I prefer to solo dive, No. Once diving grows behind simply looking around (read as photography, spear fishing, artifact collecting etc etc) buddy separation becomes more likely.

From my viewpoint the overwhelming fact (based on the very limited amount of information that we know) is that Quero was significantly over weighted. This is evidenced by the fact that she was on the bottom with a fully inflated wing and that the rescuing parties had difficulty in bringing her to the surface. I would add that the second contributing factor was failure to ditch weight thus rendering the diver unable to at least attain neutral (allowing a kick off the bottom) if not positive buoyancy. When coupled with some emergency, say OOA but we may not know specifically, the weighting factor became too much to be overcome. A very short error chain leading to death.

I don't see this failure as some shortcoming in Quero's skill. An underwater emergency situation generally may require a life saving decision to be made in the space of 5-30 seconds and a variety of thought chains and external factors may affect that decision making process including in this instance the dry suit.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

This is a critical issue from my perspective for those that are discounting panic or a medical issue in favor of other causes. As an instructor she would know that if she was out of air that she could breath off her wing, hold her breath for at least a minute all enough time to get out of her gear/drop her weights and swim to the surface. As an experienced instructor she has take gear on and put it on underwater many many times in demonstration to students. She has done gear exchanges underwater. I am sure she would know that she could do this IF SHE WAS ABLE TO THINK STRAIGHT AND CALMLY.

Obviously she was not able to think straight at the time which could easily be a result of panic or a medical issue.

It is easy for someone to say they can keep calm in a panic situation but completely another to actually be in a panic situation and experience it first hand. I have when I ran OOA at 100ft and my buddies secondary had a hole in the diaphram.
I only knew Marcia via conversation on the froums and from others I often travel and dive with in Thailand. She was too experienced as a diver and instructor and comfortable in the water under much more severe conditions for the above two issues not to be considered highly.

John

Not necessarily in a new drysuit that she was obviously having issues with.

We didn't know if she tried to ditch the gear and if so did she remember to unhook the drysuit hose?
Seems like she did not try to ditch.

There is also the matter of just how task overloaded was she.

Instructor or no with even thousands of dives she was in a new type of exposure suit from what she was used to. Over weighted (perhaps even grossly so), too small of a wing, carrying a camera, with a seemingly faulty gauge, and based on her lack of use of buddy skills, highly distracted.

With all this going on she might as well have been a new OW diver out of a weekend or two weekend course where you are not expecting anything to go wrong.

And something then did and the SHTF. And when it did, even in only ten feet of water, it was apparently too much.

I know we are trying to keep things a little more toned down since this was one of our own. But how would you react to a post about a stranger who did all of these things and had the same outcome?

This was a cluster f#*< largely due to diver error. Plain and simple. Many of us would want to tear up the c card of one of our students if we heard of them doing half of these things.

We need to remember that any glossing over of these mistakes and errors in judgment would set a bad example for any new diver.

Anyone of these alone could have killed someone.
Taken together it would have been amazing that they didn't result in at least someone getting the crap scared out of them, likely hurt in some way, or just what happened here.

Like Dr Tracy I am kinda pissed at all of these things being done by a person who should have known better and never gone that far with them.

I expect to catch flak for this post but too many things have happened and I have spent too much time and effort writing, speaking, and teaching to try and see that stuff like this does not have to.

 

[Stoo]

I wonder if Marcia would have viewed her kit and gas-management choices differently if she had planned it as a solo dive? I really can't speculate about that but I can say that when *I* choose to dive solo that I go through a different thinking process during preparation than I do when I choose to dive with a buddy but accidentally become separated..

I dive like a solo guy all the time... or at least as much as I can... even with a buddy. I always wear doubles. I always have two regs. I always have two computers etc. It comes in handy even with buddies. Mrs. Stoo and I were diving a 105' wreck on Sunday when her computer went a little wonky. I simply handed her mine so she at least had something to use. That computer was on its second dive of the day, so if nothing else, she had a significant safety factor already built in!

 

[Jax]

I wonder if Marcia would have viewed her kit and gas-management choices differently if she had planned it as a solo dive? I really can't speculate about that but I can say that when *I* choose to dive solo that I go through a different thinking process during preparation than I do when I choose to dive with a buddy but accidentally become separated....

That's bad, I know, but it's a fact, and a fact that I'm sure a lot of people can relate to. Maybe there is something to learn in that?

R..

I, too, dive as if solo on every dive. I am ready to solve anything that's thrown at me. However, I am the very best buddy my buddy wants of me. I think diving prepared for solo makes me a better buddy for whomever I dive buddied.

 

[buton]

In my short membership to scubaboard, I have never seen a post in accidents and incidents about someone who lived because of ditching weights. I am always reading the forum and danydon makes a good job posting everything.

So I guess there's something missing we are humans and no stupids, I think if you are in trouble and in a close call you will ditch them..

I didn't know her but she was OLD around 60?
Must of the post I see here they are always old people who die.

Don't you thing it was something medical hard to explain?

 

[lamont]

This is a critical issue from my perspective for those that are discounting panic or a medical issue in favor of other causes. As an instructor she would know that if she was out of air that she could breath off her wing, hold her breath for at least a minute all enough time to get out of her gear/drop her weights and swim to the surface. As an experienced instructor she has take gear on and put it on underwater many many times in demonstration to students. She has done gear exchanges underwater. I am sure she would know that she could do this IF SHE WAS ABLE TO THINK STRAIGHT AND CALMLY.

Obviously she was not able to think straight at the time which could easily be a result of panic or a medical issue.

It is easy for someone to say they can keep calm in a panic situation but completely another to actually be in a panic situation and experience it first hand. I have when I ran OOA at 100ft and my buddies secondary had a hole in the diaphram.
I only knew Marcia via conversation on the froums and from others I often travel and dive with in Thailand. She was too experienced as a diver and instructor and comfortable in the water under much more severe conditions for the above two issues not to be considered highly.

John

I think its pretty clear that she was surprised by the OOA or she attempted a response to the OOA and was surprised by it not working.

If you put yourself into a low on air situation or anything else sketchy, you really need to be cognizant of what your exit is, and have it visualized how you're going to deal with it. Then if it, happens, of course, the actions you've visualized need to actually be effective.

Putting myself into this kind of situation, the couple of single tank solo dives that I've done without redundant gas, I had visualized a CESA and oral inflation and establishing positive buoyancy. If I had run OOA and executed on that plan and been massively overweighted, then I could see that spiraling out of control as I could not establish positive buoyancy, there was no response to my drysuit inflator, and all it would take would be aspirating some water and then not being able to breathe while needing to tread water to stay above the surface would lead pretty quickly to it all being over... During those dives I had a 40# wing, though, and kept at least a 40 cu ft reserve on my back.

I don't know exactly what happened, but I don't find the accident all that confusing and can visualize roughly how it happened. She ran OOA which immediately and drastically shrank her options, and we know that she had compromised one of those options by being overweighted with a too small wing... Once she got into the incident pit, if you make the wrong response to get out of it, then you just sink into it deeper...

And to reinforce, one thing people seem to be picturing here is the failure of training and acting without thought in response to an emergency. But she ran out of gas, which is a very slow moving emergency that you can see coming from miles away and we deal with it every time we go diving. Once your gas gets low you should have heightened vigilance and be mindful of your exits. If you wind up just suddenly pulling hard on a regulator and needing to rely on instinctual training then you've really failed yourself a long time before that.

The more I dive the more Dive Accidents (ALL of them) look less like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mlhT-_9UDM

And more like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLlUgilKqms

 

[buddhasummer]

In my short membership to scubaboard, I have never seen a post in accidents and incidents about someone who lived because of ditching weights. I am always reading the forum and danydon makes a good job posting everything.

So I guess there's something missing we are humans and no stupids, I think if you are in trouble and in a close call you will ditch them..

I didn't know her but she was OLD around 60?
Must of the post I see here they are always old people who die.

Don't you thing it was something medical hard to explain?

Steady on there...and what's with the caps on "old"? I met Marcia and would say she was in better physical condition than the majority of divers I've met regardless of age.

 

[DiveWithPassion]

So I guess there's something missing we are humans and no stupids, I think if you are in trouble and in a close call you will ditch them..

I didn't know her but she was OLD around 60?
Must of the post I see here they are always old people who die.

Don't you thing it was something medical hard to explain?

While you're right about her age and that medical conditions might increase with age, to say that just old people die is in my opinion ignorant.
Especially when it was discussed in this thread that she was found with an inflated BCD and out of air.

While instructors should be familiar with ditching weights, it's still a simulated skill, at least for me. I didn't regularly ditch weight and do a buoyant ascend. I remove my weights and put them back in.

I have been in a situation where I had to bring a diver up with an wing failure. At least I thought so when he started to go down and couldn't get air in his bc.

Initially, I stabilised us. Trying to solve the problem. We kicked up silt, viz was getting bad and it was getting darker due to depth and silt.
With my wing and our dry suits we got to the surface. No medical issues.
Then we found the problem. The inflator hose was not properly connected, worked initially and then disconnected.

I thought a lot about what happened as I was instructor his dry course on this dive.
We could have inflated orally, we could have used his suit earlier for buoyancy.
Fact was, in the situation, the tunnel vision set in and we had to get him to stop getting deeper.

Accidents happen and they sometimes have simple reasons and easy fixes. But you might be busy fixing an issue and not seeing the source or even an easy fix.