Swim throughs - what could possibly go wrong?

[tursiops]

Flutter kick is fine if you are careful.

You clearly don't know what you don't know.
All your posts are demonstrating confirmation bias, not trying to learn anything.
We can talk, but you seem to be unable to listen.

 

[Foxfish]

You clearly don't know what you don't know.
All your posts are demonstrating confirmation bias, not trying to learn anything.
We can talk, but you seem to be unable to listen.

If someone is finning along without kicking up sand I don't really care how they do it.

 

[DeputyDan]

My only opportunity to do a "swim through" would be on a vacation. Since vacation diving almost always means diving with people I don't know and whose skill/training level is unknown to me I do not do swim throughs (at least not anymore). I had one unfortunate incident in Devil's Throat that woke me up to the fact that, despite my training/equipment and confidence, there were other people in front of me and behind me capable of doing something (or not doing something) that could get me killed. If a swim through is on the agenda I politely and assertively tell the dive leader that I will follow the group's bubble stream and meet them at the exit.

I agree with this !!!
If I don't know who I am diving with I don't do the swim through no matter how benign it may appear. If the person in front of you freezes up or really mucks up the bottom you are sort of stuck.

If you go to Coco View on Roatan they normally do both Mary's Place and Calvin's Crack - (or is it Mary's Crack ??). Depending on who is in the group makes my decision for going through or over - I have done both approaches!

 

[tursiops]

If someone is finning along without kicking up sand I don't really care how they do it.

Your "if" is another demonstration of being closed-minded.
You may as well say, "If the sand is super-heavy and can't be moved by the "prop-wash" from a flutter kick......"
What happens when you enter a new space, and the coarse sand turns to fine sand?
Having available to you more than a flutter kick is like having a backup light. You may need it. You do carry a backup light, don't you?

 

[TSandM]

I think what this thread boils down to is that the OP dives in some overhead spaces that meet all his criteria, and he hasn't yet had the experience of having one turn out to be different.
I've dived a lot of overhead spaces in a variety of locations literally around the world. Some are as benign as the OP's -- the Cathedrals at Lanai, for example. Others are truly not like that at all -- the clay-filled caves in Florida, for example, where a careless hand swipe can blow the viz for hours or days. I've been inside wrecks where there was no silt at all, and I've peeked into others I wouldn't enter with a reel.

If you have decided you do not want any skills other than the ones you have, you need to make sure the diving environments you enter are well-suited to that suite of skills. As long as you make those determinations absolutely accurately, you will be fine. What scares me is the phenomenon of creep . . . where you decide this place looks a little smaller than the last one, but it's probably okay; or you fail to realize the sediment at the bottom of this cavern isn't the coarse sand you're used to.

Like I said a while back . . . you can approach such dives from two directions. One is the diver who has more experience, more skill, more gas . . . more of everything than the dive requires. That's like being tall enough to dunk a basketball. The other direction is the diver who KNOWS what he's doing is on the ragged edge, but he decides to do it anyway. Those dives suit adrenaline junkies, but fall roughly into the category of, "Hold my beer and watch this!" And at least those of us who work in emergency medicine know how well that tends to turn out . . . Dives are all that way. Everything goes well, until it doesn't. When it doesn't, you either have the necessary things to deal with it, or you become a statistic. The sad part about overhead environments is that what those necessary things are is entirely known, and they are absolutely available to anybody. People who choose to explore those environments without those necessities are gambling. You can gamble for small stakes or big ones, but sometimes I think people don't know which they are doing.

 

[Foxfish]

In our area, with a little care flutter kick is just fine. If you are in an area prone to silting then the safest way to avoid the risk is to stay out of the caverns.

 

[TSandM]

Foxfish, I think you have made it quite clear that the suite of skills you have is one that you feel is appropriate to the environments you describe.

The reason this thread keeps going is that there are a lot of people who read ScubaBoard, and a lot of them are relatively new divers or people without advanced training. They are reading you as saying that you don't need special training to go into overhead environments. They may or may not remember the entire list of VERY restrictive criteria you posited for making that statement.

We see people die almost every year from swimming into overhead environments for which they are not prepared. I, for one, am not willing to let this thread rest on your repeated statements that your skill set is adequate for overhead diving. It's adequate for overhead diving in a very restricted set of overhead environments, and so far, you've done a good job in selecting them. Most people don't have the experience or the knowledge to evaluate the overhead environment they are about to enter, to determine if it suits their skills. People die from guessing wrong. More training is ALWAYS better . . .

You remind me a lot of someone I know who used to dive. His skills were awful, and he was adamant that he needed to use his snorkel on every dive, because he couldn't afford to breathe any of the gas from his tank on the surface, because it didn't last very long underwater, anyway. Nothing we could do could convince him that, if he improved his diving skills, he wouldn't worry about a couple of minutes of breathing from a reg on the surface. He didn't want to change the way he did things, despite seeing multiple examples of people who didn't have the problems he had. You don't want to change what you are doing, or get any further training, and I get it . . . You may be quite right that you don't need to be any better than you are for the diving you are doing. The problem is that it doesn't generalize.

 

[Glenlivet]

In our area, with a little care flutter kick is just fine. If you are in an area prone to silting then the safest way to avoid the risk is to stay out of the caverns.

And learning frog kick doesn't hurt a bit and does not need a class. With a bit of practice you can swim inches above silt without disturbing any of it.

I'll never understand why learning frog kick is not a part of OW training.

 

[Donnah]

On my first dive trip with a group, I did Bear's Den in Roatan. DM, 2 instructors, and experienced divers were with me. I followed the DM. I still remember getting into the cave, sitting on the bottom and looking around at the shafts of light coming in through the holes in the top and the silversides shimmering all around me. Next time I went, I asked to do the dive. DM was evasive. I asked why. He finally mumbled that they had "lost" a diver on that dive. The last time I was there, I asked to do the dive again. DM had no idea where Bear's Den was, but one of the local helpers said he could find the opening. It was a beautiful as I remembered. You enter through a hole in the reef (30 ft.), travel through a somewhat narrow tunnel (have to keep low), and come out in the cave. I shouldn't have done it the first time -- I didn't have the skills or experience and had no idea what I was getting into. The last time I dove it, I made the decision to go knowing the chances and what was involved. I'm glad I did -- it's a magical dive. I'm also glad they have closed the dive site -- there is just too much that can go wrong.

 

[Storker]

learning frog kick doesn't hurt a bit and does not need a class.

It's even possible to do them in splits :shocked2: