What could I have done differently?

[plot]

I would've gotten my buddies and went back for the guy if he wasn't responding.

No point in endangering yourself by becoming a solo diver, and no point in endangering your somewhat inexperienced buddy by leaving him, all for an unknown person with an unknown status (distress wise).

If a person was in obvious distress, flailing around etc., I'd approach but keep a distance to see if they would calm down. Otherwise, I've never taken a rescue course so I am not trained to help a person in distress underwater, and wouldn't want to endanger myself to try to help them. In that situation I'd try to flag other divers down, or surface and try to flag someone else down.

If you want my help, you'd better approach me somewhat calmy so I know you're not gonna stab me with your dive knife and steal my air or something... it'd ruin my dive trip if I got mugged underwater

 

[Charlie99]

Charlie,

You are killing me here man... The communication has to happen before action takes place. Even if the leader is on the ball, by the time he turns around, number 3 may no longer be visible. Communicating before acting completey avoids the situation where OP has to sit and wait for his buddies to realize that OP is gone. With divers not trained to do solo, avoiding buddy seraration has to be first and foremost.

It's a matter of choices. In the other incident that I linked to, the diver did as you suggested and went to communicate with the lead buddy. When they came back, their buddy with the problem had disappeared.

If you can quickly communicate to the leader without losing sight of the diver in distress, fine. But too often it really boils down to either choosing to stay with the guy with a problem, or going chasing off after someone else, hoping to be able to find the guy with the problem later. My choice is to stay with the guy with a problem.

Charlie Allen

 

[Drewski]

I would've gotten my buddies and went back for the guy if he wasn't responding.

THAT was exactly the CORRECT thing to do, IMO. After you re-established contact with your buddy team, simply ask them to follow you back to the diver. If he's gone, assuming he linked up with others, case closed. If he's not and still there, you have back-up.

This is a "classic" situation in CPR training. You come across someone in cardiac arrest at a remote place, no one else around. No one can call 911 for help. The patient is not breathing and does not have a pulse. What do you do? Answer: Do CPR for a short period of time to see if the patient can recover. If not, go for help then return.

The slate was a good suggestion. Remember also that not everyone responds to an "OK" but an "UP" sign usually gets a response in the affirmative or negative. Sure sounded like hypothermia to me...

 

[TSandM]

While I was taking a class a couple of weeks ago, I had an opportunity to see my first distressed diver. An OW class was coming up as we were preparing to drop, and a young man came to the surface near us. He looked anxious, and said, "I've lost my buddy." My dive buddy spoke to him, and he didn't respond at all. He was breathing fast, and he didn't have enough air in his BC, and his face went under the water. He came up spluttering, and looked very frightened. Most of all, he didn't respond to anything we said to him, until Joe swam over to him, got him by the BC and inflated it, and basically got in his face and spoke very calmly to him to reassure him.

It was an object lesson that a very frightened diver gets self-absorbed and doesn't respond.

If I ran into somebody underwater who didn't answer an OK signal, I don't think I'd leave them. But then, I dive in teams that use powerful lights to keep in contact with one another, and if I left, my teammates should notice that my light is gone very quickly. The worse the viz, the faster they should note it. And I would have the option of flashing my light at them, if conditions were such that they could see it, to let them know something is wrong.

But I understand the dilemma -- You have made a COMMITMENT to Alpha and Beta to be their teammate; you have no commitment to the strange diver, and you aren't even sure he has an urgent problem that merits you abandoning your team. This is not an easy decision, and had I not seen the young man on the surface -- Who wasn't thrashing or screaming or anything else that immediately indicated panic, except after he started sinking -- I might not have made any different decision than you did.

 

[Halthron]

1) What could/should I have done differently? or
2) What should I do if something similar occurs in the future?

First off, kudos for trying to do something. However, I'm not certain that what you did was the best thing to do. Essentially, you wandered away from your buddies without letting them know, to go check on someone. On verifying that the guy may be having a problem, you left him to go back to your buddies. Good intentions, bad implementation.

What I would have done, if I didn't have a light and if we were in that formation, would be to take one of my snap bolts and bang it against my tank to get the attention of my buddies. Then, we could all go over to the diver having problems. If they didn't get their attention, I'd swim to them and get it. As other have said, you have a committment to your buddies, what happens if one has a problem as soon as you leave, as one did?

 

[MikeFerrara]

I've come across lots of divers who look like they're having trouble. A few were but some just look like it. Some people just always dive looking like they are in death thrawls or something and it's not always easy to tell.

As has been pointed out diving single file doesn't work well without lights to communicate with. If you have to help someone it's best to have your buddies there to help you and there's no sense in having them wandering around wondering where you are. We've spent quit a bit of time just hovering off to the side trying to decide whether or not we need to step in. These days I avoid the popular dive parks at busy times because sometimes it seems I spend most of my time doing that. LOL.

I think I'd have stayed out of the divers reach and signaled. If he didn't respond to an ok, Id give him a thumbs up. If he didn't respond I'd move around behind him, get hold of his tank and take him to the surface.

It's nice if you've had a rescue clas or something to get some practice at surfacing other divers but it's not too gard to figure out on the spot. Some entry level courses teach it, some don't...they all should because it's something that could happen on any dive.

 

[MikeFerrara]

During my neurosurgery residency, a professor posed this situation to me and my fellow residents: you are leaving a pro football game headed for the parking lot. Just outside the stadium, you see two drunks get into a fight. One drunk hits the other on the head with a beer bottle and the man goes down, unconscious. You notice that the man's pupils become unequal and his breathing labored. The police have been summoned, but what do you do personally to help?

Clearly, the man had intracranial bleeding, but before we could answer, the professor responded: I'll tell you what to do, he said, go as fast as you can to your car and beat the traffic, since everyone else will be standing around watching the man on the ground!

This seemed callous, to say the least, but he went on: what CAN you do? You are surgeons, he noted, not paramedics, not police officers. You have no OR with you, no scapels, no CT scanners...you are no better, perhaps worse, then the other bystanders there. If you get involved, you might get bashed on the head too, or make some mistake in emergency management. If you aren't equipped or trained to help in a situation, walk away before you become a victim too, or make a bad situation worse.

In this case, unless you are a trained rescue diver and are certain the man is in distress, what could you do? Staying there and trying to help resulted in abandoning your buddies, and could have left you stranded in low viz as a solo diver. The man might have suddenly reached out and pulled your mask or regulator out. He might have been psychotic for all you know. Most likely he was a student or inexperienced diver who simply didn't know what OK meant and thought you were being cute, or taunting him.

There isn't any diving course that I know of that would have a diver in OW without knowing what an ok sign is. I can't imagine a student even getting his head under the water in the pool before the instructor goes over the basic hand signals.

The point of this rambling? Two-fold: 1) what looks like an emergency often isn't; and 2) unless you know what to do and are trained to do it, your first obligation is not to make two victims when there is only one.

:

I don't know what the legal risks are for a professional but for non-pros, I think you're in a pretty good legal position in most states.

I wouldn't go off and leave a diver that I thought might be in trouble. If it's not a real emergency and just looks like one, the best place for it is on the surface.

Sort of like the boy scout that takes the little old lady across the street even though she doesn't want to go...If I think someone is looking too bad off underwater I'm likely going to take them to the surface.

 

[shakeybrainsurgeon]

I agree this isn't a clear cut situation. I'm not worried about legality, in that good samaritan laws immunize even professionals when rendering aid in the field in good faith (this holds for physicians, I can't speak for dive professionals). I'm worried about confronting a confused, irritated, mentally unstable or distracted stranger underwater... alone and without training. All right, you decide to help him to the surface...how? He won't respond to OK, so is he going to respond to thumbs up? Do you grab him and try to wrestle him to the surface? Do you inflate his BC and cork him up (then you might be facing liability)? If he is confused, he might react violently and then you have two people in trouble. Leaving him may sound like abandonment, but may be the wiser strategy...but that doesn't mean not seeking others to come and help you, it simply means not confronting the situation alone. In the story I related above, I wouldn't walk away from an injured person on the street without knowing professional help had been summoned... it just means I would not attempt to render aid in a setting for which I am not equipped or trained.

So you stay with him, then what? Until he passes out? Swims away? Runs OOA? This isn't a panicked diver, just an aloof one. This isn't a buddy, but an unknown entity. If he leaves, do you follow? I'm reading many vague, nice sounding platitudes (stay with him, assist him), but no nuts and bolt suggestions as to what to do with an apparently calm, unknown diver who simply ignores you but doesn't seem in great distress otherwise. Surface, blow your whistle and summon any help available above water, perhaps.

One thing I would do, for sure, is seek some answers after the dive from anybody I could find; who was this guy and what was his problem? If he was part of a class, seek out his instructor and let him know what went on, or try to find the guy topside and sort out what went on. If he was just being a jerk, he was putting other divers in a bind and should be told so.

As to the OK sign, I thought all certifying agencies taught dive tables too, but from other threads, I find that not to be true. Thus, one can never assume what someone should or should not know from any given diver or LDS.

 

[Michael Schlink]

Once you made the decision to look after the "problem" diver you're really stuck with staying with them until something has been resolved. Look at it this way, after you re-joined your group and you're on the beach you notice some excitement going on and then someone points out a diver in distress, the one you just swam away from. It's not uncommon for a diver to say they're OK when they really aren't. If you think a diver needs help and you have "moved in" to help YOU need to make the decision if everything is OK rather than what the other diver is telling you(or not, in this case). Mike's probably right about possibly pulling the diver up if you didn't get a responce, I'd probably stay in front to keep an eye on him, unless he was already flopping around. You may have got a reaction out of him when you started pulling him off the bottom!!
As far as should you help or not, I think we all should help each other all the time whenever we can regardless of "training". The diver you swam to may have simply been "alone" and not liking it and not sure what his next step should have been. Another diver swimming up to him and asking him if he was OK may have been all he needed to avoid a bigger problem (rapid ascent,panic, gas loss, wandering around lost,etc.)
IMO you should never swim in a line with the style of diving you're doing, in fact there really isn't any reason to swim single file unless you have to....some caves and wrecks(inside) make it hard to swim side by side but in OW side by side is great, especially if you have a "weaker" diver. Just watch your turns. Turning around "every few minutes" isn't ever going to work. One time you're going to turn around and nobody will be there. Depending on the distance the # 2 or # 3 diver may have to swim harder to get help, something they may have trouble doing, entanglement, OOA's, cramps, a couple of combined problems and suddenly life is getting real difficult for the trailing diver.
Great post, now go get some "rescue" skills if you don't have them, some of this should have been covered in a well taught rescue class.

 

[MikeFerrara]

I'm worried about confronting a confused, irritated, mentally unstable or distracted stranger underwater... alone and without training. All right, you decide to help him to the surface...how? He won't respond to OK, so is he going to respond to thumbs up? Do you grab him and try to wrestle him to the surface? Do you inflate his BC and cork him up (then you might be facing liability)? If he is confused, he might react violently and then you have two people in trouble.

It's best to still have your own buddies still with you of course but I'm not doing it without trainaing. How...is I move behind him and get hold. In most cases I would use his BC to control our buoyancy but I'can be flexible there. If he was in passive panic, which is what I would suspect if he was consious but not responsive, he may indeed start to fight at some point. Let him, having done this sort of thing before, I'm fairly skilled at underwater conbat. LOL I can take him. but, that's why I'd rather be behind him if I have a choice.

Leaving him may sound like abandonment, but may be the wiser strategy...but that doesn't mean not seeking others to come and help you, it simply means not confronting the situation alone. In the story I related above, I wouldn't walk away from an injured person on the street without knowing professional help had been summoned... it just means I would not attempt to render aid in a setting for which I am not equipped or trained.

I don't think anyone could argue the advantage of some training which is why I would question the wisdom of doing much diving without such training. having to surface an unconsious diver, a paniced or passive paniced diver is something that any diver could run into on just about any dive. I think it's best to learn something about it up front.