Cost differences Mexico v Florida

[rddvet]

Yea it's a problem. If you come to the end of the line and don't realize your actually at the START of a jump line that can cook your goose. You're entire mental image of the cave just got shattered. Enter things like doubt, confusion, and a rapid cycling of different scenarios in your mind trying to make sense of the wacked out situation you've found yourself in.

Contrast that with coming to the end of a line and seeing another line in front of you. You not have more information to use to make a decision on what to do.

I guess I'm not following. You come to the end of a line that is actually the start/end of a jump what difference does it make? If you don't know where you're at your don't know where your at, right?
Maybe there's a part of the puzzle I'm not getting. I'd like more explanation. Because it's possible I agree with you but don't get what you're saying.

 

[rjack321]

Yea it's a problem. If you come to the end of the line and don't realize your actually at the START of a jump line that can cook your goose. You're entire mental image of the cave just got shattered. Enter things like doubt, confusion, and a rapid cycling of different scenarios in your mind trying to make sense of the wacked out situation you've found yourself in.

Contrast that with coming to the end of a line and seeing another line in front of you. You not have more information to use to make a decision on what to do.

The incident happened along the Paso de Lagarto line. A guide placed a "team cookie" at a T like snap in gap at the other end. Some of the clients got on the wrong line, swam almost all the way to grand cenote, upon reach the end of that line they couldn't see the gold line which is ~120ft and around a corner ahead. So they swam all the way back up the PDL line and several of them drowned.

Whole lot of messed up on this dive:
Snap & gap
Team cookie
Very long jump that if they had made would have been very close to an exit
Very large "team" (7 or 8?) on a guided dive
The guide was from Florida, she is still guiding to my knowledge.

I believe there is a ICURR report about it but it was 8 or 9 years ago and I don't know what it might be titled.

 

[Capt Jim Wyatt]

To contrast Mexico & Florida lines I think the following:

For the most part we do not Tee Gold lines in Florida. That was the philosophical approach used at the inception of the installation of Gold lines. There are obvious examples of this protocol being violated nowadays due to now prominent figures in the cave community who changed the protocol to fit their personal philosophies. Perhaps justifying these changes as an evolutionary approach.

See a discussion of the Gold lines protocols for installation at this link on the NSSCDS website: The Gold Line

In Mexico there has been no such philosophy that I can ascertain to run lines to prevent the lowest common denominator cave diver from becoming lost.

We plan cave dives based on the weakest link in the team, I think we should install lines with the same idea. Mexico does not seem to have done this.

@rddvet -- Clearly you are not amongst the least common denominator in the cave diver world and the lines in Mexico do not over challenge you.

 

[PfcAJ]

I guess I'm not following. You come to the end of a line that is actually the start/end of a jump what difference does it make? If you don't know where you're at your don't know where your at, right?
Maybe there's a part of the puzzle I'm not getting. I'd like more explanation. Because it's possible I agree with you but don't get what you're saying.

You might know where you're at if you get additional information.

Imagine you're at ginnie springs and SOMEHOW you end up turned around in the expressway/ mud tunnel area. If you came to the end of the line and spotted the mainline you'd probably be able to almost instantly sort out your position.

If there's a ton of distance between those two lines you will miss out on that critical piece of information. You could think you're in a totally different passage and you continue to slide farther down the incident pit.

 

[rddvet]

You might know where you're at if you get additional information.

Imagine you're at ginnie springs and SOMEHOW you end up turned around in the expressway/ mud tunnel area. If you came to the end of the line and spotted the mainline you'd probably be able to almost instantly sort out your position.

If there's a ton of distance between those two lines you will miss out on that critical piece of information. You could think you're in a totally different passage and you continue to slide farther down the incident pit.

That makes more sense and I can see you're point of view. Hard part to get past is why you're lost to begin with.

 

[boulderjohn]

Wasn't there a fatality in Mexico a few years ago where someone got disoriented and swam to the end of a line, couldn't see the mainline, then turned around to go back and drowned?

You might be referring to a different case than the one rjack321 referenced. The one I am referring to was only a couple years ago. In this case, it appears the diver was at fault for not marking his own jump properly. Confused by contradictory arrows leading to different places, he apparently tried to exit in the wrong direction after pulling his jump, realized his mistake, and did not have enough gas to get back. He was diving solo, so that is all an inference from his computer, etc.

Is that an example of a jump being too long? I don't see why someone losing their way means that jumps should be shorter for safety.

I have a couple of examples of long jumps. One case was caused by the fact that there was a small cenote opening nearby, so they wanted to avoid the dreaded danger of having a permanent line too near an opening. (I personally feel not having that line is more dangerous, but we who think like that are in a minority.) In this case, I knew roughly in which direction to to find the jump from looking at a map, and I set out in what I thought was the correct direction. It took a long time of meandering around and all of a 150 foot spool to find the jump.

I had another case in another cave that had a long line with no cenote nearby as an excuse for it. In this case I was following a well-known cave guide who took a long time to find it, afterward expressing great embarrassment about that.

These cases are not exactly dangerous, but they are a royal PITA when you using up tons of air looking around for something you should normally find in seconds. You can also end up spending a lot of time on your return trip, when you are potentially low on air, if you have to follow the zig zag path you took trying to find that elusive jump.

 

[rddvet]

@rddvet -- Clearly you are not amongst the least common denominator in the cave diver world and the lines in Mexico do not over challenge you.

I guees my instructors did a good enough job to keep me from making what appears to be dumb mistakes.

 

[PfcAJ]

I guees my instructors did a good enough job to keep me from making what appears to be dumb mistakes.

Don't let overconfidence be your weakness.

 

[rddvet]

I have a couple of examples of long jumps. One case was caused by the fact that there was a small cenote opening nearby, so they wanted to avoid the dreaded danger of having a permanent line too near an opening. (I personally feel not having that line is more dangerous, but we who think like that are in a minority.) In this case, I knew roughly in which direction to to find the jump from looking at a map, and I set out in what I thought was the correct direction. It took a long time of meandering around and all of a 150 foot spool to find the jump.
.

I ran out of line on my first attempt to find the paso de legarto jump on my own from zigzagging around. Once I found it I went back and cleaned up the line for a straighter path. It was an annoyance, but that's about it. I get AJ's point about long jumps, but I don't necessarily see it as any different than a hidden jump here.

 

[Capt Jim Wyatt]

so they wanted to avoid the dreaded danger of having a permanent line too near an opening. (I personally feel not having that line is more dangerous, but we who think like that are in a minority.

I am a member of this minority.