A recent reply to another one of my posts kind got me on my soapbox.
I've always been an explorer of sorts, as I kid I love to go to the hills near our home and go thru the old ghost town up the canyong, I like to go thru the old grist mill, and thru the old abandoned pioneer homes spaced here and there on the hills. There was an old mine we used to go into with flashlights, an ice cave up the canyon. In California, we even explored the flood water sewage drain system. I was usually somewhere, looking at something.
And I noted before, I'm a former Army aviator. The distinction between low flying helicopters and the 'fast movers' and what can be seen in each of those flight modes is very, very different.
And I wasn't just any kind of Army aviator, I was a scout pilot, my primary role was reconnaissance (some guys go off to gunships and shoot things and blow them up, yeah, that's fun too) But I have to say that I liked being a recon guy, we didn't have an armed aircraft, so we either went our in pairs, or sometimes 'Dad' would send along an Apache just to be sure the bad guys got theirs if they started shooting at us. Most of our work happened at night, under night vision goggles, at 5-10 feet above the ground or nearest vertical obstacle. For the wreck and cave divers, this is the aviation version of your world. It doesn't get any more exciting.
My maps were 1:50,000 meaning 1cm on the map was the same as 500m, and one grid then being 2500sqm or just about 1/2 US acre.... but you'd be mistaken to think that as aviators, we don't pay great attention to the detail within a single grid, in fact since most missions are directly related to finding out what is in that grid before sending in troopies or larger aircraft, that's one of the tasks for the scout aircraft to record and even provide a detailed map analysis of the actual and current topography. Or, we stand off and use optics to do the same thing, it depends on the mission.
So, I think I'm a pretty good explorer, and one of the things that I continue to hear is that as scuba divers, we are underwater explorers. I think that might be true for a small number of divers, but I think most are just 'casual observerers'.
I previously posted a question about why in the dives I've done so far, and with so many operators, dive masters, instructors who cover in multiple many of the best sites in the world, isn't there better mapping? And why isn't it used in dive briefings?
And, I just have to wonder that the purpose and usefulness of a divemaster candidate preparing a detailed dive site map if we can't get any usefulness out of it for the diving public. The best explorers used maps, inaccurate as they might have been in the early days. But the TRUE explorers of history (Lewis & Clark come to mind) took those maps and during their excursions, created BETTER maps for those who followed, more detailed, more accurate, and making further exploration even more purposeful.
We are trained to dive with a purpose. What greater purpose could there be than to create useful maps of the place we visit, to gather during our surface interval and see if we can't combine the knowledge we've gained, perhaps indicate where we saw something special. Why can't this be kept and passed along to other divers.. (I know I'd pay $5 for a dive site map with any level of detail when I visit somewhere I've never been, in fact, it might help attract me back to the same site)..
And then, there's the safety part of this idea of exploring. Sorry, if there is a hole in the diving/scuba world, it is that we are explorers leave far to much to chance, and then want to talk about safe diving practices. There is no better way to make diving safer than to have a repository of drawings, dive site surveys that divers can access as they PLAN their dives. Being able to get some basic understanding of where you are going, what you will see, the types of visual references you will find makes a dive easier to manage.
Jumping in and looking around is not exploring if nothing comes of it, explorers produce results. To some, that may be pictures, to others a map, and to some it might be gold bullion... in any case, I think there's an argument for simple mapping work, even if it's with a crayon and dinner placemat.
I've always been an explorer of sorts, as I kid I love to go to the hills near our home and go thru the old ghost town up the canyong, I like to go thru the old grist mill, and thru the old abandoned pioneer homes spaced here and there on the hills. There was an old mine we used to go into with flashlights, an ice cave up the canyon. In California, we even explored the flood water sewage drain system. I was usually somewhere, looking at something.
And I noted before, I'm a former Army aviator. The distinction between low flying helicopters and the 'fast movers' and what can be seen in each of those flight modes is very, very different.
And I wasn't just any kind of Army aviator, I was a scout pilot, my primary role was reconnaissance (some guys go off to gunships and shoot things and blow them up, yeah, that's fun too) But I have to say that I liked being a recon guy, we didn't have an armed aircraft, so we either went our in pairs, or sometimes 'Dad' would send along an Apache just to be sure the bad guys got theirs if they started shooting at us. Most of our work happened at night, under night vision goggles, at 5-10 feet above the ground or nearest vertical obstacle. For the wreck and cave divers, this is the aviation version of your world. It doesn't get any more exciting.
My maps were 1:50,000 meaning 1cm on the map was the same as 500m, and one grid then being 2500sqm or just about 1/2 US acre.... but you'd be mistaken to think that as aviators, we don't pay great attention to the detail within a single grid, in fact since most missions are directly related to finding out what is in that grid before sending in troopies or larger aircraft, that's one of the tasks for the scout aircraft to record and even provide a detailed map analysis of the actual and current topography. Or, we stand off and use optics to do the same thing, it depends on the mission.
So, I think I'm a pretty good explorer, and one of the things that I continue to hear is that as scuba divers, we are underwater explorers. I think that might be true for a small number of divers, but I think most are just 'casual observerers'.
I previously posted a question about why in the dives I've done so far, and with so many operators, dive masters, instructors who cover in multiple many of the best sites in the world, isn't there better mapping? And why isn't it used in dive briefings?
And, I just have to wonder that the purpose and usefulness of a divemaster candidate preparing a detailed dive site map if we can't get any usefulness out of it for the diving public. The best explorers used maps, inaccurate as they might have been in the early days. But the TRUE explorers of history (Lewis & Clark come to mind) took those maps and during their excursions, created BETTER maps for those who followed, more detailed, more accurate, and making further exploration even more purposeful.
We are trained to dive with a purpose. What greater purpose could there be than to create useful maps of the place we visit, to gather during our surface interval and see if we can't combine the knowledge we've gained, perhaps indicate where we saw something special. Why can't this be kept and passed along to other divers.. (I know I'd pay $5 for a dive site map with any level of detail when I visit somewhere I've never been, in fact, it might help attract me back to the same site)..
And then, there's the safety part of this idea of exploring. Sorry, if there is a hole in the diving/scuba world, it is that we are explorers leave far to much to chance, and then want to talk about safe diving practices. There is no better way to make diving safer than to have a repository of drawings, dive site surveys that divers can access as they PLAN their dives. Being able to get some basic understanding of where you are going, what you will see, the types of visual references you will find makes a dive easier to manage.
Jumping in and looking around is not exploring if nothing comes of it, explorers produce results. To some, that may be pictures, to others a map, and to some it might be gold bullion... in any case, I think there's an argument for simple mapping work, even if it's with a crayon and dinner placemat.
