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Will- Janet speaks the truth. If you go out on a regular summer weekend trip on one of the local dive boats around here, the resulting circus is painful to watch. You get 2 boats on a wreck, the pandemonium is truly hilarious. The bottom of the downline quickly disappears in a cloud of silt kicked up by terrified divers with a death grips on the line. The spiderweb of wreckreel lines is like tanglefoot at the perimeter a vietnam-era firebase. Then the struggle at the hang bar by panicking divers is like a keystone cops movie. Fins flailing, masks getting kicked off, spearguns pointing everywhere, buoyant divers dragging the whole hangbar to the surface, it's a comic tragedy. You learn quickly to avoid the weekends like the plague. To me these scenes illustrate the poor state of dive training today. Jim On 12/15/97 9:24 PM William M. Smithers wrote: >Bill (and Janet), > >Yes, this is certainly true. The Wahoo takes all comers (more-or-less) >unlike other dive boats up here that are very particular >about who they let on board. For this reason, I full-well >expect a bunch of what you and George would call "stroke-deaths", >and I have no problem with that (natural selection, as far as >I'm concerned). > >Were it just that, I never would have made the post I did. The >truth is that several years back, there was at least one near-death >incident that was clearly due to procedural oversight by the >crew, not by any real fault of the diver, and I was concerned to >hear radio calls this summer that on the surface would indicate >this as a continuing pattern. > >I am very happy to hear that Janet and the Wahoo crew have >implemented proper procedures to ensure that when accidents >occur (as they inevitably will), it's not due to lack of >crew attention - that's about all anyone can ask. > >I am not permenantly trashing the Wahoo: there were events >that deserved derision, and I am just as happy to see >that hard-won experience has been intelligently applied, which >is more than we can say for many others in this industry, who >rack up piles of bodies while proclaiming their perfection. > >BTW, you will notice that the thrust of the original post >was to ask what corrective measures have been applied, and >I thank Janet for her clear, non-dodgy, unequivocal reply. > >Regards, > >-Will ------------------------------------------------------------------- Learn About Trimix at http://www.cisatlantic.com/trimix/trimix.html -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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