CT-Rich
Contributor
Just finished this book by Joe Haberstroh. It was an interesting read about the string of deaths associated with the Famous Charter boat Seeker and the wreck the Andrea Doria. A pretty good, although a little on the morbid side. The author examines the string of five fatalities over a two season period (1998-99), all associated with one charter boat, the Seeker. The question the book posits is whether there was an underlying cause for the fatalities, or if it was simply a issue of numbers; if you run a large number of divers out to a high risk destination, you will have a larger share of the fatalities as the Seeker's skipper contended.
While each accident had its own story and coarse, I did see the competitive atmosphere of the Seeker stoking the fires of some of the divers to take unnecessary risks and some of divers should simply not have been out there in the first place. Mostly it was a good cautionary tale about divers pushing to far and too fast to do some of the riskiest dives imaginable and the potential cost for stretching the envelope on skills and businesses allowing it to happen.
I think this a great book for divers who want to start going tech right after certification, and maybe their instructors. The beauty of diving a wreck like the Andrea Doria, shouldn't be the dive itself, but the journey, the hundreds of dives required to prepare for that wreck safely and the enjoyment of those along the way.
Full disclosure, this is not my type of diving so I speak only as an arm chair expert (perhaps only doing elaborately complex dives in the hypothetical waters of Scubaboard....)
While each accident had its own story and coarse, I did see the competitive atmosphere of the Seeker stoking the fires of some of the divers to take unnecessary risks and some of divers should simply not have been out there in the first place. Mostly it was a good cautionary tale about divers pushing to far and too fast to do some of the riskiest dives imaginable and the potential cost for stretching the envelope on skills and businesses allowing it to happen.
I think this a great book for divers who want to start going tech right after certification, and maybe their instructors. The beauty of diving a wreck like the Andrea Doria, shouldn't be the dive itself, but the journey, the hundreds of dives required to prepare for that wreck safely and the enjoyment of those along the way.
Full disclosure, this is not my type of diving so I speak only as an arm chair expert (perhaps only doing elaborately complex dives in the hypothetical waters of Scubaboard....)
