Deaths at Eagles Nest - Homosassa FL

[beaverdivers]

I'm curious if anyone knows who sold him the tech gear? I just ask because it seems at least every shop I have brought doubles or stage bottles from have asked me show some type of certification that would show a understanding of tech driving.

Also no LDS I visit would let me buy a complete gear setup for a non diver knowingly.

Daru

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C-card is needed to buy gas ( air ).

 

[HIGHwing]

C-card is needed to buy gas ( air ).

That's why people just buy portable compressors.

 

[VMI08]

You can buy any gear you want without certification ... you don't even have to leave your home. And the only card you need will have been issued by a bank, not a certification agency.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

This right here... The gear could have been purchased at a LDS or it could have been purchased online... Cylinders are cylinders and regulators are regulators... I don't know of any LDS that wouldn't sell me a regulator because I have this cert instead of that cert... Or a BPW, set of cylinders etc... They know you have "A CERT" and that is good enough... Now getting fills is a different matter... I could see a shop asking for a particular cert card for specific items like a CCR unit... Tec computers and the rest? no way.

 

[flots am]

I thought it was in the materials, but maybe it was just our instructors, but I left OW with the impression that diving in an overhead environment would kill you immediately.

It's in there, but is very clinical, in the same sense that the Tylenol label says "liver damage may occur". It doesn't say that it's in all sorts of places you don't expect and that an overdose is easy to do and will destroy your liver and kill you.

Some instructors do mention death. I specifically mention a couple of world-class Darwin award winners, but it really needs to be part of the training materials.

 

[Skittl1321]

C-card is needed to buy gas ( air ).

The Dad was a certified diver though, so he had a c-card - they don't ask you what you are going to use the tanks for when they fill them, and I they don't limit you to 1 tank per person so you can't give the tank to someone else.

I mean, they were just diving air, weren't they?

 

[flots am]

OW is not safe if done without the proper training and preparation to the depths these two went to ...

They were way beyond the NDL. A virtual overhead is just as bad (and more deceiving) than a physical overhead. When I said "Open Water" dives, I was referring to dives within OW limits. It's certainly possible to die without a physical overhead.

 

[mizzie]

The thing that angers me about these types of accidents is that it gives people the wrong idea about scuba and scuba divers. Or maybe I should say a skewed idea. I've had many conversations about this with my husband, who is training for his pilot's license. He gets very mad when he hears of aviation accidents caused by people eligible for the Darwin Award. It makes aviation look *dangerous and pilots look reckless. It also causes the government to put even more regulations in place, which may or may not be helpful. He already has a book on aviation laws and regulations that's, and I'm not even exaggerating, about two inches thick, and you can bet that student pilots are tested on it.

My fear is that more accidents like this will turn the governmental eye to scuba and make it that much harder to be certified and go diving. We are now mostly self regulated and that works just fine if we can all use basic common sense. There is truly no way this father didn't know that what he was doing was dangerous. I think the problem was the "nothing bad happened last time/it won't happen to us" mentality. That kind of thinking just doesn't work, in scuba or in life.


* I fully realize that both aviation and scuba have their risks, and so, can be dangerous. But I wouldn't classify them as such, as a general rule. With training and common sense, you can reduce the risk to acceptable levels.

 

[boulderjohn]

It's a long way from the entrance to 233'. This probably wasn't done by accident.

...We know to get to 233ft, they intentionally continued the dive despite passing warning signs, and several good opportunities to turn around and exit in the water. They didn't stop in the solution tube, they didn't stop on the debris pile, they didn't stop before entering the tunnels.

OK, then, forget my speculation in the previous post. I was trying to present a plausible explanation for something that made no sense whatsoever. We are now left with something that makes no sense whatsoever.

Despite their lack of formal training, everything we have heard says that they have received some sort of training, even if only (at a minimum) reading online discussions. Pictures of them show their gear looking properly set up. They have been apparently not only been diving in caves for a while, they have apparently being doing decompression dives for a while. However they got it, they apparently had at least a basic idea of what they were doing.

The problem is that the details of this dive do not indicate that they had even that basic idea of what they were doing. They went to 233 feet, leaving their decompression gas near the entry point (which is common),and at some point the son ran out of air and they had to share air on exit. I have been reading about this incident on several forums, and I don't see any indication of a gear failure causing that problem. Even if there had been such a failure, following the most basic rules of cave gas management, which they should have known, a catastrophic gear failure on the son's part at the worst possible point in the dive should have gotten them to their decompression tanks. Now, they did almost get there, but what would they have found when they did? According to reports, they did not have enough gas in their decompression tanks to come anywhere close to the amount needed for the required decompression after a dive to 233 feet.

So that means there were two complete failures in the most basic knowledge required to do that dive, knowledge they should have picked up easily in whatever informal training they had received.

 

[gianaameri]

OK, then, forget my speculation in the previous post. I was trying to present a plausible explanation for something that made no sense whatsoever. We are now left with something that makes no sense whatsoever.

Despite their lack of formal training, everything we have heard says that they have received some sort of training, even if only (at a minimum) reading online discussions. Pictures of them show their gear looking properly set up. They have been apparently not only been diving in caves for a while, they have apparently being doing decompression dives for a while. However they got it, they apparently had at least a basic idea of what they were doing.

The problem is that the details of this dive do not indicate that they had even that basic idea of what they were doing. They went to 233 feet, leaving their decompression gas near the entry point (which is common),and at some point the son ran out of air and they had to share air on exit. I have been reading about this incident on several forums, and I don't see any indication of a gear failure causing that problem. Even if there had been such a failure, following the most basic rules of cave gas management, which they should have known, a catastrophic gear failure on the son's part at the worst possible point in the dive should have gotten them to their decompression tanks. Now, they did almost get there, but what would they have found when they did? According to reports, they did not have enough gas in their decompression tanks to come anywhere close to the amount needed for the required decompression after a dive to 233 feet.

So that means there were two complete failures in the most basic knowledge required to do that dive, knowledge they should have picked up easily in whatever informal training they had received.

233 feet (71 meters) deep on Air (if I understand correctly from the post that this is what they did) in a cave is in itself crazy/stupid/non-sense.

It goes against any training, common sense, and any of the worst advise/non-sense ever posted on an internet forum/online discussion.

You would be narked and unable to perform the cave dive safely at 71 meters on Air.

The Dad as a certified diver should/would have known that (i.e. Air at 71 meters is a bad idea even on an OW dive).

Maybe they went to 71 meters in error (narked/disoriented...), not the original plan?

 

[ianr33]

They went to 233 feet, leaving their decompression gas near the entry point (which is common),and at some point the son ran out of air and they had to share air on exit. I have been reading about this incident on several forums, and I don't see any indication of a gear failure causing that problem. Even if there had been such a failure, following the most basic rules of cave gas management, which they should have known, a catastrophic gear failure on the son's part at the worst possible point in the dive should have gotten them to their decompression tanks.

Were the "decompression tanks" high O2 or just air?

This might be helpful


Depending which way they went, 230 feet is either around 200 feet or 300 feet of horizontal penetration. Might only take 4 minutes to get there from the top of the mound.