What's with the deaths?

[erubic]

Wow, good stuff guys. Thanks again

 

[Charlie99]

MikeFerrara once bubbled...
I can kill any one of these teams with the slightest thing thrown at them. They can't manage a free flow midwater, they can't share air without being all over the water column, they don't know where their buddy is and they can't do a mask R&R without loosing it unless they're planted on the bottom, they can't even stay together during a descent. BTW, that's when I like to throw OOA's or free flows at them.

That tells me that these are divers who are relying on luck and if anything goes wrong there's a good chance that they'll get wacked.

How is that for statistics?

The statistics tell me that these divers must be Warm Water Wusses / underwater tourists staying within their safe limits --- shallow warm water dives following around a DM. It works. Most of the time.

One thing that does bother me is all these posts that keep pointing fingers at instructors, agencies, and DMs. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? Whatever happened to the concept of active LEARNING as opposed to passively BEING TAUGHT.

 

[DennisW]

I know that my OW instructor provided instruction on how to assess the dive site for safety. Any good (and smart) instructor would, no matter what agency they are with. Why do I say that? If for no other reason that the instructor can be liable for a student, even after they are certified. I wouldn't want a lawyer asking me (if I were an instructor) "So, did you give instruction on how to assess the safety of a dive site?" It should be basic to any open water course. Just my $.02.

 

[Saudi-Diver]

Dont we all have a responsibility to our selves I qualified through the PADI system that got me in to the water. There is tons of litrature out there and if you are passionate about diving like 99.9% of the folk on this site you read, you dive with more experianced guys, you learn from every dive you pick up experiance. I used to climb in scotland in winter and the attrition rate was/still is horrendous its a completly unregulated sport and I bet more people die on Scottish hills in a year than divers world wide thats me shooting from the hip cos I signed on to the BMC web site and gave in trying to get the stats!! Just dive and plan and stay aware.

 

[diverbrian]

I see a post here about the instructors ability to "introduce" problems that can't be handled by most people.

Now, with my experience around drills, they never go as smoothly as an actual incident. Drills are valuable, but you have to a monitor "tell" you what exactly is happening because everything is actually quite normal. For instance, if I see bubbles coming out of someone's reg., I probably won't be the first to offer them my primary until they they tell me that they are out of air. Even if they actually are, I had a dive buddy give me an OOA signal that was more like a signal about his shave than the throat slash of an OOA signal (you can bet that this gets covered well in class now). I was looking right at him and missed the OOA signal.

I have seen divers that have problems with drills flawlessly handle stuck inflators, free flows, and the like. Our method of handling freeflows is to get air from your buddy, shut your air off, and try turning it back on after coming up a bit figuring that the freeze-up will clear if the air isn't blowing through the reg. Actually breathing the free-flow is the second choice in the book of most of the divers that I talk to.

Most of the other comments that I have about instruction, I will save for a more private setting except to say that I personally feel that the right instructor is far more important than what training agency they are affiliated with.

The reason that we see more about deaths and divers missing would seem to be the access to world wide media now, IMHO. Like many things, these tragic events seem to attract reporters like flies on (you-know-what). We see these events and post about them here. They may have happened in the past and nobody but close families noticed. I would be interested in seeing the percentage of problems in the past with higher training standards and now. I notice that "higher level" or "veteran" people in many roles get complacent and can have more problems than when they are first learning and maybe paying attention to what they are doing. The actual cause and type of problem is different. The result is the same many times. This is based on my experience in running nuclear power plants for the Navy and computer controlled mixing equipment for my current employer (making medical grade materials). The cause for these types of problems in my mind is dual: complacency and its close cousin, arrogance. Both of these have the potential to be caused by overtraining where the person thinks that they have seen nearly everything before they are cut loose to operate on their own.

Again, these are my own views. Feel free to regard them or disregard them as you wish.

 

[DivePartner1]

Rich's post

I did my OW with SSI and everything through Rescue with PADI. None of the materials or training I received at any PADI level were as detailed or thorough in terms of dealing with envirnomental difficulties as was the SSI OW course.

This being said, a good theme I see on these boards--but rarely elsewhere--is the benefit of consistenly practicing diving skills by diving on a periodic basis.

 

[FreeFloat]

Charlie99 once bubbled...

One thing that does bother me is all these posts that keep pointing fingers at instructors, agencies, and DMs. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? Whatever happened to the concept of active LEARNING as opposed to passively BEING TAUGHT.

hear, hear. If a person always dives with exactly the same buddy/location/etc, and never asks any questions or does his own research, how is he supposed to broaden his experience? Sadly, too many new divers seem to have gotten certified just for the upcoming vacation, or only so they could dive with their SO, etc. They shut off the brain in favor of just blindly absorbing what is taught, no more no less, and don't even question the info being given them.

My OW Instructor so badly wanted to encourage active thinking that he would sometimes deliberately say or do something that went either counter to what he had just taught, or against all common sense (advising against buying 'dissolving lead' for weight belts, comes to mind) and then wait to see who picked up on it. If he got no response from the class over one of his obvious things he would get a little annoyed and we'd get a little lecture about questioning things that don't sound right.

WRT environmental assessments, it was a blustery day with 3-4' waves crashing against the shore entry points and 18-20 kt winds blowing on the first day of our checkout dives - but the instructor made us as a class assess several sites as 'diveable/not diveable' and he wanted to hear reasons why or why not, before he told us we would not be diving the sites...

 

[MikeFerrara]

Charlie99 once bubbled...
The statistics tell me that these divers must be Warm Water Wusses / underwater tourists staying within their safe limits --- shallow warm water dives following around a DM. It works. Most of the time.

One thing that does bother me is all these posts that keep pointing fingers at instructors, agencies, and DMs. Whatever happened to personal responsibility? Whatever happened to the concept of active LEARNING as opposed to passively BEING TAUGHT.

I agree. It works most of the time. But, as I said, most of the time there isn't a problem. Often it's the divers who don't stick to the warm water resort dives that have a problem.

Personal responsibility is a fine thing. But...If we don't teach (or present the need to learn) trim, good buoyancy control, buudy skills or midwater problem management, why shouldn't they believe us when we tell them they did just fine? They think they're prepared because we told them they are. If we hand out certs to new divers who are crawling on the bottom instead of swimming above it, why shouldn't they believe they're qualified?

It's the same with pointing fingers. As a new diver and as a new instructor, I believed what I was taught. I thought I was doing a fine job. Now, looking back, I am really thankful that I didn't get some one hurt. I do point a finger at the agencies but I think many instructors, like many divers have to put 2 and 2 together (a wake up call so to speak). That can take time and some won't ever do it because they're motivated by other things. Maybe even they get lucky and get to teach for/under one of the good ones. I guess the point is that we don't know what we don't know and since we don't know that we don't know it we share some of the responsibility with out teachers and the agencies.

 

[adshepard]

Each year over the past two decades between 180 to 200 deaths have been reported of divers. The numbers are fairly consistent. It's the reporting and the advent of the Internet that make it look like more and more people are dying.

There is no epidemic out there. The sky is not falling. No training agency is to blaim nor are training standards to blaim Stuff happens and always will.

DSDO

Alan

 

[adder70]

diverbrian once bubbled...
I have seen divers that have problems with drills flawlessly handle stuck inflators, free flows, and the like. Our method of handling freeflows is to get air from your buddy, shut your air off, and try turning it back on after coming up a bit figuring that the freeze-up will clear if the air isn't blowing through the reg. Actually breathing the free-flow is the second choice in the book of most of the divers that I talk to.

As stated above, the diver has a responsibility to hear advice from all sources. Being a Florida diver, the aspects of cold water diving and iced valve free-flowing regs never really came up. my OW class taught breathing the free flow reg. since it would usually be caused by a failed 1st stage, not icing up. I may have forgotten this tidbit, but I now know and will likely remember to try turning off the reg to see if it will unfreeze in the future.

I will never know if I missed, forgot, or wasn't taught the mantra from cavern class "face the flow" when water backflows into your reg or lifts your mask and floods it, but I will never forget it after having that happen in a cavern entrance several years back. I eventually made it to still water and got my bearings without doing anything exceedingly stupid, but that definitely got my attention.

The moral of the story: Never stop learning.