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In a message dated 1/1/99 11:30:49 AM Eastern Standard Time, cobber@ci*.co* writes: << it is truly rare when a diver spends the time to describe a clusterfuck situation, esp. if there were no witnesses. >> And here is the true advantage to being a pizza stained north east wreck diver....the boats on which I travel and have traveled all treat their diving as an evolving process. None are so hugely caught up in their egos and their places in the dive world that they cannot admit to mistakes.....Rather the trips to and from the site are often taken up with the 'oh-shits' and how now in the perfect light of surface visibility the event or events could have been improved upon.....these stories arent machismo, big man doing super cool Bruce Willis imitation, but rather, oh man, I fucked up..... In fact, early on I realized that hanging out around these discussions was the best learning tool I could access, next to continually going diving.....and that I could also enter into this pool and each and every one of my 'episodes' could also be dissected up on deck.....not with rancor or "you dunderhead" (altho in my case that tends to apply, what could I have beeen thinking of??? <g>)....but with a healthy awareness that this too could happen to you or that your time will come for some sort of meeting with Murphy and his downhill train. Even if it will not be your particular circumstance, often the sets of skills used as coping mechanisms can be applied. Those stories get stored somewhere in the brainpan and they can instantly replay when needed. Poor old Wrolf's episode this spring is a good example. I've never had a run away inflator incident and only fairly briefly thought about it. Out came many stories of run amuck suits and inflators and the different sets of circumstances which caused the blow-ups and then the differing responses and outcomes....all useful stuff.... Suicide clips for example. We used to all use them. Years ago now, a diver was deep inside the Doria when one of the clips wrapped round a cable.... in that total darkness the diver had to take off his rig, cut himself clear and re-don...and this was before mix....that story went round immediately and we all fairly quickly remedied our set-ups....Every time a diver would show up on that boat with those clips, that story would be trotted out. This fall a diver had a series of judgement errors almost catch up to her and in the round robin discussion group one diver said that he would absolutely never do this or that on this or that particular setup....but then was backed up in the reminder that everyone used to do those things off of those set ups....it was just over the evolutionary process of going diving, seeing and making mistakes that the diver came to those Mount Olympian judgements... And I can hear the KP'ers now, yes, I do represent the single most insidious force in diving today, personal choice....the personal choice to go diving as well and as often as I can amidst a group of like minded individuals..... -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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