Diver Storytime - Qualified Diver?

[fnfalman]

I feel so silly!!! I have that book, but I never paid attention to the author's name and make the connection.

He is talking about my book , "SCUBA: A Practical Guide for the New Diver". It's available on Amazon in print with illustrations and an all text Kindle version. I also have a VERY LIMITED number of copies here I can sign and send for someone who wants one of those.

I wrote it in response to the lack of emphasis on safety and risk I was seeing, and continue to see, in diver training today. Especially the entry level courses where it seems to be more about get em in the water, get em done, get em out, and try to sell them more training that they should already have gotten to begin with.

Dive planning does include the psychological and, as I talk about in the book in that chapter, emotional factors as well. A diver's emotional state can and often does have a huge effect on their planning, level of acceptable risk, and execution of the dive itself.

The diver who relies on someone else to plan every aspect of their dives all the time is one of the most dangerous people in the water. Not only to themselves but to those around them. They even pose a risk to other divers not in the water with them. If one of these people has an accident as a result of not knowing what to do, trusting someone else to do it for them, or perhaps intentionally going beyond their training and experience because they have chosen not to educate themselves about the risk they have needlessly taken up resources that may be needed for someone else.

It's quite selfish really. To put all the responsibility on someone else for your safety is very selfish and worse is that you may have been trained to do that! Trained to do that by instructors that don't see the need to pass on the ability to plan a dive, execute a dive, and assist a fellow diver. Plus not be told in clear and graphic terms what kind of bad stuff can happen when a diver chooses to be a sheep.

 

[gfaith]

I feel so silly!!! I have that book, but I never paid attention to the author's name and make the connection.

Now who is the ??? Just kidding I loved your NCO reference.

 

[PhatD1ver]

Yep, a great book, makes you think, of course I already think too much, need to dive a little more... alas, I'm off to Anilao again first weekend in Sept., going to introduce my wife to some of the sites I dove last time... and a couple I didn't...

 

[GrandpaScuba]

If I'm diving from a boat, I get the dive briefing, I hear all they say, I process it, and plan from it, but standing at the gate, I'm still a little apprehensive about just jumping into someone else's pond (so to speak) that I've never been in before. Telling me there is a horseshoe shaped reef and I can follow it out to the point and back, okay, I get that.. but I'm used to knowing the hazards I'm supposed to watch for, I'm used to some kind of visual reference (called a MAP)... and in scuba, you get hardly any of that, at least in most locations.

Your flight maps cover areas that are hundreds, maybe even thousands of miles. Your typical dive sight is, at most, a couple hundred yards square. I doubt that, if you drilled down to a 1/2 acre section of your flight map, that it will show the location of every pile of rocks or pile of debris. As a military flier, your job is to execute carefully planned missions. As a diver, you are an explorer. Perhaps seeing a particular feature no one else has seen before. As a flier, you are a map reader. As a diver, you are the map maker. You are looking for things you've never seen before. Enjoy it.

 

[PhatD1ver]

Your flight maps cover areas that are hundreds, maybe even thousands of miles. Your typical dive sight is, at most, a couple hundred yards square. I doubt that, if you drilled down to a 1/2 acre section of your flight map, that it will show the location of every pile of rocks or pile of debris. As a military flier, your job is to execute carefully planned missions. As a diver, you are an explorer. Perhaps seeing a particular feature no one else has seen before. As a flier, you are a map reader. As a diver, you are the map maker. You are looking for things you've never seen before. Enjoy it.

You might not have gathered it from my flight training outline, but I was a scout pilot, my primary role was reconnaissance, and most of it at night, under night vision goggles, at 5-10 feet above the ground or nearest vertical obstacle.

My maps were 1:50,000 meaning 1cm on the map was the same as 500m, and one grid then being 2500sqm or just about 1/2 US acre... which is your sample size... but you'd be mistaken to think that as aviators, we don't pay great attention to the detail within a single grid, in fact since most missions are directly related to finding out what is in that grid before sending in troopies or larger aircraft, that's one of the tasks for the scout aircraft to record and even provide a detailed map analysis of the actual and current topography.

And, I just have to wonder that the purpose and usefulness of a divemaster candidate preparing a detailed dive site map if we can't get any usefulness out of it for the diving public. Explorers still used maps, inaccurate as they might have been. But the TRUE explorers of history (Lewis & Clark come to mind) created BETTER maps for those who followed, more detailed, more accurate, and making further exploration even more purposeful.

Sorry, if there is a hole in the diving/scuba world, it is that we are explorers leave far to much to chance, and then want to talk about safe diving practices. There is no better way to make diving safer than to have a repository of drawing, dive site surveys that divers can access as they PLAN their dives. Jumping in and looking around is not exploring if nothing comes of it, explorers produce results.

 

[lemke]

If I knew exactly what I was going to encounter/see/windup on every dive I've made, I would have quit years ago. Diving into the unknown is what keeps me coming back.

 

[PhatD1ver]

If I knew exactly what I was going to encounter/see/windup on every dive I've made, I would have quit years ago. Diving into the unknown is what keeps me coming back.

I didn't say you would know exactly what you were going to see. But I doubt you've dove many times with absolutely no idea of what's beneath the surface. And I would counter that having some idea of what's there makes it possible to explore even more the stuff you want to see.

Things like swim thrus are often missed because the 'casual diver' doesn't know how to identify where it's at. There's a really awesome chimney swim thru I did in Thailand, but the opening is at 25 meters, and it come out on the top of the reef at about 12 meters... trying to swim it DOWN is next to impossible and dangerous, so wouldn't it be cool for a 'self reliant' diver like you to have a cheat sheet (map) that tells you where you can find this feature? or would you rather waste a tank of air looking for it?

 

[Tony387]

I agree...its the unknown that makes it interesting, for me anyway. I understand how some might enjoy a map of an entire dive site....its just not for me. Different strokes, I suppose.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

 

[drrich2]

And that's my point. Am I not a qualified diver because I don't know the local area well enough? How can anyone know 45-50 dive sites at a location they might visit once in a lifetime? Am I really supposed to trust a 5 minute briefing describing what is beneath me and then jump in with my buddy (wife) without any thought for what else I might find? I mean, if someone told me to go 100 m out at 80degrees from the house reef to find a sunken helicopter, I'd have no problem with the general direction of the dive, and I know I can get back to shore easily, the only factor in that dive is that the helicopter is at 30m, so I need a new buddy, because my wife isn't deep qualified, and doesn't want to go deep.

If I dropped you in a car in a foreign city you'd never been in before, with different topography than you'd dealt with before, you'd drive much more conservatively for awhile as you acclimated. If you didn't drive extensively enough there to acclimate, you'd stay quite conservative. Same basic thing there.

The issue of guided vacation dives comes up a lot on Scuba Board. They are often derided, but conducted day in & day out in huge numbers across the world, the overwhelming majority ending in nobody seriously hurt and lots of people having fun. Would the injury & mortality numbers be lower if they were all awesome divers. Yeah. And if wishes were horses, all men would fly...

In addition to some of the issues you laid out in the original posts, some other concerns affect divers getting into the sport:

1.) Not all people are good auditory learners. I try to listen thoroughly to dive briefings. But I'm one of those people who, if I'm listening and you say something interesting, my mind wanders off processing that tangent a bit, I don't even realize it for awhile, and I miss some of what you say. If I'm part of a group of strangers, I'm not going to raise my hand, announce I was daydreaming and ask for a repeat. Most dive briefings I've encounter on charter boats were oral delivery. I do monitor my depth, gas, estimated gas time remaining and NDL. But I follow the guide. Try not to get lost; have an SMB on your in case you do. That's true whether you follow a guide or navigate yourself.

2.) Do you tend to remember 'the gist' of what others say, or do you have an excellent rote recall of detailed info. you heard one time? I'm a gist guy. 30 Minutes into a dive, I'm not gonna remember everything said in the briefing, much less be able to process and use it for planning and decision making on the fly.

3.) Not all people have a good capacity for navigation. I don't. I try. Bought the PADI UW Navigation manual and read it. A few times. But I'm one of those people who, on land, you cannot tell orally how to drive somewhere. You'll annoy me mightily, but I won't retain that spree of data coming out of your mouth. If you want to tell me how to get somewhere, sit down with me one-to-one, and we're going to hand draw a nice map, with pictures of obvious major landmarks. And experiences teaches I often miss a turn and have travel drama anyway. I don't remember and recognize reef structures well, not much looks distinctive enough for me to recognize it later, and trying to figure compass bearing calculations on the fly (e.g.: deciding whether to add or subtract 90 degrees and doing it for right angle turns), and trying to get the same distance between turns, well, probably not going to be a prime accomplishment anytime soon. And I'm slow to pick up motor skills.

So, what to do?

Well, as Clint Eastwood's character Dirty Harry said, "A man's got to know his limitations." Shore diving Bonaire's west coast where sloping reef wall and natural navigation are simple works well. If navigation is necessarily, one could aim for reciprocal course diving to avoid much in the way of compass calculations; go, come back. Diving in good viz., well-lit conditions with minimal current and an observable bottom is apt to be easier than poor viz., low light blue water diving without visual references! Guided dives are sweet, but watch your time, depth, gas remaining and NDL - he guides but I still gotta dive.

Whatever you do, do it to a reasonable level of safety and enjoyment. You will have to decide what that level is.

Richard.

P.S.: On the plane trip to your destination, did you monitor the plane's fuel supply, navigate the flight course, plan the flight in detail, etc... Or did you rely on a professional to help you get where you were going?

 

[lemke]

I didn't say you would know exactly what you were going to see. But I doubt you've dove many times with absolutely no idea of what's beneath the surface. And I would counter that having some idea of what's there makes it possible to explore even more the stuff you want to see.

Things like swim thrus are often missed because the 'casual diver' doesn't know how to identify where it's at. There's a really awesome chimney swim thru I did in Thailand, but the opening is at 25 meters, and it come out on the top of the reef at about 12 meters... trying to swim it DOWN is next to impossible and dangerous, so wouldn't it be cool for a 'self reliant' diver like you to have a cheat sheet (map) that tells you where you can find this feature? or would you rather waste a tank of air looking for it?

I get what you're saying, and yes, if I was sight seeing, a map of the "structures of interest" would be golden. However, I've always been one to blaze my own trails... never been a fan of the status quo, LOL.

I dive oil rigs a lot... sometimes you have to swim below a zero vis murk layer... sometimes I'm not familiar with the structure, sometimes there's sharks, sometimes I get tangled up with fishing line or a feisty fish... and I keep coming back!