Do you practice safety procedures regularly?

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Thanshin

Contributor
Messages
193
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Location
Spain
# of dives
100 - 199
I was reading Near Misses and Lessons Learned and now I have a sudden urge of being underwater with my wife to train safety procedures.

Do you practice safety procedures regularly with your usual partner while diving? Maybe on your safety stops, or at the end of a shore dive.
 
We only get to dive a couple times each year, on vacation. But in between, we get in the pool. While there, we practice bouyancy & trim (which can be a bugger in such shallow water) as well as run through skills drills. Everything from flooded/lost mask to CESA to air sharing and buddy breathing. We try to simulate things like OOA emergencies by shutting down tank valves, just to remind us of what it feels like when your tank is about gone.
We try to make our first dive each trip a shallow one, during which we run through drills at random times during the dive.
 
Recreational, I do it all the time teaching students.
Technical, We do Safety drills (bubble checks, regualtor checks & deployment) before every dive. I also will occasionally do lights out, air share, lost line or lost buddy drills.
 
Like TStormdiver, I'm an instructor, so I'm demonstrating and practising drills all the time. From doing that, I'll definitely state that practice makes perfect. It takes a lot of repetition to ingrain something into your muscle memory. You can only rely upon it, if it is ingrained in your muscle memory as an instinctive reaction. Under stressful situations, where time is critical, the last thing you want to do is have to think about your response.

The same is true, or more so, with technical diving. Again, like TStormdiver, I utilise a series of checks/rehearsals at the start of every dive. It's taught as a procedure by most technical agencies. I dive doubles a lot, even on recreational dives, so I'm constantly rehearsing and repeating drills whenever I can.

Repetition is the key. How much do you need to repeat something? Well... do it enough that you get completely bored and disinterested doing it. When it starts to happen by itself - and you find your attention on other things whilst carrying it out... then you are half-way there. :D
 
Not as much as I should. Usually during a safety stop, I switch out regulators, and sometime I practice tilting the bottom of the tank so I can reach the post with the other hand.

Beyond that I just dive.
 
I think it is interesting that the instructors who have posted mention they regularly are engaged in safety training and they are in the habit of thorough safety checks on every dive and also some " drills." I engage in the safety training and drills with classes too, and am in the habit of thorough safety checks and procedure reviews when diving recreationally with my wife or another buddy. We occasionally "share air" for practice on safety stops as well, for "practice." But the truth is, sometimes we are more casual about pre-dive checks than we should be. I am taking a lesson from our techie colleagues here, and resolving to be more thorough in those pre-dive equipment and safety checks, articulating a "safety plan" and remediating appropriate skills regularly. Thanks for the reminder, guys.
DivemasterDennis
 
I was reading Near Misses and Lessons Learned and now I have a sudden urge of being underwater with my wife to train safety procedures.

Do you practice safety procedures regularly with your usual partner while diving? Maybe on your safety stops, or at the end of a shore dive.


I do, but my buddy does not. :(

I finally got him to at least do a bubble check with me, and to watch my S-drill.
 
if you can do buoyancy and trim in 3 ft of water, it'll only get easier.
Every dive I do a cold water treatment and that's with a buddy. That gets breathing without a mask, pass and slide when in backmount, and toe to head buddy checks taken care of for each diver before we descent. Before each day of diving we do a run over of hand signals. I have trouble doing 3 and 8 properly so I use the ASL 3. Run the rest of the usual culprits down. If I'm with a new buddy all signals get run through as well as how each of us would donate air. Working with classes as much as I do, I get a lot of practice of each.
Simulated S-drills as Jax mentioned are part of each day of diving once we descent. If I'm in doubles I'll do a valve drill before the first dive. No point in doing it with sidemount, which makes it doubly important for me in backmount since it's not often I'm diving backmount
 
Every now and then I do some practice with whoever I am diving with, generally secondary to what our plan is.

When I dive with my daughter we usually choose something to do at the end of the dive when diving locally but not on vacation.
 

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