Treat every dive like a tech dive

[CuzzA]

The "50-dive expert" isn't usually about ego ... nor is it meant to be in any way derogatory. It's more a description of an attitude commonly seen in divers right around the time they've had enough dives to start getting comfortable with their basic skills, and who therefore begin to feel as though they've "mastered" what they were taught.

It is something seen in divers who are active in social media, because they're usually the sort who tend to read and absorb knowledge and apply it to their experiences. But due to their limited experience, they are not aware of how much they haven't yet been exposed to. In that sense, it's more about limited perspective than ego.

It's commonly the case that divers are more confident in their knowledge at 50 dives than they will be at 500 ... because by the time they reach the latter they have developed a much broader perspective on how much there is yet to learn about the activity.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I understand. Ego... I was referring to the description of the diver Beachbummer posted about. That person sounded like they had an ego. Nevertheless, I agree with everything you're saying and I think that logic can be applied to just about anything in life. I participate on another board and an experienced, respected member on that board has a great signature that I read and is a good reminder every time he posts.

If you stay in this sport, and really apply yourself , in 10 years you might be the diver you think you are today.

Lots to learn.

 

[boulderjohn]

It's commonly the case that divers are more confident in their knowledge at 50 dives than they will be at 500 ... because by the time they reach the latter they have developed a much broader perspective on how much there is yet to learn about the activity.

This happens in almost any area of knowledge and skill. An analogy would be that someone who is early on in a climb up a forested mountain might feel he or she is closer to the top than someone far above who has been to a crest and seen the distant peak.

Research in education, for example, shows that teachers with a relative large amount of knowledge of the subject area usually teach differently from people with a much smaller grasp of the subject area. The ones with less knowledge focus instruction on memorization of facts in their instruction, whereas people with much greater knowledge focus on using the thinking skills and research skills needed to use facts to draw meaningful conclusions. The usual theory to account for this is that the teachers with lesser knowledge think that both they and their students are closer to sum total of available knowledge than they really are. Teachers with greater knowledge have a better sense of the massive amount to be known and realize how trivial the amount students can actual memorize is in comparison with the whole. They are thus more likely to focus on teaching students how to find facts when they need them and how to use them when they find them.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Like they say:
"Hire a teenager...while they still know it all".

 

[Bigd2722]

IIRC they taught this in OW class.

Have you completely forgotten "search for a minute, then surface"?

I also seem to remember being taught something about monitoring one's gas consumption to avoid OOG incidents.

Certainly haven't forgotten abut search for one minute and then surface. And I agree with that thought process, but then what? If your buddy doesn't surface do you go into panic mode? Do you have the means to call for assistance? What are your options? What if you lose your buddy and your air? (I agree this is a highly unlikely scenario). Where I dive, most of the time, if you lose your buddy, you keep on diving. Not saying it's the right thing to do, just saying it's fairly common

---------- Post added December 26th, 2015 at 07:23 AM ----------

I don't think that's necessarily true. I went through a lot of "phases", and tend to emphasize team diving protocols. But I found that once I started solo diving on a regular basis I had to put a lot more conscious effort into being a dive buddy on those days when I dived with one.

Diving really is a routine-oriented activity ... the less something becomes part of your routine, the more conscious effort you need to put into being good at it. Being a dive buddy requires practice and effort just like any other skill set. More so than some, since it begins with how you think about the dive (i.e. "our" dive rather than "my" dive) ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

After reviewing this comment and giving it some thought, I would agree that it does take more/different thinking to be in dive buddy mode

---------- Post added December 26th, 2015 at 07:32 AM ----------

No. The team approach is based on shared resources. It's all about the Team.

Pick / develop your team carefully.

My backup gas is on my teammates back. We are a planning on one failure *per team*, not one failure per diver. It is this first failure that turns the dive.

Losing contact with your team is a failure, and will result in a detailed debrief. If I can't see you, or touch you during the dive it will be a subject of conversation post dive.


Tobin

The key to this is to able to pick/develop your team carefully. That's not always an option. I do agree with most of what you are saying about team

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Certainly haven't forgotten abut search for one minute and then surface. And I agree with that thought process, but then what? If your buddy doesn't surface do you go into panic mode? Do you have the means to call for assistance? What are your options? What if you lose your buddy and your air? (I agree this is a highly unlikely scenario). Where I dive, most of the time, if you lose your buddy, you keep on diving. Not saying it's the right thing to do, just saying it's fairly common

It may be common, but unless it's something that was discussed and prepared for prior to the dive, it should by no means be considered acceptable. Losing a dive buddy introduces stressors that take your mind off what you're doing and greatly increase the risk of a diving accident. Look at the DAN statistics ... a significant number of diving accidents begin with buddy separation. If the expectation in the event of buddy separation is that you'll keep on diving, then you should be trained and equipped for solo diving, and should have discussed this contingency with your dive "buddy" prior to the dive, so that you both know what to expect and are prepared for it. Diving with a buddy is all about predictable behavior ... if you both know what to expect, and have prepared for the possibility, then you will have at least removed the uncertainty and stress that accompanies an unexpected buddy separation, and will therefore greatly reduce the potential for worse things happening.

The key to this is to able to pick/develop your team carefully.

The key is to set expectations, to articulate them to each other so you know what to expect, and to stick to what you said you were going to do. That's a fundamental part of dive planning.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[cool_hardware52]

The key to this is to able to pick/develop your team carefully. That's not always an option. I do agree with most of what you are saying about team

The available options for any recreational dive include not doing the dive. Always.

I *had* to dive with

1) The Wrong tank
2) Wrong mix
3) Leaking whatever
4) Wrong exposure suit
5) Insta-Buddy
6) Insert bad idea here_________.

Er, ah, well no. You elected to do the dive with those known avoidable handicaps.

We all can thumb the dive at any point including "before" the dive ever happens.

I've walked away from dives when the available team mates impressed me as being a liability.

Tobin

 

[Storker]

Certainly haven't forgotten abut search for one minute and then surface. And I agree with that thought process, but then what? If your buddy doesn't surface do you go into panic mode?

No, but I'll most probably (correction: sure as heck) call 112, the European version of 911. And my (insta-)buddy will be quite aware of that because I've made that pretty clear during our pre-dive chat/dive planning, so it'll be up to them to either follow procedure or get (at a minimum) a stern talking-to from the police and the rescue divers. More or less similar to what happened here.

Do you have the means to call for assistance?

Yes, of course. Either a cell phone or a VHF radio with Channel 16. Or, usually, both.


EDIT: I find it interesting, though, how you try to steer the discussion away from my point that proper buddy procedures more or less invalidates your argument about redundant gas and lost buddies by talking about "panic" in case of a lost buddy. A classroom example of the red herring fallacy.

 

[boulderjohn]

Certainly haven't forgotten abut search for one minute and then surface. And I agree with that thought process, but then what? If your buddy doesn't surface do you go into panic mode? Do you have the means to call for assistance? What are your options?

I had a buddy diving with me in some shallow kelp, and he kept disappearing on me. I kept surfacing, and after a while he would surface, too. After a few times, he stuck with me.

In my most recent case, about a year ago, we were diving in a small lake with relatively poor visibility, and we separated. We were following a wall so I knew roughly his direction of travel. I went to the surface and waited. Nothing. I finally swam to a set of steps where we entered and exited the water and climbed up high so I could see better. I eventually saw his bubbles. They were not far away, and they were heading back the way we had come. I swam toward the bubbles and then descended through them. When we talked later, he insisted that he had followed the protocol but had not reached a minute yet. What that meant was that for more than 5 minutes he had not realized I was gone.

Now, here's what happens when one person purposely decides not to follow the protocol.

There were 5 of us diving a shallow (35 feet) lake with poor visibility. We adopted a pentagon formation, with one person leading and the other four following in buddy teams. I was in the first buddy team. Only a few minutes into the dive, the lead guy just disappeared. The four of us stayed together looking for a while, and after a minute I thumbed us to the surface. He was not in sight. We did see something strange--an inflated SMB was blowing away in the light breeze in the distance. There were other divers there, so we figured it had come from them. We waited several minutes on the surface trying to decide what to do. The missing diver was an instructor, so he certainly knew the proper protocol. We looked for bubbles, but in the light chop there were none. Eventually we agreed to go down and do a search for a short time. We did. When we surfaced again, we decided things were serious, and we sent several people to shore to get help while we began the search again.

The pair that went to shore to get help found him there. When we had separated, he had looked for us as well. He said he was close enough to hear us breathing, but he could not find us. He knew the protocol, but he had an inspiration and decided that he would send up an SMB so that when we surfaced, we could find him and follow it down. He forgot that he would then have to come up and deflate his SMB to continue the dive, so that would not have done much good. It turned out to do no good whatsoever when it somehow disconnected from the line of his spool and floated away across the lake. After he reeled in the loose line and looked around again for a while, he decided he would have no choice but to surface, which was probably almost the same time we decided to go back down and look for him again. Not finding us on the surface, he headed for shore.

Yes, he knew the protocol, but he decided not to follow it. If he had just gone to the surface as he knew he should have, everything would have been just fine--the only result would have been a few minutes lost dive time. Because he chose to do something different, we all lost an entire dive.

 

[markmud]

Many a diving question I've pondered, not just here but in real life, has been shut down with some variation on "that only matters for tech dives." I'm struggling to understand the mindset. To me it's like getting in your car and leaving your seatbelt off because the weather's nice and you're not driving fast.

Most of the equipment, training, and practices that make a cave or deco dive safer is going to improve safety for looking at the pretty fishies at 60 feet. The risk of a rapid ascent from "recreational depths" is not zero. Why not think about gas planning, and carry a second primary regulator, and focus your mind on solving problems in a way that allows a deliberate ascent?

Any dive can turn into a solo dive. Any dive can turn into a tech dive (no immediate access to the surface because of entanglement or the needs of a buddy). Many dives, e.g. wall dives, can turn into deco dives, with just a momentary loss of buoyancy control.

In other activities that have inherent hazards, the norm is to expose people to information and training that is beyond the boundaries of what they can do without qualified supervision, while still reinforcing the boundaries.

Hello Airishuman,

Thanks for starting this thread!

I disagree with your opinion, in large part. However, I communicate with people on Scuba Board regularly who think as you do (and they have been critical of me for not following tech protocols).

I don't need to perform tech-dive planning protocols, gear choice, and buddy protocols for a dive in Gin-Clear water, with no current, and a hard bottom at 40 or 60 feet (and a dive boat anchored directly above me).

TDI cofounder Bret Gilliam has written about tailoring your dive plan and gear choice for the dive at hand. He has written about the heat stressed, the equipment stressed, and the buddy stressed diver who jumps of the swimstep into gin clear, warm water for a one hour dive to 60 fsw (one hour surface to surface). What the hell!

In the Project Management community, a term called "tailoring" is used to decide which project management protocols one would use for different jobs. Creating a brand new system, such as the Polaris Ballistic missile system, requires all of the processes prescribed for project management, including program management, for an integrated system, that includes missiles, staging, MIRVs, u/w launching of weapons, a nuclear reactor, a submarine, stealth, u/w navigation, u/w communications, and long-term u/w life support for a crew. Compare the protocols needed for an integrated weapons system verses remodeling a bathroom?

While my analogy is extreme when discussing Tech vs. Rec, the principles are the same. Overthinking the dive can create more problems than are warranted.

Perform a mental risk analysis for the dive. If you are not diving in an overhead environment, not diving where entanglement is probable or much less possible, not doing staged decompression, or not diving in extreme exposure situations, tailor your dive to eliminate protocols and gear to unencumber your dive. Sometimes, less is more.

Qualification: I dive with my solo kit almost exclusively. I am sometimes teamed with insta-buddies. Sometimes, I perform self-rescue drills while my buddy is present. Also, I am a bit lazy (since I am trim and neutral, why change the gear set-up from one dive to another?).

Akimbo started a thread regarding his commercial buddies losing masks. His commercial peers had never lost a mask, nor did he. The incidence of catastrophic failures or loss of equipment for trained and experienced divers is rare.

markm

 

[Bigd2722]

[QUOTE



EDIT: I find it interesting, though, how you try to steer the discussion away from my point that proper buddy procedures more or less invalidates your argument about redundant gas and lost buddies by talking about "panic" in case of a lost buddy. A classroom example of the red herring fallacy.[/QUOTE]

Perhaps, I could have expressed myself more clearly, certainly not trying to steer away from your points regarding buddy procedures. Simply don't agree that buddy procedures invalidate my points about redundant gas or lost buddies.

I've mostly enjoyed this discussion