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To the list, I have been involved with this list and others for a while and have learned a great deal of valuable information. I have seen postings that I thought were "right on!!" and others that I couldn't believe anyone could be so stupid as to write them. I believe some of the personalities are the kind of people I would like very much to dive with and call "friend" and others I would call "sick" (to put it mildly) and would quickly use my cave diver's prerogative "to call a dive at any time for any reason" before entering any overhead environment with them as a member of the team. I believe in the basic concepts of DIR (not necessarily all of the details yet but I'm working on it) and am slowly changing a number of the ways I dive in accordance with this. I have tried to bring some information and interesting discussions to this list. Recently, I have started to see an opinion coming out on the lists that bothers me a great deal. It deals with the use of helium in breathing mixes by divers untrained and uncertified in its use. Basically it scares the hell out of me so I thought I ought to bring it out in the open. I am afraid that we may be heading for some serious trouble if we don't take a stand against this idea. And I guess I'm looking for some support in my concerns. Now first, for those of you that don't know me, I need to indicate that while I am certainly not a famous cave explorer or record setting deep diver, I don't believe that I'm a particularly wimp diver either. I am older and so perhaps a little more conservative (I will be 60 this year), will never make 3% body fat (or even 5 or 6% for that matter) and I do have an 80 mm stainless steel screw holding one ankle together. But on the other hand this winter I made my 2,000th dive, around half of which have been either in an overhead environment or deeper than 200 feet, and my deeper dives this year were below 400 feet. I am an active PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer, NAUI Instructor Trainer, SSI Divecon Instructor, IANTD Advanced Nitrox Instructor and Trimix Blender Instructor, ANDI Technical Safe Air 3 Instructor, TDI Advanced Trimix, Full Cave and Rebreather Instructor, and a DAN Oxygen Provider and REMO Instructor. I teach at Scuba Sciences in Phoenix in the summer and the Akumal Dive shop in the Yucatan during the winter and it is not unusual for me to make half mile swimming cave penetrations (around 90 minute dives without stage tanks) and have almost half of my air remaining on exit, four or five days a week. I am also involved in the exploration of our "new little cave" in Belize in which we have laid around 3,700 feet of line last winter and hope to continue more next fall. I may be older and not too strong, but at my last treadmill test I was told I was in the top 1% of men in my age group. I say all this simply to demonstrate that I believe I am not a "newbie" to technical diving and not afraid of "pushing my own limits" so to speak. Recently I posted something on this list questioning whether it was wise for someone with no formal training to be mixing and diving trimix. And the answers it drew really surprised me. I figured it to be a no brainer; if no training then don't do it. One of the five basic rules of accident analysis for cave diving deals with diving beyond my level of training. And my experience with deep diving leads me to believe that clearly here too, one of the leading causes (to me it seems to be THE leading cause) of death is "cockpit error", "stupidity" or "overlooking something". To me these are all different ways of expressing "lack of training". Now I understand that training does not necessarily require attendance in a class with a certified instructor and an official certification card. But for most people I really believe that that's sure as hell the way to go. Of course there are highly experienced and extremely knowledgeable people who can mentor a novice and teach him or her all that is needed. But unless there is some kind of special relationship between them, this situation is not too common. And when is the training over? And how are we sure that "all" of the required information has been covered? These are subjects which have been carefully considered in a well defined course. It's bad enough when some of the members of this list (based on their association with members of the WKPP team) argue that they don't need formal training to use Helium, but I'm afraid that it's far worse when divers with almost no access to other trained technical divers, start to do it. For example, in a thread I've been following on rec.diver, the following quotes typify what has been going on; 1) "Instrokters like you are the problem. Trimix is no different than air. Forget what ever the stroke instructor told you about He and do some research." 2) [From a diver with no trimix certification (S.A.B.)] "I would submit that diving air is a higher risk than mix." 3) [When arguing against the need for a Helium use certification (S.A.B.)] "I'm surprised you haven't launched into thread on the dangers of mixing/blending and the horror of O2 handling." 4) [When arguing against the need for a Helium use certification (S.A.B.)] "At this point I think a thread on the home servicing and testing of Regulators is in order. Or is that too the sacred province of ...." 5) "Certification is only a means for those who don't want to spend the time to learn something properly to believe they will be safe while diving." And another thing which I would think is really absolutely ridiculous if it weren't so sad, is that some of these people are actually using DIR as an excuse. For example the statement "The advances in procedures and equipment utilization developed by the proponents of DIR have made the exploration of caves and open ocean much easier and safer." This statement was made in the context of explaining why a trimix certification was not needed. There are many more examples of this mentality but unfortunately, I do not have them immediately available. To me this is very similar to what was going on in the early days of nitrox. Most of the diving community was saying "too dangerous", the people involved were saying "it's safe and terrific with the proper training" and the uninformed risk takers were saying "I don't need no stinkin' training". And these latter people were using the same excuses as are being bandied around now. "Too expensive", "instructors only want the money", "my friend uses it and hasn't had a problem", "You're just trying to scare us", "you want to make money cleaning tanks", "I don't need anyone else to tell me how to dive", "there are too many BS courses", etc. I would like to get some opinions from the folks on this list as to whether I am overreacting or is there a potential problem brewing? I have no axe to grind other than trying in my own way, to make diving in general and technical diving in particular, a little safer. Depending on the information I receive, I'll either stay up on my horse or STFD & STFU. Thanks for your time. Take care and safe diving, Scott -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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