Some good points flots. IME Caribbean DM's rarely manage the dive, but rather lead the way, holdthe float and and point out critters. I am sure some are more hands on, but most act like I would expect a local diver leading an out of town friend to act.
With this in mind maybe it would be a smart idea to let OW students know that when to end the dive is going to be their decision, so they know what to expect even if a "Dive Master" is present.
The very vast majority of adults should be able to take care of themselves with even a rudimentary idea of what is going on, but we hear all the time of adults who hand off their lives to complete strangers and follow along even if they know what they are doing is dangerous.
I don't get it. I feel like I am talking myself out of my own argument.
Maybe I should moderate my language. Obviously there is a problem, I think most of it lies somewhere other than the agency and instructor and dive master. It lies with people who are in increasing numbers avoiding responsibility for themselves.
It would be nice if today's dive pros would compensate for this lack of...I don't know the best word to describe what I am thinking, but too be honest at this moment I am not sure that more education is the answer. People seem to automatically look to some authority figure to protect them from XYZ, rather than take steps to safeguard themselves, and I don't think I like where that trend is heading.
I think the concept is more complicated than this to begin with, but I also believe there is a descending spiral after the students has completed a class.
First of all, I have done a lot of Caribbean diving in a lot of different sites, and I would say that in
most cases in my experience the DMs really do control the dives. They monitor gas supplies for the group and make decisions appropriately. In some (like Bonaire) a DM was put in the water for anyone who wanted to take advantage of that service, with most divers paying no attention. In most cases in my experience, though, the DM monitored group gas supplies, kept the group together, and made sure they were together on the surface. I suspect many divers have never experienced anything other than this.
This brings us to the spiral of which I spoke. In my last two classroom sessions for OW instruction, while I was talking about dive planning, students have told me that they had been told by friends before the class that "in the real world" dive planning is not necessary because the DM does all that for you. Obviously the people who told them that had never experienced anything different. In time they had grown dependent upon a DM's dive planning decisions and lost whatever planning skills they had learned in their OW classes. (That is the descending spiral.)
In the case of the dive in this thread, I would like to repeat what I said earlier. It was not a typical dive, and the DM had a crucial role in dive planning. They descended on a line in current, a line that was attached to the boat. It is critical that the importance of this be understood. I just finished a month of wreck diving in South Florida, and we divers had a number of discussions on the boat prior to each dive about how we wanted to do our descents and ascents: with a fixed line or with a live boat.
Your entire group has to do it the same way! If someone is going to do a drifting ascent in current, the boat has to be able to monitor the ascent and follow it, so it can't be fixed. If the boat is fixed with people going up the line, it can't follow the drifters.
In this case, the divers could not do a direct ascent to the surface, because they would have been drifting in current as they ascended. Not only was the boat fixed to the wreck and unable to follow them, they did not have a DSMB, an essential tool for a drifting ascent. The boat crew would have no idea they were ascending off the line and would not be looking for them. The crew would have no ability to follow their drift during a safety stop without a marker. Only when everyone else had ascended on the ascent line would they learn that someone else had come up off the line and start looking for them on the surface somewhere.
So, unless the current was much less than I have been led to believe, they had to come up that line, so they had to return to it before beginning the ascent. They have not had that kind of planning in their previous training, so they were indeed dependent upon the DM to make a good decision. That is why the DM needed to turn the dive when they signaled their air situation to them.
