DukeAMO
Contributor
As someone who's likely to dive Lake Rawlings in the near future, I really hope that some people with direct knowledge of what happened will tell us what they know, so we can prevent this in the future.
This does seem to be, at least in part, a failure of the buddy system and direct supervision. I can see how it could happen. Staying together in low visibility is difficult and takes practice, and divers who are fresh out of a pool can't possibly have that practice. Most of our training dives in Fantasy Lake were in low visibility (10-25 feet), and sometimes very low visibility for short stretches (the worst being the nav run on the night dive -- for a short while it was difficult to see your own compass). I lost sight of my buddy more than once, sometimes when swimming in a pack from one area of the lake to another, sometimes just in the hoops course. It's especially difficult when you're all wearing black gear, making it hard to tell who is who. Usually we'd find each other again quickly. Once, the entire class had to surface together because one of the divers (a buddy with DH and I) went to the surface without anyone else seeing her go up. We got chewed out for not noticing that, and deservedly so. Our assistant instructor had to really be a sheepdog (and not always a nice one) to keep everyone together in a small area. Small enough that we kicked each other many times. We had a ratio between 2:1 and 3:1 students to experienced divers (DMs, DMCs, etc.), and they were really working to keep people together.
I do have one idea - what if students in low vis wore colored tank marker lights so you could tell who was who? You could even do it by buddy team - blue team, red team, green team? I think that would make life easier. (Edited to add - not the annoying blinky kind. The kind we have were about $12, don't blink, and come in a few colors.)
This does seem to be, at least in part, a failure of the buddy system and direct supervision. I can see how it could happen. Staying together in low visibility is difficult and takes practice, and divers who are fresh out of a pool can't possibly have that practice. Most of our training dives in Fantasy Lake were in low visibility (10-25 feet), and sometimes very low visibility for short stretches (the worst being the nav run on the night dive -- for a short while it was difficult to see your own compass). I lost sight of my buddy more than once, sometimes when swimming in a pack from one area of the lake to another, sometimes just in the hoops course. It's especially difficult when you're all wearing black gear, making it hard to tell who is who. Usually we'd find each other again quickly. Once, the entire class had to surface together because one of the divers (a buddy with DH and I) went to the surface without anyone else seeing her go up. We got chewed out for not noticing that, and deservedly so. Our assistant instructor had to really be a sheepdog (and not always a nice one) to keep everyone together in a small area. Small enough that we kicked each other many times. We had a ratio between 2:1 and 3:1 students to experienced divers (DMs, DMCs, etc.), and they were really working to keep people together.
I do have one idea - what if students in low vis wore colored tank marker lights so you could tell who was who? You could even do it by buddy team - blue team, red team, green team? I think that would make life easier. (Edited to add - not the annoying blinky kind. The kind we have were about $12, don't blink, and come in a few colors.)
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