darned straight! my spreadsheets have spreadsheets... ;-)
What makes one cave dive "bigger" than the other?
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darned straight! my spreadsheets have spreadsheets... ;-)
Couldn't agree more. Certain dives, which can become defined as "goal driven" dives, have lead to fatalities because people have this feeling they haven't arrived as a cave diver unless they have done them. It is amazing this "peer pressure" that cave divers feel that there is a need to measure myself against others based on seeing a landmark or a certain penetration.
I stress to my students it's not about how far you go, how long you go, how deep you go, how many jumps you do, but it's about getting home safely.
lermontov
Contributor
It depends on how or what your measuring. If there was no one pushing the boundaries of adventure and discovery then not only diving but most sports would stagnate. Just considering the innovation and advancements of equipment that even beginners now enjoy was at some point developed to cater for sports people pushing the limits somewhere take nitrox for example - once considered devils gas!. Im amazed at some of the exploits that have been achieved by others -its way beyond my level of committment but I dont decry them for it. I'm talking about semi professionals or those a the very top of their game not some wannabe that gets into trouble.
Being goal driven is not necessarily a negative thing, and ego is required to strive for advancement and personal development but those words have connotations of bigheadedness and competitiveness,
I dont believe that any sportsperson that strives to improve their skill ,fitness ,ability is without ego or isn't to some degree goal driven otherwise they wouldn't feel a need to go past OW certification. we get further training to stay longer go deeper explore more etc its for adventure , personal challenge, new discoveries, it'd not bad, its stimulating and satisfying.
Peer pressure? dont know what its like in caving community but therse no pressure in the school of divers i know -maybe its imagined or self imposed, or do cave divers perceive their discipline to be the pinnacle of divecraft.
sure theres alway some ****hole who goads others into doing something that is beyond their ability but that across all 'extreme" sports. I have my own dive goals and I'm building up to them- but theyre mine -not someone elses
Bobby
Contributor
My experience is that a "Big" dive not only varies by the person, it will vary for each person. A few years ago a big dive, for me, generally would entail run times coming up on double digit hours, trimix, & CCR. Today, since I've been diving less, a big dive is a couple of hours, a few navigation choices, & nitrox. It is a fun exercise to attempt to quantify and break it down in a spread sheet however I believe there are too many variable inputs to arrive at a reliable output.
One that is a constant for me is that any dive with a team mate is bigger than a dive solo. I have some very good teammates that I highly trust, however I always feel it adds a level of complexity and mental commitment when diving with someone else. When diving solo I can focus completely on myself and the dive which makes any dive a bit easier.
One that is a constant for me is that any dive with a team mate is bigger than a dive solo. I have some very good teammates that I highly trust, however I always feel it adds a level of complexity and mental commitment when diving with someone else. When diving solo I can focus completely on myself and the dive which makes any dive a bit easier.
The concept of what is a big dive can change over time, even for the same person. Early in my diving, I heard about a shipwreck called the "Capillano" near Campbell River off Vancouver Island. It was described as a "really, really big, scary, deep dive". How it was only for the most advanced divers. The stories were all about getting blown off the wreck and how deep it was and how dark and ... terrifying.
I dove it a couple of years ago (at last!) because the more I read about it, the more I wanted to do that dive. I finally dove it during the 150th anniversary of it sinking. The seas were flat and calm that day and it was an awesome dive in every possible way. I was also 120ft deep, which barely put us into deco on our rebreathers.
Yet it was still a big dive for me simply because of the renown of the wreck and the actual joy of really diving on her.
The MV Gulfstream off the coast of Lund, B.C. is far deeper but even that dive is one of my favorites due to the life, the nature of the wreck, the history of the wreck, and of course... Nancy' Bakery in Lund. :-D
I dove it a couple of years ago (at last!) because the more I read about it, the more I wanted to do that dive. I finally dove it during the 150th anniversary of it sinking. The seas were flat and calm that day and it was an awesome dive in every possible way. I was also 120ft deep, which barely put us into deco on our rebreathers.
Yet it was still a big dive for me simply because of the renown of the wreck and the actual joy of really diving on her.
The MV Gulfstream off the coast of Lund, B.C. is far deeper but even that dive is one of my favorites due to the life, the nature of the wreck, the history of the wreck, and of course... Nancy' Bakery in Lund. :-D
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@Bobby I agree with you, and that is one of the things that victor and I were laughing about on our way back from cave country a few weeks ago. My goal right now is how to put a number on the "size" of a dive. Some function of depth/distance/time with factors accounting for complexity of the dive plan, gear etc. By doing that you can say "ok I did a dive of X magnitude and was OK, but I haven't done a dive at X magnitude in 12 months so I need to scale back to Y magnitude to lead up to a dive of Z magnitude". It's not to achieve a goal, but more to increase safety by making sure that you aren't jumping from X to 2X magnitude dives immediately but gradually increasing. There's obviously the "Feeling" of one dive being bigger than the next and your perception of that changes with time and goes up and down according to what you are doing, but to be able to quantify that would be a nice tool to have.
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About 4 years ago I got it in my head to create a scale for diving overheads, much like climbers have a scale for the difficulty of their climbs. I know something about making scoring scales of this kind. Such scales are used in various ways in educational assessment, and I not only created them, I taught others how to create them. I would need lots of help, though. For one reason, my own cave diving was pretty near the beginning level, and I had no idea how to categorize the dives well beyond my ability, the dives I had never seen. For another reason, on a project like this you need a large number of participants in order to gain enough credibility at the start in order to get people to give it serious consideration. No one would give a second thought to a scale produced by a cave diving nobody like me.
There was already something of a start in the form of the typical four class sequence to cave certification. It should not have been hard to build upon that. Unfortunately, I could not get any interest from anyone. The tea leaves were getting very clear, and I gave up. I finally settled for something along those lines at the recreational level only, and I created a a PADI-approved course that teaches ascending difficulty levels of overhead diving, beginning with the very simplest (like diving under the anchor chain) and culminating in cave and advanced wreck diving. The course teaches why the fact that you can swim under the anchor chain safely does not qualify you for more difficult overheads and absolutely does not mean you can enter a cave. It does not in any way teach anything about cave diving except to show as clearly as possible the kinds of things that can go wrong when you go into a cave without proper training. People who have taken it report that the "don't go into caves!" message was quite clear.
I still think something like that can be useful for the spectrum of cave dives, something that would help someone compare his or her present skill and training level to the rated difficulty of a dive before setting out to do it. I can think of several fatalities from people diving well beyond their abilities, and I can't help feel it might have helped.
There was already something of a start in the form of the typical four class sequence to cave certification. It should not have been hard to build upon that. Unfortunately, I could not get any interest from anyone. The tea leaves were getting very clear, and I gave up. I finally settled for something along those lines at the recreational level only, and I created a a PADI-approved course that teaches ascending difficulty levels of overhead diving, beginning with the very simplest (like diving under the anchor chain) and culminating in cave and advanced wreck diving. The course teaches why the fact that you can swim under the anchor chain safely does not qualify you for more difficult overheads and absolutely does not mean you can enter a cave. It does not in any way teach anything about cave diving except to show as clearly as possible the kinds of things that can go wrong when you go into a cave without proper training. People who have taken it report that the "don't go into caves!" message was quite clear.
I still think something like that can be useful for the spectrum of cave dives, something that would help someone compare his or her present skill and training level to the rated difficulty of a dive before setting out to do it. I can think of several fatalities from people diving well beyond their abilities, and I can't help feel it might have helped.
Victor (the OP) and I just had an illuminating exchange outside of this forum. His intention in creating this post was apparently misunderstood, and my post (#39) was more what he was thinking about. this could take the discussion in a new direction.
First let me dwell on an analogy. Here in Colorado we do a lot of skiing, and the mountains have a variety of slopes that attract a variety of skiers. The slopes have ratings of difficulty in ascending order--green circle, blue square, black diamond, and double black diamond. Skiers choose slopes based on an appraisal of their abilities and the slope ratings. If they match, they should have a satisfactory run. But sometimes skiers do not match their ability to the slope rating. If a green circle skier chooses to do a blue square run, it will be a big run for him or her, and they will be on edge and perhaps frightened all the way down.. If a double black diamond skier does a blue slope, it will be something of a bore, a run taken usually only to get to a different part of the mountain.
So you have two different systems in play at the same time. One is a relative system, where the difficulty of the run depends upon a comparison of the skier's ability and the challenge presented by the slope itself. The second system is the difficulty of the slope itself, and that does not depend upon who is skiing it. The slope is what it is.
I have not skied much in the last decade because of an artificial knee, but I used to be considered an expert skier. I did mostly double black diamond slopes. One year I skied the Beaver Creek ski area immediately after it had hosted the World Cup, and I went to the area where they had held the downhill races. The slopes were familiar to me, but not that run in the condition it was in for those races. That run was closed to us, but we could cross it several places. At times I paused and looked down the slope that had just been raced, and although I had no intention of going down it, I was still filled with a sense of fear. That was one scary run! That was way past the double diamond rating.
So, understanding that the difficulty, the "bigness" of a specific dive, will always be in one system relative to the ability of the person attempting it, would it be possible to make a second system, a more objective rating system for difficulty of the dives that would help divers make decisions about their abilities to attempt them?
First let me dwell on an analogy. Here in Colorado we do a lot of skiing, and the mountains have a variety of slopes that attract a variety of skiers. The slopes have ratings of difficulty in ascending order--green circle, blue square, black diamond, and double black diamond. Skiers choose slopes based on an appraisal of their abilities and the slope ratings. If they match, they should have a satisfactory run. But sometimes skiers do not match their ability to the slope rating. If a green circle skier chooses to do a blue square run, it will be a big run for him or her, and they will be on edge and perhaps frightened all the way down.. If a double black diamond skier does a blue slope, it will be something of a bore, a run taken usually only to get to a different part of the mountain.
So you have two different systems in play at the same time. One is a relative system, where the difficulty of the run depends upon a comparison of the skier's ability and the challenge presented by the slope itself. The second system is the difficulty of the slope itself, and that does not depend upon who is skiing it. The slope is what it is.
I have not skied much in the last decade because of an artificial knee, but I used to be considered an expert skier. I did mostly double black diamond slopes. One year I skied the Beaver Creek ski area immediately after it had hosted the World Cup, and I went to the area where they had held the downhill races. The slopes were familiar to me, but not that run in the condition it was in for those races. That run was closed to us, but we could cross it several places. At times I paused and looked down the slope that had just been raced, and although I had no intention of going down it, I was still filled with a sense of fear. That was one scary run! That was way past the double diamond rating.
So, understanding that the difficulty, the "bigness" of a specific dive, will always be in one system relative to the ability of the person attempting it, would it be possible to make a second system, a more objective rating system for difficulty of the dives that would help divers make decisions about their abilities to attempt them?
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