A diver's doing no one a favor if he's at quarter capability due to stress. The whole stress and rescue courses are there so you can handle situations with a calm mind. Should they even be diving if they're so stressed they aren't be doing things by the book?
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Having been through a recovery, with someone that I didn't even know and I wasn't diving with, the first that hits your mind is emotional shock, because you're not dealing with some CPR dummy, but dealing with a real human being who is either dead or dying.
If you haven't been through that and had to deal with it, you don't understand the effort required to push that aside and how badly it impedes your thinking. What worked in the rescue attempt that I was involved in was that we all cooperated and collectively managed to make some good decisions. Left by myself I would have screwed up all kinds of simple things that on retrospect would have been obvious (I nearly started towing the victim hundreds of yards further than we needed to because I couldn't see how we were going to get her up on a dock -- but trusted someone else who shouted out to take her there and it all worked out about as optimally as possible).
Obviously situations differ, and you can't always do things EXACTLY how they're supposed to be done, but from what I heard of the recovery they towed him in a kayak, which is definately not what I was taught in my open dive class.
Ever tried towing a real, unresponsive diver outside of a classroom situation? We had a pile of people, and about 50 feet to tow her, and we weren't making anything resembling good time until I figured out how to use my scooter to tow her. I don't know if I'd choose to haul a diver up into a kayak as being the fastest method of rescue, but given a long enough distance the time spent hauling them into the kayak is definitely going to be offset by the speed the kayak can make to shore. I would not second guess a rescuers choice to do that, even if it didn't work out well given that they're operating under pressure.
Rescue breaths could have been administered during the transportation.
Monday morning quarterbacking.
Its much more important to get them onto land and get them to the paramedics. This is actually taught in rescue courses. Do the rescue breaths if you can, get them to trained emergency personnel first. The rescuers were prioritizing correctly.
When I first did my open water I do believe I was asked the question of whether to ditch the person's BC/tank/Regulator to the water and swim them to safety. I said yes and my instructor told me I was wrong. All of that is evidence, even if it IS cumbersome to haul with a person in critical danger, if not dead. Was there something wrong with the air? Was there a problem with the regulator? The BC? If you dump it there's the possibility it'll never be found and those questions won't be answered. Of course this doesn't have anything to do with videotaping the recovery, but it shows that you need to think about things, through the stress, and realize that it doesn't just end when the person is on shore/in a boat.
Your instructor was wrong. It is better to get them out of their gear, cutting them out if necessary in order to make it easier to tow them to shore.
When doing that, the BC/wing should ideally be inflated, allowing the gear to be recovered, but that is secondary to the rescue. You optimize for the person to give them the best possible chance, you don't optimize for the analysis afterwards (which is likely to be useless anyway and reduce to being likely two or three different common causes of accidents, and the gear will not clarify anything -- nobody is going to get 'CSI' with the gear and the MD will report the death as accidental and either heart attack, drowning or embolism).
Basically, [/B]Was there something that could have been done during the recovery to help this man live?[/B] Take the jerk's footage and use it for good. I don't condone video taping people die because you're awe-struck by it. It's a serious situation and it needs to be handled with professionalism.
Any rescue or recovery effort is going to be flawed but a few rescue breaths or a few minutes less time getting them to shore isn't going to make a difference. The difference between a good attempt and the perfect attempt isn't going to save anyone. There's no point putting the rescuers through the anguish of going over the flaws in the attempted rescue when the outcomes wouldn't have been any different.
And you got important aspects of the rescue completely incorrect while on dry land with your decision making skills unimpeded by stress and shock. You can't possibly expect people in that decision to make perfect choices. And the only thing that training really gives you is the ability to push past the emotions and do something useful, rather than sitting around taking pictures with your camera phone -- it can't possibly anticipate every situation or prepare rescuers for the eventuality.
