Innovation in diving

[ScubaToneDog]

It doesn't mean people shouldn't know the mistakes he's and others committed, and the risks they took, to formulate the rules followed nowadays.

Bingo! Key word, Rules. There are rules and they are not meant to be broken. They should be adhered to at all times. Breaking of protocols, regardless of training or experience, calculated however you want is still wrong. Protocols are what carrier pilots are graded on, on every landing. Catching the last arresting cable is bad....too steep a glide path is bad...ignoring a wave off is bad...something as simple as a Velcro strap on a glove left undone is bad. All bad because these things can all have catastrophic results.

The Tech diving community, back when I was heading down that road 10+ years ago, would have had seizures reading this thread. Diving without the essentials, and not having backups to those essentials was immediate termination of the dive period! No questions asked! No bottom timer or depth gauge? Not DIR...no go.

Explain yourselves away, but I am done with this thread. Ya'll are scaring me. What you are arguing is absurd. If you feel you are justified in your superior skills to break the fundamentals of diving, good luck and god bless.

Back to the OP...What the father did was stupid. And stupid kills.

ToneDog....out!

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Tapatalk

 

[Nirvana]

Bingo! Key word, Rules. There are rules and they are not meant to be broken. They should be adhered to at all times. Breaking of protocols, regardless of training or experience, calculated however you want is still wrong. Protocols are what carrier pilots are graded on, on every landing. Catching the last arresting cable is bad....too steep a glide path is bad...ignoring a wave off is bad...something as simple as a Velcro strap on a glove left undone is bad. All bad because these things can all have catastrophic results.

The Tech diving community, back when I was heading down that road 10+ years ago, would have had seizures reading this thread. Diving without the essentials, and not having backups to those essentials was immediate termination of the dive period! No questions asked! No bottom timer or depth gauge? Not DIR...no go.

Explain yourselves away, but I am done with this thread. Ya'll are scaring me. What you are arguing is absurd. If you feel you are justified in your superior skills to break the fundamentals of diving, good luck and god bless.

Back to the OP...What the father did was stupid. And stupid kills.

ToneDog....out!

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Tapatalk

Not to derail this long thread even more, but you're changing the subject. I am not defending gianaameri's dive, but it being open to discussion here on Scubaboard. Nothing you said here makes me think we shouldn't talk about it.

 

[BRT]

Bingo! Key word, Rules. There are rules and they are not meant to be broken. They should be adhered to at all times. Breaking of protocols, regardless of training or experience, calculated however you want is still wrong. Protocols are what carrier pilots are graded on, on every landing. Catching the last arresting cable is bad....too steep a glide path is bad...ignoring a wave off is bad...something as simple as a Velcro strap on a glove left undone is bad. All bad because these things can all have catastrophic results.

The Tech diving community, back when I was heading down that road 10+ years ago, would have had seizures reading this thread. Diving without the essentials, and not having backups to those essentials was immediate termination of the dive period! No questions asked! No bottom timer or depth gauge? Not DIR...no go.

Explain yourselves away, but I am done with this thread. Ya'll are scaring me. What you are arguing is absurd. If you feel you are justified in your superior skills to break the fundamentals of diving, good luck and god bless.

Back to the OP...What the father did was stupid. And stupid kills.

ToneDog....out!

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Tapatalk

On the other hand somebody stuck their neck out to figure stuff out. I'm kind of amused that the attitude is that if you die doing something you payed someone to learn to do it is ok, but if you die doing it without paying for the training it's not ok???

 

[TONY CHANEY]

On the other hand somebody stuck their neck out to figure stuff out. I'm kind of amused that the attitude is that if you die doing something you payed someone to learn to do it is ok, but if you die doing it without paying for the training it's not ok???

And that makes no sense at all. If we have not learned from the mistakes of others and repeat them then we have learned nothing! On the other hand, if someone is brave enough to share their mistake so others will not do likewise then we have a very good lession learned with no skin off our necks. This is how lessions are learned and rules formed.

 

[Ron Lee]

And that makes no sense at all. If we have not learned from the mistakes of others and repeat them then we have learned nothing! On the other hand, if someone is brave enough to share their mistake so others will not do likewise then we have a very good lesson learned with no skin off our necks. This is how lessons are learned and rules formed.

I could go dive that site with a single tank and learn a lot in the process. The problem is that even with a reasonable amount of experience, that is an environment for which I do not have the training, experience and equipment to do it according to the standards developed over many years.

How long could I get away with diving it before something happens that is not within my ability to overcome and I die?

The reality is that I do not have the desire to acquire the training, experience and equipment to dive it so I won't dive it. I can live with that decision.

 

[TONY CHANEY]

I could go dive that site with a single tank and learn a lot in the process. The problem is that even with a reasonable amount of experience, that is an environment for which I do not have the training, experience and equipment to do it according to the standards developed over many years.

How long could I get away with diving it before something happens that is not within my ability to overcome and I die?

The reality is that I do not have the desire to acquire the training, experience and equipment to dive it so I won't dive it. I can live with that decision.

And this is the right thinking that I wish others could get.

 

[pocky21]

And this is the right thinking that I wish others could get.

I'm going to go out on a limb here...but strict adherence to protocol, in any application, forces any creative energies to fall within the confines of that system.

If everyone thought in such a manner, Einstein never would have left the patent office. A continuing trend I'm starting to see in this industry, and specifically among technical divers, is a blind obsession with "the way things are" and an almost complete shutout of "the way things could be". Why is it that so many of us are willing to endanger our lives for something we love, yet we go off the deep end when someone else endangers theirs in a way deemed inappropriate?

Am I defending a deviation? Yes. Simply on the premise that we all seek ways to make things "better", but the crowd will always be ready to chastise your failures. We cannot have progress without failure, and we cannot be afraid to fail if we wish to progress. The alternative is stagnation - a curse I feel we're already somewhat afflicted with.


In light of this, I also have to ask, am I the only one who thinks that the death of these two people is such a big deal because we MADE it a big deal? If scuba related deaths continue to become a cluster#$*@ like this whole ordeal has, I think the attention it gains from outside sources is a one way street to a self fulfilling prophecy. In my opinion, all of you are digging your own graves.

 

[Omisson]

Pocky21,

While I think there is a bit of hyperbolic rhetoric on this topic- and there is always merit to thinking out of the box- your position on this seems a bit ham handed.

First, innovation is a good thing- but not when unjustified by the risk-reward ratio.

Cave diving protocol has evolved as a result of studying deaths related to the sport and analyzing the root causes. Sheck Exley's study (who ironically died while pushing the envelope during a dive) assembled the commonalities on the accidents in the sport and identified solutions, which if followed, would avoid or minimize those accidents.

Surely as a driver of a car, trying to be "creative" you wouldn't decide to drive it with a blindfold on? Or (not being a mechanic) fix the brakes yourself with parts u made, unsure if they will work, then drive the car in adverse situations HOPING you did a good job... Right?

So Cave diving protocol calls for guidelines to open water, rule of thirds for tanks, redundant flashlights, etc. because these things have by experience yielded safer dives.

Be creative all you want- where innovation does not yield a risk greater than the potential reward- especially when the proverbial "wheel" has already been invented.

Just my 2 cents-

 

[gianaameri]

I could go dive that site with a single tank and learn a lot in the process. The problem is that even with a reasonable amount of experience, that is an environment for which I do not have the training, experience and equipment to do it according to the standards developed over many years.

How long could I get away with diving it before something happens that is not within my ability to overcome and I die?

The reality is that I do not have the desire to acquire the training, experience and equipment to dive it so I won't dive it. I can live with that decision.

It would be highly imprudent/foolish to enter any cave (or cavern or approach any hole) with a single supply of respirable gas (solo, with a buddy, in a team, or with a crowd of like minded idiots), even for the trained cave divers.

There is nothing to learn from doing so.

Equally, you can have all the equipment and redundancy that money can buy (the best), still to enter any cave (or hole or cavern...) is pure madness/stupidity to do so without formal prior training now that this is available (at the time of the cave pioneers it was not available, and also SCUBA was not available, and entry was done with a snorkel... but now you can get training and book it on the internet/by email!).

Nonetheless, human nature is that people again and again and again as in this cave/case continue to enter caves (and "caverns") without training despite its wide availability (a stupid way to die!).

 

[drrich2]

I am so tempted not to stir the pot on this long-running thread, but the irony is just too delicious for me.

One of the contentions that has come up involves whether we should 'let' people retain such personal liberty that they can (despite signs & other public education efforts) continue to make their own (adult) decisions to do foolish, dangerous things that may get them killed...

...or whether there should be more regulation, some sort of licensing system, and people could even check for some kind of permit displayed on the vehicle and 'call the authorities/police' if it were absent.

It's my subjective impression that gianaameri tended to have the latter view, whereas a number of us have had the former.

So now gianaameri posts about having chosen to make a cave dive. Granted, cave certified and far more knowledgeable and experienced about the matter at hand, but still a cave dive that...

...some other people consider ill-advised and that should not have been done! Why, there are probably some people in this world that would have put a stop to that if they could have.

And so, once again, do you want liberty, or do you want Big Brother telling you what to do, even if under the latter system your statistical likelihood of longer life expectancy is higher?

Richard.