..but then you go off on a rant about how unskilled today's modern trained diver is. How exactly has not knowing how to use tables or not demonstrating swimming ability or not knowing how to buddy breath or not know how to use a snorkel made anyone a safer or better diver?
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This is picking what to hear.
It's not that divers are unskilled. I said the instructors were unskilled in free-diving, and that, and lack of practice makes snorkel use unlikely to be done properly. (Since I don't consider snorkel use a diving skill, it's would not be "divers" who are unskilled.)
It's not that less training is the causative factor in making better divers, it is that equipment advances and changes have made diving safer. It's a tough move to try and align lack of safety with these 'damn kids' new methods; diving is demonstrably safer, despite more divers with a greater range of abilities who do it only a occasionally.
Plus the idea that few could buddy-breath or use the tables a year after taking the course, because few practiced them.
And in the context of this discussion, that's the crucial point. Proper snorkel use is rarely practiced (if ever properly learned). Basic "magic breathing tube" breathing may be practiced, but not proper snorkel breathing.
Instead of calling diving pioneers old farts how about trying this: “If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”
Let's look at what that sentence is about.
First, it presumes diving 'education' is about using the procedures developed by the old hands in the field. But that's not what is happening; the old fart divers are not working on new procedures. The changes made have all been away from previous training methods. They think they already know how it should be done, and they way it is done now is wrong.
Newton, on the other hand (the man that quote refers to) would have approved what Einstein did to his theories of gravity, essentially abandoning them as a rough estimate of what was really happening. In the same way that Newton discarded every previous theory of motion up to his point, when he posited the three laws, and called all the previous thinkers except Copernicus not just slightly, but completely, wrong.
He was giving a sop to all the people he had just called dead wrong. I am not that politic, obviously.
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Here is a challenge:
For those who insist that a snorkel is an essential piece of safety equipment, I challenge you to find one fatality where the person who died might have been OK if he/she posessed a snorkel.
For those who believe the snorkel to be a hazard, I challenge you to find one fatality (outside of an overhead environment) where the person who died might have been OK if he/she was not wearing a snorkel.
How about one where a snorkel causes discomfort and panic that did not result in anything more because people on hand reacting appropriately and solved the problem?
My example of a diving giant striding off the boat, switching to snorkel, getting hit by a wave, then giving up the snorkel in panic, and choking on a mouthful of water, happens all the time. No snorkel, and the divers may take out their reg, but they hold the reg in their hand ready to go back in if a wave hits. A wave which they can see because their head is oout of the water.
I am not sure you are going to get more detailed on an actual fatality because if no one is there to react, it is not going to be clear what happened afterwards.