Wow, just wow, this thread is unbelievable. This is going to be a long one, sorry about that.
Not the mention the 4 minutes exalation and/or the from 100+ depth CESA and the fairly regular amount of OOA / emergency situation beanojones seems to find herself confronted to regularly. Not with her own divers though...
During the read of the all thread, I laughted a bit (some people have great reparty on this forum), got surprised and serioulsly concerned.
1. Many (and in my case all) deep dives have a hang tank and reg at the safety stop, so that is as far as one needs to get.
That might be what you have experienced, but I have to say that, having dived and / or worked in France, New Zealand, Egypt, Thailand, Djibouti, Malaysia and Maldives, I NEVER had a hang tank and reg present at the safety stop.
So, IME, this is not the norm.
basically every first dive on a two tank boat dive in the tropics is a 100+ foot dive, regardless of the divers certification. What this means is that often enough divers who cannot handle their buoyancy are rocketing to the surface from some significant depths. "Pressed the wrong button", or "He knocked my mask off, so I hit the up button" "My ears hurt so I hit the up button" are not really that uncommon to hear.*
When I unfortunately have to agree on some of this, I also think that as dive professionals, we don't have to accept this as a fact that can not be changed. In the Maldives, the orientation dive is there for that, and I think it limits the potential of problems like that.
When you say "regardless of their certification", I assume you mean also regardless of their experience. And bim, they run out of air at 30m deep. How surprising.
*Not to mention the "Can you dive down and free the anchor?" or Can you dive down and grab that Camera/weight Belt/GoPro" Dive computer etc. The reason so many of us learn to free dive to significant depths is because we have to and we don't have time to change tanks or put on our gear, not because we necessarily want to do a bunch of rapid ascents after nitrogen loading.
If you have that little consideration for your own safety...
Beano,
Your can do attitude is commendable, however it's reckless. Not reckless to other divers, but to yourself. I just pray I don't see your name in the A&I forum. If I do, tell your family not to take offense when my 4 word post says " I saw that coming".
With what I've red here, assuming it's true, I wouldn't be surprised either.
As a full time guide/instructor, I don't considere it "my job" to put my life at risks. I considere it my job to prevent problems with certified divers, and to teach as well as I can my students; I will always insist at the end of a course, no matter how good they were, they still have very very little experience even if certified and should be fully aware of that. What they do with what I taught them is up to them, not up to me...
And eventually comes this part of the industry where people go diving like this: "follow me, I'll handle everything." Great.
If I see a problem underwater, of course I will help as much as I can. But put my life at risks, no, sorry, this is not my job.
But, even if air usage from a given diver was not wildly variable, depths and conditions are completely varied for many recreational dives. We jump in daily and do a current check, because we have to, and that is mostly which direction the current is running. Once the current direction in known, then we plan our dive direction, but as to depth and how much current we are fighting, that is all once we are in the water. So workload and depth are completely unknown. The only fixed variable is the size of our tank.
And then add the fact that currents switch direction underwater, and for some dives we can drift, and others we cannot drift and sometimes we do not know if it is a drift or not, until we are well into the dive and the boat takes off.
Go ahead, tell me how gas planning would help these dives.
I never dived in Hawaii, so it's true I don't know the conditions over there. But I dive for long enough in the Maldives, which is not a destination not known for it's potential strong currents, changing direction/washing machine or going in the opposite direction when you got deeper, drift diving only.
We still are planning our depth though. Knowing that, we can plan our dives accordingly.
Not saying to my divers at what maximum depth they can go sound very very strange to me.
Sorry again for the long post, I don't participate much but read a lot, but sometimes too much nonsense is too much.
