brnt999
Contributor
I've only had one bad dive op in my entire life. The boat left while I was on a drift dive, to pickup some students (he was double dipping). If the boat got to the dive site and was there to pick me up, they've done their job.
Anything beyond that is my fault.
The dives in Belize and Cozumel are only dangerous because the major agencies have portrayed SCUBA as a safe tourist activity, no more dangerous than the roller coaster at Disney World. If SCUBA classes actually taught what they need to, including analyzing risk and objectively considering diver qualifications and dive difficulty, dive boats would be packed full of divers who demand that they be taken to dive sites with names like "Fun Happy Reef", not to a hole in the middle of the ocean, with no reachable bottom or a dark tube with an exit deeper than the diver has ever been.
The Blue Hole and Devils Throat and pretty much anyplace else you can think of are perfectly safe dives for divers that are qualified to do them.
The danger in SCUBA comes from divers who believe the advertising and the implied level of safety, built up over the years by marketing and instructors who are afraid to scare anybody, not because it's Belize or Cozumel or wherever.
Better education would mean that when the DM tells Mr. 10 Dives that he's "Going to the Blue Hole on Thursday", the reaction would be "Are you insane? Not with me, you're not." instead of "Cool!"
flots.
If you read the course material in the Padi Open Water and Advanced Open Water courses there are many warnings about the dangers in diving. I took the AOW course last January and their is no ambiguity about the potential dangers and the necessity of diving within your ability and training. There is no reason for a new diver to go into a dive without his eyes wide open. People choose to ignore their training. I dove last February in Roatan with a couple of guys. They were about 35, stock brokers from New York, and they started diving the year before. One of the guys told me about diving the Blue Hole the year before- it was his 5th dive after taking his OW course. He told me how someone in his group got into trouble, and unbeknownst to him they returned to the surface. He suddenly found himself alone at 130 feet with no dive watch. It freaked him out. Anyway in Roatan they wanted to dive a shipwreck that was 100 feet. The divemaster wouldn"t take them because they didn't have AOW. I saw these guys beg, cajole, bribe ( they tipped the DM very generously on regular dives) the DM into letting them go on the dive. Though he was reluctant he finally agreed to give them a modified deep diving course so they could go on the dive. These guys didn't care about a common sensical approach to diving--they were busy guys who went on one diving trip a year and they wanted to maximize the thrill. This personality type represents a certain percentage of divers and no warnings or training is going to stop them. There is no one to blame but them. People ignore their training all the time and nobody is at fault but them.