It also seems at least reasonable that if the key was in fact given to him and that if he was not certified to have it, that the owner now recognizes the liability of giving it to him and would be vehemently denying having done so.
I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the internet, but I do know the following for sure...
Every time ANY diver goes into the water, he or she is the person responsible for his or her actions.
I am not just talking about going into a cave, I am talking about jumping off of a dive boat in the Caribbean, walking into the sea from a sandy beach, giant striding off a dock into a quarry, or walking down the steps into a spring like what Ben did.
Each diver is responsible for his own dive, each and every time he gets into the water. That is a fundamental rule of diving that a lot of non-divers are just not aware of.
We each decide what our dive plans are going to be, we each decide if our dive is appropriate for our certification levels. We each decide if the water conditions are within our limits, if we enough air to dive our plan... etc...
However Ben got past that gate, the simple fact of the matter is he CHOSE to get past that gate. Nobody forced him to do it. There was not a gun to his head. It was a choice, just like when I dove Vortex a couple weeks ago I chose not to leave the light zone and go beyond my level of training by doing so...
Let me tell you a quick story, since you haven't been there. In Vortex, the front of the cavern leads down to the Reaper (which you saw pictured earlier in this thread). That reaper is positioned next to a wide tunnel that is filled with some really cool wildlife (eels, fresh water critters of several descriptions, etc) and is EXTREMELY inviting to go down. I admit it, I was tempted to go down the tunnel, and around the corner to see the next room. But... that would take me out of the light zone, and I am only Cavern certified. It was not part of my dive plan, so I dove the plan we had made and I became determined to GET THE TRAINING that will allow me to take it to the next level.
That's how it is done.
That doesn't make me or anybody else a better person than Ben, but it does mean that I have a LOT better chance of coming up our of that cave than somebody whose dive plan is to go far, far beyond his level of training and certification.
Whether the gate was open or not, the simple fact is he should have not been AT the gate in the first place, let alone through it. He chose to go through the gate, he planned to go through it and he did. Was that a wise plan? No. But he went in there, knowing that is what he was going to do.
I am sorry for what happened to Ben, and I am somewhat in awe of the talents and skills of the community of people who are trying to recover his body... but my feelings or anybody else's feelings doesn't change this simple fact:
Irregardless of the quality of the person out of the water, he CHOSE to broke several of the cardinal rules of diving in a cave, he CHOSE to go a place he wasn't trained or equipped for, he CHOSE to go past the gate (however it happened) that he had no business going through, and he unfortunately didn't make it back out of Vortex cave.
We all make our choices when we dive, every one of us. These threads here are Scubaboard are here not because divers are a bunch of ghouls, quite the contrary. We, to a person, HATE to see people die while diving. We do this so that we can understand what happened, and to help ourselves and everybody who reads this make better choices in our own diving in the future.
