Hi Tom - Thank you for your well thought out, measured  and excellent response.
I hope that IANTD will be leading the way  against any kind of Deep Air  
training and diving  ! 


Thank You


Eric


On Wed, 18 Aug 1999 11:24:26 -0400, Tom Mount wrote:

>Mark
>
>Having had the description of your dive read to me over the phone I would
>like to offer the following comments:
>
>1. First the dive sounded like the biggest screw up I have ever seen
>published. You were obviously out of it, lets see blind, overinflation of BC
>to the point of rupturing the bladder, estimates of 130 meter/min ascent
>rate due to loss of buoyancy control. etc etc.
>
>2. It sounds like you are damn lucky to be alive and that if anything this
>should have taught you the reason to avoid ultra deep air divers rather than
>have a desire to teach it to 70 meters.
>
>3. That your mental frame of mind as to the approach to do deep dives is
>outdated by 30 years or so and numerous deaths are proof of this outdated
>mind set
>
>4. You must be unaware that IANTD only offers air diving courses to a max
>depth of 51 meters and that a sister program to this course is Normoxic
>Trimix
>which is essentially the same program except all divers deeper than 40
>meters are made on trimix and it will allow dives to 60 m. With your goal to
>teach deep air to 70 + meters you certainly do not need an affiliation with
>IANTD where this practice is expressively FORBIDDEN
>
>5. After completing the dive you did and still wish to promote this type of
>activity as such you would represent everything IANTD is trying to
>discourage and avoid, thus you crossing over to IANTD is a little absurd.
>
>6.  While if you had learned from this experience and god knows you had some
>good clues dropped to you on the dangers of this type of activity
>A. Blind at 100 m (but you continued the dive to 158m) time for a sanity
>check,
>B. explosive ascent due to loss of control for whatever reason
>C. The need to do a omitted deco procedure because you could not recover
>your buoyancy on the dive and various other comments you made concerning the
>dive.
>
>As stated if you had learned instead of being intrigued by that dive, you
>may have had good rational to share with divers about avoiding ultra deep
>air diving but it seems your primary goal is to teach air diving to depths
>that exceed accepted oxygen and nitrogen limits, Sorry that is something
>that will not be done under the IANTD umbrella. I recommend you stick with
>your present training agencies maybe they will allow this but we will not.
>
>7. While I agree with your statement on the rights of an individual to take
>risk on a personal level I cannot share your enthusiasm about wanting to
>encourage others to do this type (ultra deep air)activity. Plus I find it
>difficult to see your logic in wishing to do a 158 m air dive in the first
>place when there are other ways to have adventure and take risk that are not
>proven both in theory and in practice physiologically insane endeavors.
>
>8.All you proved is for some reason on this one day, you as one person,
>survived a dive to 158 m. I hope you at least picked up enough warnings from
>the events that happened to you to avoid this kind of a dive in the future.
>
>9. Deep diving even on propre mixes has its share of danger why try to
>exceed well documented physiological risk limits.
>
>10. In closing while my philosophy agrees with a statement by Dr Gil Milner
>along time ago.
>
> You Have The Obligation to Inform One Honestly of the Risk, And As a Person
>You Are Committed to Educate Yourself to the Total Risk In Any Activity! 
> Once Informed & Totally Aware of the Risk, Every Fool Has the Right to Kill
>or Injure Themselves as They See Fit! 
>
>So if you really understand and accept the risk then you have the right to
>kill yourself, but Mark we do not want you to be responsible for training
>IANTD divers if you feel ultra deep air diving is something you want to
>promote and teach them. So as long as your stated goal is to teach air to
>great depths,
>then we really would prefer that you were not an IANTD instructor
>
>So I do not know at what part of your instructor crossover you are at or who
>with but I will have to prevent its completion at this time maybe when and
>if you "grow up we can reconsider this action".
>
>Respectfully yours,
>Tom Mount
>CEO IANTD World HQ
>http://www.iantd.com
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: bdi@wh*.ne* <bdi@wh*.ne*>
>To: Tom Mount <TOM.MOUNT@wo*.at*.ne*>
>Cc: techdiver@aquanaut.com <techdiver@aquanaut.com>; Christian Gerzner
><christiang@pi*.co*.au*>; Mark the Nark Andrews
><extreme@de*.fr*.co*.uk*>
>Date: Tuesday, August 17, 1999 11:46 PM
>Subject: Re: Darwin Award winner -'Mark the Nark'Andrews
>
>
>
>
>--
>Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'.
>Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
>



--
Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'.
Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.

Navigate by Author: [Previous] [Next] [Author Search Index]
Navigate by Subject: [Previous] [Next] [Subject Search Index]

[Send Reply] [Send Message with New Topic]

[Search Selection] [Mailing List Home] [Home]