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Each of us who have had the benefit of learning DIR diving, can occasionally find themselves facing uncomfortable conflict with Non-DIR friends. Its no fun, but worlds better than a body recovery. Last week my girlfriend Sandra and several of her long term dive buddies, wanted to go do the HydroAtlantic, one of South Florida's most spectacular looking natural wreck dives, found at 175 feet deep. The group dives every week, and has been diving for between 12 and 20 years--- they are "good" recreational divers, your typical "old timer" types. Every two years or so they want to do the Hydro. And they want to do it on deep air, as they have always done it. Suddenly they think they can use a pony bottle, as if this piece of gear will make them safe at 175, even though they never/infrequently use them on their "normal" dives. Because they dive together on 60 foot dives every week, they think they are real "buddy teams"....even though their typical procedure is spreading out to the far ranges of vis on the bottom, but staying close enough to the one with the float so that they can come back up near it at dive's end, and not be bitched out by the boat captain for coming up far away from the flag. I had to tell Sandra I did not want her to do this dive....even though she has done it 3 times before in the last 5 years. I would not be there with her ( I had to work this day), so there would be no one with her she could "count on" at 175 deep. I did NOT want her to do deep air, or rely on others who would be using deep air --- as her buddies---on deep air, they are far from redundant backup for anything but a clusterfuck. None of them are using the right equipment---typical would be a scuba pro BC with normal recreational short hoses, with alt reg tucked away or covered by a "cute" yellow mouthpiece cover --- certainly one of recreational diving's stupidest accepted practices. Most would use a 100 cu ft tank, and add a 20 cu ft pony as their "backup". I had to be the bad guy, she had to tell her friends Dan was freaked out about her diving, so she would "pacify" me by not diving. I can't actually "tell" Sandra not to dive---orders tend to backfire with her :-) Luckily, she remembered enough about the Jane Orenstein tragedy to understand my concern, and was willing to tell her friends she would NOT do the dive with them...and of course, now her friends blame me for ruining their dive outing, as the trip broke down with the "issue" that Sandra cancelled her plans with. Prior to the Jane Orenstein incident, I would have said, "I hope you guys have a cool dive". I would have felt happy for them about the dive experience I would expect on that dive myself. Now I can't think about the experiences without first thinking about the safety issues of the dive. I still am totally pissed that IANTD has not created standards that would spell out the "correct dive procedure" for a dive like the hydro---what gear, exactly, is mandatory; what type of buddy team work is mandatory as a prerequisite, and how much practice at it; what skills need to be reflexive before this type of dive is permitted. Guidelines like this should be within IANTD standards, and they can apply to all divers, not just those certified by IANTD. Tom Mount needs to be pro-active here, and save lives...because "he can". These very basic guidelines could be applied by boat captains to refuse an improperly equipped diver. While the skill performance will be beyond their scope, the boat captain can see a diver with a stuffed hose and recreational configuration, and be able to make the "standards" based judgement that this person should not do the deep dive. Just as a Captain like Zero would refuse a recreational diver who showed up on an 80 foot dive with a WWII military Oxygen rebreather, obvious gear configuration choices need to be spelled out as rejected by Tom Mount/IANTD, and then used by the boats. IANTD is the leader in technical diving. There is no close number two in creating a pervasively applicable set of standards for deep diving. GUE and DIR are superior in their approach, but the dive "masses" will not hear their ideas, or get exposure to them. IANTD is the organization that CAN pull this off, and they need to. I posted this rambling account because I see this as a very real threat to many on this list. Many of us know divers who may tell us about an upcoming dive they will do, one which we know is ABSOLUTELY UNSAFE for them. If we care about them, we CAN NOT DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN, SAY NO. For all those we don't know, but we would not like to see dead, we need IANTD to do something, NOW. Come on Tom, Make us Proud of you :-) Regards, Dan Volker -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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