With all due respect - and I both respect and really enjoy the posts you make on SB, so I hope you don't take offense - I must humbly beg to differ. I do agree that we aren't in position of every single fact surrounding the OPs dive, but he's related enough facts to draw a conclusion that his behaviour was ill-advised.
All the existing evidence (what little there is) suggests that is not the case.
Fact: A bloke engaged in a dive beyond his capabilities. He engaged in a trust-me dive using a piece of equipment that is deadly to the untrained.
That's why CCR students never receive their whole kit upon purchase: a crucial piece of equipment, such as the counter-lungs, are sent directly to the instructor, to prevent the student from 'experimenting' with it and dying.
Yet, somehow, miraculously a whole passel of us experimenters somehow survived teaching ourselves, and each other, how to use CCRs before there were instructors to whom to send keys or counterlungs.
Even once trained, they dive knowing that while a carefully-checked and perfectly functioning unit is essential, having one breeds complacency (the 'Pyle Paradox'), and they must assume their rebreather is going to malfunction at any moment.
There are lots of things in the world that need to be treated that way, not just CCRs. Complacency can kill everything from divers to marriages.
Did the OP dive with that assumption, and was he trained to save himself and bail himself out if anything went wrong? No. Because he didn't spend weeks training, drilling and practicing with ain instructor in order to obtain basic familiarity with the unit.
I hate to say it, but if it takes you weeks of training, drilling and practicing with an instructor, your probably not really cut out for the task at hand. When I got my Mk-15 I spend a couple of days disassembling and assembling it. I made three dives in a pool, with a more experienced buddy, using a high ppO2 diluent and then we moved out the ocean.
Fact: The fact he lived is testimony that learning from qualified professionals is not always necessary?! No, it's testimony that he was lucky.
Neither of us have any idea of what, if anything, it means in this case. Occam's razor would suggest that either there was no need for a "professional" instructor, that the mentor he had did an adequate job or that perhaps he leaned nothing and his buddy was good enough to look after them both (something that all of us, as instructors, are known to do from time to time).
Now, I too have encountered remarkable divers without the formal training to undertake the dives they're regularly undertake. One, an acquaintence back home in NY, has a YMCA OW card (which he displays to anyone that asks and even some people that don't with the greatest glee!), but he was/is one of THOSE wreck divers in the Northeast, who participated in expeditions to the Doria and so on. But then - there were precious little C-cards back then, and much of what we know today is thanks to the likes of divers like him (and, very sadly, his dead buddies).
Well, I have a rather different view. Much like him most of what I learned I learned from members of my community who came before ... and not a single one of them has died from diving. It's bad juju to try to extend your conclusions outside of your data set.
I have the utmost awe and respect for divers who dived back when there were precious few rules - dammit, they helped make the rules! - and who literally cobbled together equipment to undertake those dives. But we don't live in that world anymore. We have access to tried-and-true equipment and (if you shop around) experienced, insured instructors to teach us how to use that equipment to plan and execute incident-free dives.
With rather rate exceptions I not trust those, "experienced, insured instructors" to teach anyone I cared anything about to walk across the street.
Mentors help us build on that experience, and for that, they're absolutely invaluable. But there's an important distinction between mentors and instructors.
I don't see much difference ... you've got to be damn careful before you get involved with either one but a good mentor likely has way more teaching and mentoring experience than most instructors, who have an industry half life of about two years and who rarely if ever learn anything outside of the PADI Encyclopedia of Diving.
As to the comments about Mr. Lewis: I must respectfully disagree with you there, too. As one of the most competant and skilled instructor-trainers in the world today,
So am I ... so what?
I would venture that he's eminently qualified to watch folk undertake difficult and dangerous tasks and assess whether they're being undertaken responsibly.
So am I, and so are lots of other people, many who've no interest in having an instructor card, or who's "diving life" (like mine) has little or no direct relationbshhip with so-called "recreational diving."
The consequences of doing otherwise are too great. Firstly, it's the individual's decision whether or not to be in the water with a person they deem as unsafe and putting themselves - and others - at risk. Maybe he's done that on a few occasions and made himself unpopular as a result, who knows? Secondly, scuba is a self-regulating sport, because for the most part, its practitioners dive safely and responsibily. But if enough people have serious accidents and get hurt, scuba as a self-regulating sport may be a thing of the past.
Crap ... scuba is permitted to remain a self regulating sport due to a rather weird and self contradictory phenomena, first because it's pretty damn hard to hurt yourself in the situation that most people dive in (but even so a sizable number seem to scare the bejezus out of themselves and never dive again) and second because the general non-diving public "knows" that it is dangerous as hell and so assumes that anyone in their right mind who takes it up actualy knows the risks.
Thanks for taking the time to correspond.
