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Mark,

>You were cave diving and during deco your teammate was
>experiencing difficulty. You stayed with him as long as your
>gas supply allowed, he was apparently okay so you surfaced
>and while putting your snorkel in your mouth told your surface
>staff to get someone ready to assist him in the water, then
>you put your face in the water and kept up observance of
>your teammate in case his condition worsened and until
>someone could descend to stay by him. Whether you are
>watching for a few seconds, a few minutes or a few hours
>you should have the means to keep an uninterupted watch,
>a snorkel is the perfect tool for this.

While I can agree in principle with your other reasons--not being a wreck 
diver, I can't agree with this one. Carrying a snorkel on a cave dive is 
simply useless unless that cave is in the open ocean and, come to think 
of it, I've never carried a snorkel there because my only dives in open 
ocean caves have been in the Caribbean. It just doesn't make any sense to 
carry a snorkel on a cave dive. The chance of it being actually _needed_ 
is so remote that it would be utterly superfluous.

On the other hand, it seems to me that if a wreck diver had a safe, 
accessible place to stow it out of potential entanglements, then the 
chance that it _could_ be needed is much greater. Again, I don't wreck 
dive. If I did, deck pizza would be the result. <g> It looks like the 
cave divers on here are against snorkels entirely, but some wreck divers 
do carry a snorkel simply because getting blown off a wreck is a real 
possibility in waters that have heavy currents and unpredictable weather 
states. I guess that's why they carry that lift bag--for deco-ing off the 
wreck.

BTW, there are a lot of immature, whiney jerks on this list. Ignore them, 
they're mental midgets, so it's easy. Because they spend so much time and 
attention on their own penises' and bungholes and things they would like 
to see put up them and around them they think we must also be interested. 
We are not. We are no more interested in these observations than we would 
be in the booger that a 4 year-old just dug out of his nose and he wants 
to show us. At least the child has the charm of being a child. 

Keep in mind also that there is a lot of macho posturing here, you know, 
threats to "kill" the captain if he left them and all that tough talk. 
Really tough people don't need to talk about it, what they do is what 
gets done, not talked about. 

On the other hand, there is too much good info by too many very good 
divers to ignore this list and many of its participants. You just have to 
ignore the BS, which is easy.

Well-Known Stroke,
JoeL

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