beanojones
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many thousands of OW divers go into overhead environments every year. It is a rare first dive in Cozumel that does not include swim throughs. Want to dive in South Florida? Just about every first dive of a boat trip goes to a wreck, and everyone penetrates. What percentage of them have taken a cavern diving course? I am sure it rounds off to zero. Cavern diving is primarily a skills course. This is not a skills course. In the last section, it teaches what courses are needed to enter more complex overheads. One of the recommended courses would be cavern.
As is noted above, many thousands of divers enter overheads without any training now. They have no guidance to help them make the decision on whether it is safe to do it. The entire purpose of the class is to give them that guidance, which they are not getting anywhere else
The way to get people to stop violate basic rules of their training ("Don't dive into overhead envirnments, and always have direct access to the surface") is not to legitimize the violation of the rules of their training by saying "just kidding, we did not really mean no overhead environment, nor did we mean you must always dive so you have direct access to the surface"
Rather it is to change the "You cannot do this EVER" with "You need this much training, experience, and equipment preparation before you can do it". PADI made the foolish decision to fake it with the Cavern and Wreck specialty course because they used to not have a tech side so they had to get the money somehow, so they violated their own standards in designing the Wreck and Cavern course. They no longer have to do that.
"No overhead environments without appropriate training, equipment and experience" is a bright line rule that the cave community long ago recognized. Yes this is also in their own interests as cave training organizations. The question is this: has it somehow worked against safety and diver's enjoyment that they have maintained that bright line distinction?
My brightline answer is this: no, not in the slightest: I benefit daily from gear and methodologies developed in the cave community. The industry benefits as a whole through a whole range of things. I would say anyone who has taken a cave course has said they are far better divers even if they never plan on going in a cave ever again. As much as I hate BP/W (as in a metal plate and wing) and would never again wear one, I know they work better than jackets for a lot of people, and the backplates and long hose choices would not be there in the general marketplace if not for the cave training organization's work on equpiment choices.
Has PADI's solution to fudge their way around following their own standards benefitted anyone in any way other than financially, with the instructors teaching it and PADI processing PICs and selling 'educational' materials? Does anyone think enabling non-redundant, underskilled, and undertrained divers into overhead environments (wrecks/caves/deco) is benefitting anything other that divers fleeting pleasure?
Yes I realize divers wil swim through wrecks all the time. Kids play in streets all the time too. People drive drunk all the time. And drivers text while driving. Almost all of the time nothing bad results from these things. (or people whould have stopped doing these things on their own, a long time ago, whether we had rules about these things or not.)
Is any of these things safe? Is the fact that there is hardly ever a bad outcome to these actions even slightly on point as to whether they are safe?
Even though texting while driving has recently surpassed DWI/DUI as the number one cause of driving fatalities, most people who text while driving will never have a wreck, without killing themselves or some innocent third party, because most of the time bad things don't happen, in general. Most drunk drivers make it home without killing themselves or some innocent third party. Most kids playing in the road survive just fine(Game on!). Most divers go into overheads environment make it out just fine.
That does not mean the rule(s) does not make sense. It just means we as human beings are remarkably bad, unspeakably incoherently bad, at reasoning out why we have rules in the first place. They are not in place to protect from inevitable results of our actions. Not even slightly.
See several posts in this very thread that make that reasoning flaw.
1. I shot a video of divers inside a wreck/ I went in a wreck/People go in wrecks all the time.
2. no one died in the cases I am referring to
so
3. it is safe, and there is no reason to restrict access to wreck or caves or deco diving
Life itself does just fine at teaching us direct cause and effect lessons. Touch red hot stove, and you will get burned. Not possibly, but necessarily. It's cause and effect. I have never heard of any place in the world passing a law against putting one's hands on a red hot stove.
Cause and effect is not the reason for rules. The rules are in place to prevent high societal/personal cost versus low personal benefit mistakes from happening, especially to people who have incomplete ability to make intelligent choices about repercussions/risks concerning their actions. Like teenage drivers, or non-tech trained divers who go into overhead environments. Most kids don't die despite their utter foolishness.
So should we do away with the rules that not every kid follows, or that all rules if breaking them does not necessarily result in bad outcomes?
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