rmediver2002:
Don't get to worked up boys, if you check his profile he is not even a certified open water diver yet...
Medic - thats trolling in my book, stick to what you know...
Deep Sea
I'm just speaking from the perspective of someone who has been through the open water course before (I missed my last open water dive because I was in a car accident and could not dive with a cast on my leg; the dive instructor told me that since I took a year to recover to the point where my doctor would sign the paper to let me dive, that I would have to do the whole class again. I'm just waiting a month until I can get somewhere that's actually worth diving in.
I'm not trying to cause trouble, i'm not trying to belittle commercial divers. I sure as the hell wouldn't want your job- kudos to you for doing it; really deep water scares the **** out of me. But that attitude comes from mucking around, skin diving the local water traps with a friend for extra money during our high school days (all of 5 years ago). Yes there are hazards that go along with that, but as I said before, no one else could have been held responsible for my actions. Now if you're working for someone who is
forcing you to violate a law, then they should be partly responsible, but the responsibility to maintain one's safety still falls to the diver, as has been said multiple times on here.
Yes there are US dive regs about commercial work, but from what I have seen (keep in mind I have no real interest in doing this kind of work so my knowledge of the regs is just cursory), is aimed at the deep water welding and recovery stuff. No one has ever called us on things like hooking up cables to shallow sunken cars for tow truck drivers (a quick $200 for us, in 10 feet of water) and since the nearest professional divers (other than the local state police and department of natural resources divers- and they are only professionals in the loosest sense of the word in that they are paid) are over 4 hrs away near Chicago.
By the way, I don't hear an outcry to stop people from diving in non-
open water environments as kelp forests despite the risks. It would seem that such activities (dealing with the risk of entanglement) would be far greater than mucking around the bottom of a small pond in Indiana. I won't go into a kelp forest for anything, not even if there were gold bars strewn about.
I don't take unnecessary risks, and I dive very carefully. Semper paratus, semper gumby- always ready, always flexible. Just my humble opinion.