Student Pulled from Elliott Bay in Seattle

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Depth in that area? Anyone? Anyone? Is that a popular training site?
 
Seacrest park consists of 3 coves. Cove 1 is the least popular of the 3 as it is the least interesting. However, it has a fairly gentle slope that is first quite rocky. At 40 feet of depth at what I would expect to a somewhat low tide, one is definitely in the silty region. I can count the number of times I've dived it on one hand, but it is an appropriate site for teaching an open water class and one dive school uses it frequently and occasionally so does another. I know an instructor that was teaching next to the class that had the incident, but understandably, he does not wish to divulge details online. I hope to have lunch with him sometime this week, as we now teach out of the same shop, and there are other things I wish to discuss with him.
 
Like "how does an OW instructor lose a student?" And "how come this keeps happening?"
The 800 lb gorilla says "Diving is easy and anyone can learn to dive", and they make their living by making anyone who can breath without prompting and who can learn a basic set of skills an instructor. And by selling training materials to anyone who wants to learn how to dive, so the instructor with the very basic skills can't even evaluate the potential anyone who wants to learn to dive before they even show up for class. Not that they have any basis to evaluate anyone anyway. That isn't covered int he basic skill set. Because "diving is fun and easy, and anyone can do it".

Except it isn't. That's why this keeps happening.
 
Except it isn't. That's why this keeps happening.

You summed up the Industry perfectly in one paragraph, Wookie.
 
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Visibility conditions in that area can be anything from OK to horrible. This year with global warming we've had a poor year for visibility. This is a silty area. Classes kneel on the bottom for skills demonstration and generally have miserable buoyancy control and finning techniques. They simply trash the visibility and with almost no current, one of the things that makes this a good learning site, the visibility stays messed up for a long time.

I certified in the same spot. After our mask clearing skill the plan was for the instructor to lead the group off for our first 'real' dive, where we went around and looked at stuff. My buddy and I happened to be at the end of the line. By the time the whole class took off all we could see was mud. We lost the entire class of 10 people in seconds. From the other end the instructor lost us. Leading a line of 10 people even without the silt out it's unlikely an instructor could see the students at the end of the line at any time.

In our area, a lot of the time it can be a challenge for buddy pairs that are actually decent divers to stay together if they do anything but go around concentrating on contact, which is pretty much boring. Stop to take a picture, look at something, not notice that your buddy has done this, and you are separated.
 

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