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All,
Every time I turn around there is another death up here in the technical
community. George likes to blame most of it on deep air and maybe he is
right, but I think it goes a little deeper.
When the tech agencies were first getting going everyone hopped the
quality of training would remain high and we could avoid the kind of
reputation the recreational world suffers from. It appears that just this
year we may well have approached their rate of casualties.
What the hell is going on here ? Business ! You can not mix business
with training for this kind of endeavor without a strong moral background
influence - such training as true technical diving requires a mentor /
student relationship. People are being trained to use the hardware of life
support systems by teaching them how to follow a set of procedures and they
are released into the wild without a true understanding and respect for the
actual complexity and scope of what is really required to survive this stuff
outside the training grounds.
The recreational industry can get away with teaching only methodology
because practiced techniques will usually get you out of situations
encountered within recreational limits - minimum brainers, if you will.
Also most of these people are actually "taken diving" by people who have
already done the hard part - site evaluation and dive planning so that there
is often little thinking required.
It seems that this same philosophy is being injected into the technical
world - teaching them to use the equipment to get themselves into situations
they are not actually qualified to get themselves out of alive because
technique and methodology is not enough.
These divers are taught how to plan gas consumption, deco stops, and
partial pressure limits but are not taught how to prepare applicable
contingency plans or to make a realistic evaluation of the environment,
conditions, and risk. People with no talent for the organizational,
academic, and expeditionary aspects of every single technical exposure are
brought into the fold to try their hand at the frontier without a clue about
what they are actually getting into or what their actual status is when
groping around at 250 feet and then being trapped under a virtual or actual
overhead.
Talent is the key word here ! I could never paint like Rembrandt (sp)
not because I will not work at it but because I just don't have the right
stuff. The same thing applies to technical diving - you either got it or
you ain't. Even if you do have a talent for such things it is a tremendous
amount of work just learn enough to be able to figure out what it is you need
to know to handle technical exposures on your own recognizance in reasonable
safety. You can not afford ignorance here and no amount of technique or
circus tricks ( the kind of thing that works for recreational diving) will
substitute for a deep understanding or at least a suspicion of what is
required to safely plan and execute such exposures for long.
Eventually you will be put to the test and if you have studied the wrong
things or if you can not manage the right things you will fail and there is
no make up test. The instructor fails his student when he does not insure
that he has studied and mastered the right things. Yes, there is an element
of Zen to this stuff - recreational diving is a sport, true technical diving
is a discipline.
Three things need to be done about technical training in general. One is
that candidates need to be screened and those without the necessary diving
experience and the ability or talent to manage a small expedition safely
should be discouraged from venturing from the training grounds till they can.
Two is that training needs to focus strongly on a broad range of aspects of
primary and contingency planning rather than just technique. Three is that
some basics of pertinent peripheral disciplines need to be taught so divers
can make informed decisions about equipment suitability, preparation, and
maintenance. Examples might include some basics about the nature of metals
commonly encountered and some very basic engineering principles applicable to
the type of equipment we deal with / more on the nature of and dealing with
currents in open ocean environments / a little more depth on the physiology
of decompression - even if much of this is only theoretical it introduces the
issues at hand and arms the student to some extent against BS / crisis
management as complicated by time limitations and entrapment / contingency
planning beyond a bailout schedule / . . . .
Yes! All this would be time consuming but the student needs to learn it
anyway and is much better off if guided through it than picking it up in the
field from charlatans and gypsies - an education tainted by significant
omissions and handed down misconceptions.
You can not just "train" people like circus animals to do this stuff the
way the recreational agencies do. A chimpanzee can follow the procedures
and escape most problems within recreational limits - that is why any idiot
off the street can scuba dive and put that stupid license plate on the front
of his car. Some people actually think of technical diving as just an
extension of recreational diving - Joel Dovenbarger is one of them.
-----------------------------------------
Copied from AOL Scuba Forum :
Subj: Re:Dive Fatalities
Date: 97-08-27 21:20:01 EDT
From: JDovenbarg
.. . . . . . . . . . .
>I have to admit that in the beginning I wanted to list the tech folks
>separately from other recreationals, but was over ruled by everyone in the
>know universe at that time. In hind sight they were right, tech diving is
>just another level of recreational diving.
---------------------------------------
Perhaps Joel is motivated by the politics of insurance in this case but
this idea is a dangerous one that has obviously spread and even if such
remarks are intended only to be meaningful with respect to insurance matters
they are not likely to be interpreted by the diving public as such if not
qualified when made.
Because of the reliability of modern equipment and the lack of a real need
to plan dives from start to finish independently divers can work their way
through recreational training and lots of diving then enter the technical
arena having never had to manage a real emergency, never had to evaluate all
the aspects of a dive on their own, and never had to seriously take or share
responsibility for the safety of another being. Many have never even seen
the scales left behind by the dragon yet they are given the means to play
about the gates of hell - unarmed and unsuspecting.
Is the day of the $99 trimix course coming? For God's sake get the
destructive elements of commerce, economics, and competition that has ruined
the credibility of recreational credentials out of the technical training
arena. There is no place for "modular" step by step programs on video here.
If a student's or instructor's lack of time to establish and maintain a
mentor relationship is accommodated in the case of a candidate who needs the
exposure and molding then how is the student going to ultimately approach the
diving itself once he is on his own ?
If an instructor is concerned with losing a student by telling him how
easy it is to get killed doing this, by concentrating heavily on accident
analysis as a teaching tool, or by making it too hard in general then he has
no business trying to prepare humans to survive entrapment in an alien
environment in what amounts to a fallible space suit. If it is too much for
the student then he should stay in the shallows.
You can teach a man to drive a ship but if he is ever going to leave port
with reasonable expectations of returning he needs to be a seaman.
I feel much better now !
Chuck
--
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