Solo dives

[MXGratefulDiver]

Surely, You must have a dam over there containing the remnants of a town.

I live within easy driving distance of the damdest river in America. I just never thought to go exploring what got flooded when they put all those damn dams in.

Sorry Bob, I didn't mean to call you surely.

Been called worse ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Trace Malinowski]

I think for everyone this is a little different, but for me, if I can't do the dive with a single 80...if I have to use doubles, it is probably a big dive..It would be a dive where either an actual or virtual overhead occurs, and where huge adventure is the payoff, but the cost was far more planning to avoid potential problems....Diving a shipwreck at 270 feet down, in a 3mp current, with huge fish all over it, probably lots of fishing line as well, should be a big dive for most.
Really any significant penetration into a cave is a big dive, because the effects of a major failure can be so severe....This of course would be one reason cave divers typically have a better skill set than typical OW divers. Even if a good cave diver had never been on an ocean dive, it should be easy to get them squared away for an advance3d drift dive in one or 2 orientation dives. You could not say the same about a "good OW diver" being introduced to a good cave dive.

Trace, I'm talking conceptually here, I am not trying to invent a new vocabulary for diver competence

Dan, I was just wondering because "big" does carry different meanings for different people like you said. There are two types of diving that I passionately enjoy. One is unified team diving that I learned courtesy of GUE. The other is solo diving - especially solo cave diving or solo wreck diving. The kind of diving I do not enjoy is what I call "loose team" diving where a diver and his buddy are not operating as a united team. This is the scenario most divers are placed in and one in which the industry should be spanked for promoting. Just because divers have C-cards, dive operators and dive pros are perfectly happy to stick two or more people together and call them a team. In any competitive sport, people know the importance of practice. Yet, when the sport is one that the Greeks defined as a "sport of vertigo" such as scuba diving, the element of competition that exists is "man vs. nature." If two guys were going to play a YMCA racquetball tournament for the grand prize of a giant oatmeal cookie, you can bet they'd be practicing. Dive pros do a horrid job of promoting practice - especially team practice. The DIR community supports this concept, for sure. That's one of its strengths. Divers should be encouraged to practice before dives much the same as other athletes - especially prior to any dive a diver considers "big" in comparison to his or her normal diving activities.

While loose team diving is plagued with problems, the biggest danger is the false sense of security that accompanies unpracticed team members. Two divers together might be more inclined to go deeper and farther than a diver would solo. Yet they may not be entirely sure they could get out of a jam or handle an emergency together. The greatest reason that we should have much higher standards for diver training across the board is so that C-card that we place emphasis on is almost a guarantee of a reliable buddy who can skillfully donate gas. In this way, we would eliminate that false sense of security to a much greater degree if more divers were highly skilled thus reducing the ranks of the unreliable. Of course, if you are lucky to have a buddy who can somehow assist you, then at least the potential for help is more advantageous than no help at all. Even a poorly skilled diver might have a lot of intellect and creativity to bring to the team to help someone in an emergency.

My experience as a unified team diver with GUE is that for all the good of the system, peer pressure can be a problem. This pressure can be self-imposed because you are diving with buddies you don't want to let down or it can be imposed by the group. Despite the cardinal rule of technical diving, "Anyone can call a dive at anytime for any reason," I've had well-meaning buddies try to encourage me to dive when I wasn't feeling it. One of the greatest lessons I learned from my NACD/TDI cave instructor during all classes including the solo class that I did with him in the caves was that the moment anyone even thought about not diving, we would whole-heartedly support the thumb. I try to instill this in my students. One US Olympic Team strength coach I was reading about is a proponent of this. He believed the moment there was doubt from an athlete about doing another rep, lap, or whatever, then that was it. Time to hit the showers.

In a unified team, you may not feel good about diving or about a plan, but you may dive mentally or physically sub-par simply to not disappoint a team member who needs you. At best, you'll get it together underwater or just have a crappy dive. At worst, you may not be ready to step up into a leadership role or deal with an emergency. Team members need to be encouraged to disappoint their buddies by not diving rather than placing the first link in the accident chain. Of course, even on a bad day, most well-trained team divers can donate gas and handle problems even if their skills are a little sloppy due to a bad day. Team members attempting to encourage a buddy to dive must be extremely careful to be 100% supportive of a no-go decision while attempting to ascertain whether a change in plan or other action might make a buddy feel like doing a dive. Even well-meaning attempts to sort it out might cause enough pressure to put a diver in the water who really should be sitting it out and could put that first link into the accident chain.

The greatest pro of solo diving is that a diver can adjust one's level of risk based upon what one is capable of handling intellectually, emotionally, and physically at any moment. You could plan to penetrate a wreck and decide not to without having to communicate the switch in plans to anyone and not feel any pressure to thumb the dive or part of the plan. Of course, the greatest drawback is the lack of help. I really learned a lot solo diving in Bahamian caves with absolutely no help available and even if I got out of the cave, if I were bent, getting up the 50 foot ladder at Owl Hole or getting back to the truck on a traverse out of Mermaid's would have been something else. In the process of trying to create my own brand of wilderness first aid for diving maladies, I came up with all kinds of awesome tricks to solve all the "what-if's" that could take place out of the water and not just in it. In popular caves like Ginnie, most often help is readily available even for a solo cave diver if you can get back to the Eye or Ear ... unless diving at midnight or an a dead day.

True, solo diving would probably be the sixth rule of accident analysis in cave diving, but a more in-depth look needs to be taken at the causes of solo accidents. An aging diver population also has a high accident percentage, but I don't think people should quit diving even with health issues. If a diver accepts that he could perish due to an underlying condition, then why take away that diver's joy of diving if it's worth the risk. Most of us would not quit no matter what our doctors told us and I don't think people should have the right to make those decisions for us in a country in which life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are considered inalienable rights. Public education in accepting risky endeavors as being okay in spite of the consequences is a much better pendulum sway than making everything illegal to promote safety and security.

Each day we live with risk, but 800,000 people can be killed in Rwanda and get less emotional investment than an 18 month-old toddler trapped in a well. There is something about "solo diving" that stirs emotion. More buddied divers die than solo divers, yet for whatever reason, the community is far more polarized over solo diving than the causes of diver death that precede solo accidents in numbers.

Each day we live with risk above and below the water line. Each person is willing to accept certain risks. I know women that run and backpack alone and would go crazy if they needed to do these things with a safety buddy even though our society is full of sexual predators. Conversely, I know other women who will not jog alone nor go hiking alone. What is a "big" risk to one may not be to another and each person determines what is a "big" dive, a "big" risk or what parameters they need to set.

Personally, my solo diving limits based upon depth, distance, ceiling, deco, etc., are the same as my team limits. Whether to dive alone or with a buddy depends much on the way I feel about a dive. Do I want company? Do I want to be alone? Like you said, any significant penetration is a "big dive" since there are no time-outs.

Regarding training, I support training for solo diving. I don't like SDI's standards of 50 certs as an instructor allows you to teach solo. I think it is really an art form and would be better served with higher quality instructors teaching the program. Minimum an Intro to Tech instructor under the old standards of how one became an intro to tech instructor. With the PDIC solo course, the student needs to have a diving physical, more dives, and the performance standards for solo are clearly more technical in nature. Of the three dives required for minimum standards in PDIC one dive is entirely devoted to skills assessment and development, the second dive is a failures nightmare, and the third is psychologically challenging. My girlfriend thought that dive three of PDIC solo was the most difficult dive she'd ever endured and far more taxing on her emotionally than her DM, instructor, GUE-F, full cave or any mixed gas or other training.

I believe that solo training is an excellent place to teach a lot of long-forgotten skills such as tank valve breathing and introducing students to breathing from the wing and changing the diver's mindset to being one's own best lifeguard or the best lifeguard on the team.

Ultimately, how many trained solo divers have died diving solo? In one sense, I wonder how many solo accidents that have happened may have been prevented with quality solo training. Just like team diving grew out of cave diving, that's where prospective solo students should often look for their solo instructors.

 

[techdiver2us]

Having been drawn back to this forum due to the solo question posed in newsletter, I just wanted to throw in my two cents. My second wreck dive ended up as a solo dive since my assigned buddies and I had missed communications, and my next trip in very rough conditions pretty much ended the same way since I tired of hanging on the anchor line waiting. Since then I'd say about 75% of my dives have been solo dives. My instructor always stressed self sufficiency likely due to a serious case of the bends he endured as a result of having to help someone who wasn't. In many cases it's pointless to try and dive with a buddy due to poor visibility and it's also nice to be diving trimix in some of those. Example: the I.P.Goulandris. Poor vis, couldn't track a buddy if I had one, first time on the wreck, usual array of bottles, and diving mix. If it weren't for those factors I might have opted to go in the wreck. But it just goes to demonstrate the need for self-reliance, redundancy, and a thorough understanding of your own limitations. But then again, I guess you could say my first dive was a solo dive. Having gotten my hands on a tank for show and tell in school, and having a swimming pool in my backyard what would one expect of a kid somewhere around 13 years old, so that would be about 1961. But the dives I made after that were with a buddy, and times were much different back then. I taught myself to dive before I ever got in the water. I remember Bev Morgan as the author of one of those crucial books I virtually memorized.