Inspected vessels in the USA, like in the UK, may not have lifts, as it is considered an elevator which has a ton of inspection requirements. I know of a couple uninspected boats in both the US and Canada with lifts, and think they are brilliant.
If that is true then there are no ‘inspected’ dive boats in the U.K.
At the big end of things we have 25ish metre liveaboards that have open sea tickets so can nip to Norway and back, or visit the Artic Circle. Surely such a boat is ‘inspected’ in some way? For sure they have to have stability reports and a proper chat with a naval architect.
The big ones all have lifts.
There is the odd RIB or small hardboat (actually I can only think of one of them) without a lift. The bloke without a lift is very helpful and makes sure you can get your bailout back onboard, but still I wouldn’t do a big dive and then climb a difficult ladder.
There is a difference in culture. On the one hand there is a place that values the freedom to control your own diving and not be dictated to in a nannying style by people who have no clue, and on the other one which is very commercially driven. Here skippers have to accommodate the requirements of the customer as they will not book on boats that are poor, for whatever value of poor the customer has. It is all repeat custom, piss me off and me and my 11 mates will not be back. In Marie’s case that boat would have lost a club and probably £2k to £3k of bookings the following year. If she was not up to the diving it would have been handled by the club. The DO would have done what it took to get her the training or support required to reach the necessary level. Since the DO is responsible to future buddies that can’t include being excessively positive. A result of this is that boats expect divers to be half way competent, they don’t need to check plastic cards.
The diving is not the business of the boats. In extreme cases they might have a gentle word, but they are definitely not taking responsibility. Mostly the skippers are accomplished divers. They could be handing out advice all day long, but that is not what they are paid to do.
The highest service boats are the Scapa liveaboards, one of which actually has shore based accommodation but the boat side is similar. These cater for people who might fly. They can rent you twinsets, singles, deco cylinders and bailout. They provide nitrox and trimix. People go there to do long, moderately serious dives (the deepest German battleship is 44m) but the diving is accessible enough that a club of mixed ability divers can have a fine time. Pertinent to this thread it means that the people running the boats have to use good judgement. They are very good at that, not many people die and not many people are asked not to do a thing, the default is that they keep their opinions to themselves or use soft means to try stop the wrong thing happening. In the end the divers are responsible for themselves.
Help wise, the crew is there to get people in and out of the water. If they are over a 80m site then they will be helping people into the water with quite a lot of kit. They know that. They know that having a flustered diver walk across the deck with three stages and a rebreather is more hassle on average than with one or two and clipping a stage on at the gate. If they took a “your on your own” attitude then the divers would have a poor time and be less likely to do it again next year. Everyone knows that part between kitting up and hitting the water is the worst bit. Decent boats try to mitigate that.
The downside of the way it works here is that it is quite hard to dive in a completely casual way. You need to either be experienced and self sufficient or part of a club. You can’t be a once a year diver with no kit and turn up somewhere on the coast and be taken care of. Nobody is pretending to take care of anybody.
