Wreck Penetration?

[RJP]

Now not saying that they werent trained or whatever but could an OW diver still go into something like a small cessna for a very brief period of time and still be ok? I have been on dives before off the coast of panama city and have noticed OW divers doing this very same thing. Just wanting your thought on this. Thanks

"You'll be fine, unless something goes wrong."

 

[rjack321]

Yes Walter, that is exactly what I believe. I'm sure Mr Exley made a lot of mistakes and had quite a few close calls. Thanks to Sheck and many other early cave explorers we now have a good solid set of techniques and protocols that allow us to avoid and escape situations that can prove to be fatal. We don't have to make the mistakes that early cave divers made.

I agree. Sheck had no clue by his own admission/words. (Caverns Measureless to Man). He and his friends made just about every mistake known. Not using a continuous line, inadequate lights, no BCs, no 2nd regulator, wicked deep air, not reserving thirds, yada yada.

Somehow by the grace of God he survived his teenage-ish years and pieced together alot of what we know now to be "best practices" for overhead diving. We now rely on those best practices to be passed on via proper training so that we don't have to go through every close (or fatal) call that Sheck and his friends and buddies did. Cause he had way more than 9 lives for years. Its a shame he didn't have anymore for the MX dive that cost him his life.

 

[Web Monkey]

I'm pretty sure the PADI standards say no more than 130ft linear penetration and ambient light zone but I'm not positive. Beyond those you are doing what most of us would consider "technical" dives which require more extensive training, techniques, and equipment.

I can absolutely guarantee you that there are a huge number of non-obvious ways to die during a penetration, regardless of whether or not the distances add up to any magic number or how much light there is.

If you can't ditch your weights and find yourself (more or less) safely at the surface in a minute or so, it's not a recreational dive, and recreational OW divers are not trained or equipped to handle it.

Terry

 

[Nick_W]

I can absolutely guarantee you that there are a huge number of non-obvious ways to die during a penetration,
Terry

Seriously people, I'm trying, but you have to help me out here.

 

[Rick Inman]

Here is the description of skills taught in the INTRO to Cave class taught by Jim Wyatt:

Classroom work/Academics

Approximately 6 hours of classroom work. Lectures from a prior cavern course MAY be credited at the sole discretion of the instructor.
Review of medical aspects, dive tables, use & misuse of dive computers.
The cave environment, cave diving techniques including buoyancy control & body positioning.
Communication, accident analysis, and emergency procedures/situation management.
Recognition of potential stress/emergency situations.
Psychological aspects of Cave diving - these include stress, attitude, awareness, reaction to & building tolerance to stress in self & others, stress management & philosophy.
Cave conservation
Guide lines & guide line techniques - Reel usage.
Dive planning and gas management.
Equipment and equipment configurations.
Inert gas narcosis & physiology.
Cave referencing & navigation.
Philosophy of SAFE cave diving


Land drills

Proper use of guide lines & reels.
Techniques for following guide lines.

Touch contact procedures.

Lost Line / Lost diver drills.

Use of line markers.
Confined water Skills

Following a guideline with blacked out mask or loss of visibility.
Sharing gas, first with vision, then with eyes closed.
Touch contact - may be incorporated with gas sharing.
Following a guideline without a mask.
Reel usage.
Proficency with modified flutter kick, shuffle kick, modified frog kick while maintaing correct cave position & buoyancy control.
Cave Dives

Students earning certification will show satisfactory performance in ALL skills listed. Students will complete a minimum of 4 cave dives and at the instructors' discretion an open water evaluation dive. Students using double tanks will use 1/6 air rule. After certification at this level students are only qualified/certified to dive in single tanks.
Bottom time for dives is minimum 20 minutes.
Cave dives will be conducted in at least 2 diferent entrances.
I will attempt to show you different cave configurations as well as varying volumes of flow.
Equipment checks & "S" drills are to be performed prior to every dive.
The 4 dives are a minimum.
Skills to be performed in the caves

Proper finning & propulsion techniques.
Proper body positioning & buoyancy control.
Use of reel & guideline.
Touch contact.
Gas sharing.
Communication with light & hand signals.
Cave familiarization.
Use of line arrows.
Lost Diver procedures.
Lost Line procedures.
Stress detection & management.
Cave conservation & techniques.
Simulated Emergencies:
Sharing gas while exiting the cave.
Lost visibility, touch contact, team line following.
Lost visibility, out-of-gas, touch contact line following as donor & receiver for a distance of at least 100 feet.
Diver lost from line/team.
Broken/lost line.
Primary light failure - exiting on smallest a backup.
gas valve management. Diver practices turning off/on valves simulating various regulator/valve failures.
All drills will be conducted during the exit-No life support gear will be removed during these simulated emergencies.
Divers must concentrate of developing awareness of team members and the guideline. Divers must demand good technique for the safety and efficiency of thr other divers and self as well as for preservation of the cave environment.

Which of these skills would you think a person wouldn't need to be trained on for safe penetration?

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

Something else to consider is that scuba is clasified as an extream sport. Would you sky dive without training?

:no

You may classify scuba as an extreme sport, but we have had many pointless threads on this subject and I am not even sure you are in the majority here on SB with that opinion. If a certified diver has a hard time climbing two flights of stairs with a briefcase, I certainly hope they don't think they are participating in an extreme sport when they dive!

People who have no training in sky diving are taken sky diving every day! Personally, I think it would take considerable training and even more practice before one could be considered a competitive sky diver. If I am performing an activity near the same level as those that compete well, I might consider it a sport.

A lot of people participate in risky adventures in this day and age. River rafting the Arkansas river in Colorado during spring thaw can and does kill even experienced river guides, but the untrained tourists who do it every year are not competing in an extreme sport, they are participating in a risky adventure!

Take a look at TSandM's sig line; From my recollection, my air consumption (and my enjoyment) became significantly better when I realized diving was really all about floating and not swimming. (berick). Does that sound like an extreme sport?

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

In my first post, I was referncing the "rules" of "recreational penetration", e.g. no more than 130ft linear penetration, in the daylight zone, etc. This is still recognized as recreational diving.

Who wrote them and by what authority?

If you examine the following Cavern Rules, you will see that very few wreck penetrations could pass either the Max Depth or No Restriction rules. There are so few recreational wreck penetrations that would pass similar rules that I don't believe anyone has ever wasted their time writing the recreational wreck penetration rules.

From my NSS-CDS Cavern Diving Manual, cavern diving in standard recreational scuba gear follows these limits;

Direct Sunlight Zone - diver can see the opening (entrance/exit). If you can not see the opening but it is not pitch black, you are in the ambient-light zone. When it is pitch black and you can see nothing without lights you are in the zone of total darkness. Cavern diving is only in the direct-sunlight zone.

130' Maximum Linear Distance from the Surface - Cavern divers must stay within a linear distance of 130' to the surface. Linear distance includes the depth of the entrance plus the distance of penetration. Examples; 30' deep entrance plus 100' penetration, 50' deep entrance plus 80' penetration, 70' deep entrance plus 60' penetration.

70' Max Depth - Below 70' air reserves for dealing with emergencies are too limited and the margin for error becomes too critical.

No Restriction - Buddy teams should be able to comfortably swim side by side. If divers have to swim single file due to localized narrowing that is considered a restriction. Cavern divers are not permitted to pass through restrictions in part because sharing air with standard scuba through a restriction is nearly impossible.

40' Minimum Visibility - The minimum visibility acceptable for cavern diving is 40'.

No Decompression Limits - Cavern divers should stay well within the no-deco limits. When cavern diving, bottom time is the time from leaving the surface until returning from the cavern to a depth of 10' in open water(not ending at start of ascent). Most experienced cavern divers stay within 80% of NDL limits, to allow for any unexpected delays during exit.

Air Supply Limitations - One of the three leading causes of death in underwater caves is failure to reserve adequate air for exiting. This requires at least as much air in each cylinder as both divers (buddy team) used coming in on the two seperate cylinders (basic rule of thirds).

If you are in any of these following situations, you are technically in cave diving territory; ambient-light zone or zone of total darkness, more than 130' linear from surface, deeper than 70', past a restriction less than 2 divers wide, less than 40' visibility, more than 3 minite required saftey stop. Violating the rule of thirds does not put you in cave diving territory, you are just very foolish.

If you are deeper than 70' or pass a restriction (typical doorway) you are not recreational diving.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

Must admit i have no idea what idiot dreamed up "recreational diving" but i HATE that term. Its completely meaningless.

If im diving for fun, for a hobby its recreational no matter what type of diving it is. If i do a 6m dive on a reef for fun or a 70m trimix accelerated deco dive for fun its still recreational.
It becomes commercial when someone pays me to do it, otherwise its all for fun.

The term has been widely abused and blurred to attempt to classify some diving into an artificial box. I wish it would go away.

Seems to me you are skipping a couple terms; professional and technical. First you say it is meaningless, then you tell us what you mean when you use the word. I would contend that there are four major classifications to diving; recreational, professional, technical, commercial.

As I was taught, recreational diving is also considered no-stop diving. I could dive air to the sand at the Bibb (130' - off Key Largo) for a few minutes, make a nice slow ascent to 15' and if I lost some weights on the dive and could not hold my SS I'd have a very high likelihood of being just fine. If I know anything about current and wrecks I'd likely never even take a full breath.

If I go under the house to take a picture of the Jewfish 11 I am beyond recreational limits in many ways; below 130' with overhead restriction and likely extended required SS (deco). I'd also likely take at least a couple full breaths after inhaling very slowly (10 sec) to get close enough to my subject. Now it feels like work.

You call a 70m trimix deco dive recreational and then whine about people abusing and blurring the term; got a mirror?

 

[texdiveguy]

Well I for one certainly think several areas of scuba diving falls into the 'extreme' sport category! Anytime one places themselves into an environment by which the nature of such is in habitable without proper training, gear and discipline...it is extreme to most people. Leisure recreational diving is at one end of the scale were deep technical mixed gas diving is at the other end of extreme. I don't consider climbing,,skydiving or any other similiar activity anymore extreme than scuba diving. I train for this sport just the same as a climber or down hill skier trains to remain in proper condition.

 

[TSandM]

A swim through is where you can clearly see the exit before you enter, there are no entanglement hazards, the area is big and open enough for two divers swimming abreast and the exit can be easily reached at a normal pace in less than 5 seconds.

This is very similar to Rick Murchison's definition of a swim-through, and I think it's a pretty good one.

To think about this logically, we have to ask what the dangers of overhead environments ARE. There are two. One is that you run into a problem which would be neatly solved by ascending, and you can't, because you're trapped beneath an overhead. Another is that you can't LEAVE the overhead, either because you are physically trapped there, or because you cannot find your way out.

The second problem, I think, one can assess much of the time. When I'm looking at a simple rock arch, the likelihood of getting lost in it is zero, and the likelihood of dropping the visibility enough so I can't get out from underneath it is equally small. When you're peering into the side of the Saskatchewan, the likelihood of getting lost is significant, and the likelihood of encountering a lot of silt is also high. In the middle are things like the bow of the Rhone in the BVI. There, you could see the exit from the entrance, there were slits admitting light all along the passage, and there was no silt on the bottom. There were no branching passages, and there was no way to get lost.

At that point, you have to think about the first risk I mentioned. Tear your diaphragm on the second stage halfway through the Rhone and suck water . . . Are you going to have the presence of mind to calmly being using your secondary regulator, or can you reach your buddy for gas? Catch your fin in an interstice in the structure -- Are you going to panic and bolt? Lots of evil things can happen to people in a "benign overhead environment", if they're inexperienced or don't know what their own personal reaction to stress underwater is.

The easy answer is to say, "Never swim into any overhead environment, until you have done formal training for doing so." The more complex answer is to say, "Anything dark, spooky, complex, silty or manmade, or anything where you can't see the exit from the entrance, or anything where there are multiple navigational choices to be made, is too risky for someone without training. Simple swim-throughs, where you can see the exit from the entrance, light is excellent, and silt is not an issue, must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, erring on the side of conservativism if there is ANY doubt."