I have to ask if you were there when they made the dive? Then I have to ask if GI III is your hero?
Conditions often change during a dive as do personal tolerances. A diver has to know their own limitations as well as their buddy's but those can change in an instant. I've called a mandatory deco due to belligerent sharks and have cut short precautionary stops for a wide variety of reasons including a cold buddy and a plethora of jellies. Crap happens and sometimes you have to make choices that were not apparent at the beginning of the dive. Unless you were there you have no real basis for evaluating the scope of their planning. The best plans are fluid and change according to how the dive progresses. It's easy to talk smack about others but that don't impress me much. This type of discourse rarely adds to anyone's understanding but it does tend to inflate one's ego as well as to derail the discussion. So please, let's ditch the egos and get back to the topic at hand. Thanks in advance.
This isn't about ego: we've all done things sub-optimally on more than one dive (I certainly have), and there's no shame in being called on it and calling someone on it doesn't make you a better diver. The shame is if you can't objectively evaluate your own decision making ex post; you're a better diver if you go forth and do what you can to avoid screwing up (including listening to people's critiques of your diving). DD and I had a good exchange not too long ago about whether my diving air deeper than 200' was a contributing factor to my almost choosing to skip some 10' stop deco because of an O2 tox concern. Personally, I don't think my having a high pO2 contributed to my later decisionmaking process and I said as much, but I respect his arguments on the topic. Back to this thread, I didn't call this guy a stroke, I didn't call him a bad diver, and I didn't say he made the wrong call at the end of the dive. It's pretty funny you're suggesting a deep air solo diver likes GI3, though. What I said was two things:
First, he and his team made a series of poor choices that put him in that position in the first place. If he wants to tell me that the whole team had carefully planned their exposure pro for the onsite conditions their knowledge/experience/research dictated could happen, and that everyone just happened to suffer drysuit failures and/or massive temp drops that nobody could have reasonably predicted for that dive on that day at that site, cool. Somehow I doubt that's the case. Even assuming what I said is more or less correct, poor dive planning choices are not necessarily a huge deal --
happens, people make poor decisions/fail to think ahead at all. Whatever.
Second, nothing about any of that suggests that "gee, no stops are really mandatory" is a reasonable conclusion to draw, much less broadcast in Basic Scuba. Yes, there's nothing over your head preventing you from deciding that whatever risk you're facing is worse than the risk of omitted deco plus whatever mitigation you can do (warm up, suck O2, etc). How to do a decent job of balancing the risks inherent in the decision of whether to respect the ceiling or take your chances is something for a tech course and/or diving experience. But a blanket statement from a
ing instructor in Basic Scuba that "deco isn't exactly mandatory" based on that fact that he once blew off a stop and was OK? Nope, not letting that one pass without a BS tag.
Which, in point of fact,
is the OP's topic. The difference IMO is that deco stops are mandatory. What mandatory means is something outside the scope of rec training/experience...unless it's a true emergency (whatever the threat is) on top of another emergency (deco stops incurred on a rec dive).
