(article) Top Ten Wreck Diving Tips for Safer Penetration Diving

I put thoughts onto my blog, on the subject of wreck diving penetration. Enjoy the read, would love any feedback if you have some...

Top Ten Wreck Diving Tips for Safer Penetration Diving

I would add to your article about deterioration of a wreck. I have been fortunate (lack of penetration dives) that I have yet to have a collapse occur. A friend of a friend went diving on a wreck the lies upside down in Lake Huron but has never been penetrated before, found a way into the bow cabins. His bubbles hit the ceiling (floor) and tons of lumber fell in on him in 230ft of pitch black water. He was a very experienced diver and he dropped his bottles and line and took about 5 agonizing minutes to escape the wreck. When he got out of the wreck, he only had 1300psi left in his db hp100's with 20-25 mins of deco and no deco gas (because they were inside the wreck) and he sucked the tanks dry after 16-17 mins from his ascent. When he got back to the boat, he grabbed one of his spare tanks filled with O2 and spent 10 mins at 15ft. He has not dove tech in the lakes since. The next day his partner dove where the collapse occured and the line that he was using showed that he went under the pile deeper inside the wreck and U-turned back out in zero vis. This story has always played with my mind when going inside wrecks, and I do not believe that I will do real tight penetration in deep wrecks. Thanks for the article.

Good share Jared

Jared0425:

I would add to your article about deterioration of a wreck...

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I concur. Also the treatment of black water, research, preparation, and navigation are weak. I think you will get more people to read, and benefit, from it if you make it much more concise, providing links as necessary. When to penetrate is a subject that is close to me.

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/wreck-diving/485747-wreck-penetration.html

You asked for feedback so here is some:

Your recommendations are all meaningful but not necessarily specific to wreck diving. If you take the titles of your recommendations, they would apply to almost any type of diving. More importantly, they are too generic in the sense of being too all-encompassing. In good math/science/engineering, we have a practice whereby a problem is tackled by doing a first-order approximation. That captures a chunk of the essence, but misses many details. Second- and higher order approximations, up to a point, then try to catch many (but not all) of the missing details.

I would suggest following Sheck Exley's approach to formulating actionable, specific rules that can make a significant dent on safety. Such as rule of thirds. Such as continuous guideline. His very specific, actionable rules based on empirical accident analysis have made cave diving significantly safer and are still taught today (with some updates).

Guarding against complacency is well and good, and perhaps the most important (Edd Sorenson makes a very compelling case), but codifying it in concrete terms is what can help make a difference. Such as: always follow a checklist. On the surface, when beginning a dive.

Condense your vast experience to 3-5 actionable rules. It's probably not easy but we are likely to benefit from them more.

DevonDiver:

I put thoughts onto my blog, on the subject of wreck diving penetration. Enjoy the read, would love any feedback if you have some...

Top Ten Wreck Diving Tips for Safer Penetration Diving

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