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In response to my posting, David Story writes:
> > a tight schedule. Lucky or not, I think this is quite an impressive profile
> > for a novice to complete safely.^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> I'm sorry, but I really have to flame this.
By all means.
> With what are you impressed? That they did a 160' bounce dive for no
> apparent result, with no goal, with no redundancy, as a threesome with
> very little experience?
>
> All three people on this dive are idiots, by my reckoning.
> Inexperienced idiots, but idiots nonetheless.
>
> The leader of this dive is both an idiot and irresponsible,
> potentially lifethreateningly irresponsible.
I have no admiration for what they did and I agree entirely with you. I find
it absolutely incredible that any diver would attempt this dive let alone
a novice with two untrained friends. I also find it hard to believe that there
is no exageration in the story. As you pointed out, why do it at all.
However, that said, IMO it is still a testiment to the control and resolve of
the people involved that there was no incident. Perhaps they were completely
unaware of the extent/danger of this undertaking. In which case the boy is an
arse and his friends are not much better.
There will always be people who push the limits. Remeber that there were no
cave/technical diving qualifications when all the big names in the sport
started doing it. Who says they were qualified? We assume they were because
they have survived. As you may have noticed the German diver Jochan Hasenmeyer
is one of my "heroes". As far as I know he never did a certification in his
life. He dived solo to record breaking depths on air and mixed gas with just
his wife at the surface waiting for him. He designed, built and dived his own
rebreather before the current US/UK technical diving community got into it.
Was he qualified? He is now paralysed from the waist down - not because of
his inexperience but because of a screw up in a recompression chamber.
On a record breaking cave dive Sheck Exley and buddy (I can't remember who)
had an emergency and turned back. On two occasions they ran out of air before
reaching the staging bottles and also had to surface to shout for more air
while decompressing. They only turned back because of the emergency. Had the
emergency occured at their planned penetration limit they would both be dead.
So where was the rule of thirds from these so called experienced divers? If
they can seriously misjudge things, think how easy it is for a novice.
> If one assumes the details of this dive are accurate, then it is clear
> to me that this dive should not be admired, oohed over, or given any
> positive light whatsoever. The divers who followed should be
> carefully educated on the very large number of potential problems they
> narrowly avoided. The diver who led should be taken out back and flogged.
Absolutely. I think this highlights one of the things missing from the basic
OW certifications, and I have already mentioned this on rec.scuba recently.
Each agency informs the trainee of the limits to be obeyed but they only give
very high level information on why the limits have to be observed. It is almost
like saying don't do it because I say so. The novice has no idea how much he
doesn't know or the implications of attempting more advanced diving.
You tell a child not to play near railway lines because a train could hit
him and he could die. The child understands this but thinks it should be okay
because he will watch for trains and if he hears one he will step back. However,
he has no idea of the air vortexes that get produced round such a large object
moving at high speed. He doesn't understand about getting sucked under the
wheels
or being knocked off balance by the shock wave at the head of the train. It
has never occured to him that a safety line with someone at the other end may
help etc, etc.
I believe the same is true of scuba for some novices, and to some extent this
is borne out by a recent question on rec.scuba when a novice wrote:
"I am new to scuba, and I took the PADI course. I can't judge the
others but one would assume that they pretty much teach the same
thing. How many different things can you tell someone about
equipment, water pressure and how to dive."
Maybe I am misinterpreting this, but I read this as an indication that he
doesn't
have the slightest idea how much information is out there. You need to be aware
that the information is out there and that there is more to learn before you can
go look for it.
Alan
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