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joe c wrote: ~ >Good post, Bill. Your points are well made. > >One of the most disturbing things I have consistently observed in our >sport is a general reluctance to tell someone when they are doing >something wrong, dangerous or whatever. Dangerous and sometimes >potentially deadly practices are muttered about but not addressed at the >time of occurrence. Typically, the dilemma is how to handle it without >offending anyone. > >Keeping quiet to be polite is far more offensive than verbalizing the >truth at the moment. To quote someones previous post "there's nothing >polite about death". I don't often post here, since I am just getting interested in Techdiving, but I just couldn't shut up on this one. I've taken 4 classes in local shops around where I live and from individual instructors, and I can tell you that the picture out there is not pretty, especially for the initial OW classes. From what I gather there is a huge amount of pressure out there to get people certified, be they ready or not. This is of course criminal. I find that this goes on through all the levels of instruction that I've taken. The pressure is also on the students. If a student is uncomfortable doing a dive, and s/he needs to do this dive in order to get certified, chances are they are going to do it. This is really bad. Of course all this is prompted by the fact that the dive stores want to make money, and once they certify someone, they are likely to sell that person gear, more instruction, boat dives etc. In closing I'd like to say that from what I've heard about the WPB incident it seems clear to me that there was a problem with the students weights, and it sounds like this was apparent on the previous dive. No doubt, the second dive was made because everyone felt that it's a dive needed for certificaton so "Let's just do it anyway so it's done." I am specualting of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was it. This is exactly the kind of attitude that really bothers me in all instructional levels in this sport. Usually nothing happens, and people have badly configured gear and dive anyway, because it's an instructional dive and you need to get it done. Who is going to abort the dive because the suit they rented constricts their breathing and they realize it on the dive boat? Who is going to abort the dive because they don't have quite enough weight, and they realize it on the boat after the first dive? Who is going to abort the dive because their inflator valve on the BC sticks a little bit? Etc. etc. etc. This is not a game, it's life support. If you can't afford to abort a dive, for whatever reason, then you can't afford to dive. Cheers, Paul Braunbehrens mailto:Bakalite@ba*.co* http://www.daw-mac.com Mailing list for digital audio on the mac -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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