Half of Dead Divers on Their First 20 dives

[dumpsterDiver]

I personally think that the 20 dive/50% fatality statistic is a very crude metric and in and of itself, it has limited value.

However, when I taught diving, I used to tell my students that their first dives (even the training ones under my instruction) were statistically much more dangerous than ones they would be making in a year or two after they had completed a few courses and had been diving a while.

I did my best to make them be careful and to also recognize the benefit of additional supervised training dives or at least joining a dive club or somehow find experienced buddies who will get them through the first few dozen dives.

 

[halocline]

An interesting question would be, on any given day, what percentage of divers in the water (world-wide) have fewer than 20 dives, as opposed to more than 20 dives?

If it turns out that more than 50% of divers underwater on 'average' at any given time have fewer than 20 dives, which I believe is likely, then on average the inexperienced divers are actually safer! Of course, many of those underwater with fewer than 20 dives will likely be diving with an instructor during OW cert classes.

It just goes to show you how misleading statistics can be.

 

[soltari675]

Assuming that the statistics are solid, my guess would be that new divers are still getting use to being underwater. They see all the new stuff they've never seen before. They are distracted, and have little to no experience yet on what more experienced divers will think of as common sense. Since I am a new diver with right at 20 dives, I can kinda see the fault.

Distractions. A new diver sees things they have never seen before, or even thought they would ever see. They get fascinated. Distracted. Before they know it, they're not getting anymore air from their tank. OOA issue.

Fear. A new diver sees something they are afraid of. Say, a shark. They don't have the experience with animals yet. They only know the news reports that sharks bite. They panic, shoot for the surface like a torpedo. Possibly even holding their breath.

Inexperience. Sure, new divers are told about the "what ifs". But there is a difference at 20 feet with an instructor watching you untangle your gear, share air with a buddy, deal with uncontrolled ascents, etc, and being 60 feet down when it happens for real. Panic sets in. The new diver forgets the training, and goes for the surface or at their buddy who may be further than he/she looks.

Comfort. The more dives you do, the more comfortable you are doing it. That's been my experience and from what I read, that of many people. A person who is nervous, not use to their gear, not use to their environment, and trying to remember all those things they learned, I think is likely to make more mistakes than someone who has done it many times and is more laid back or calm.

These are just my thoughts why I believe it could happen. Not based on anything other than what I think seems to make sense.

 

[dumpsterDiver]

An interesting question would be, on any given day, what percentage of divers in the water (world-wide) have fewer than 20 dives, as opposed to more than 20 dives?

If it turns out that more than 50% of divers underwater on 'average' at any given time have fewer than 20 dives, which I believe is likely, then on average the inexperienced divers are actually safer! Of course, many of those underwater with fewer than 20 dives will likely be diving with an instructor during OW cert classes.

It just goes to show you how misleading statistics can be.

Do other people think that is probable? If so, the diving industry has some bigger problems than I thought.

 

[halocline]

Well, the thing that makes me think that a high percentage of people underwater at any given time are inexperienced is the often-mentioned fact that more than 90% of those getting OW certification do not continue to dive.

Lets say, for example, that you begin with zero divers, and assume that all divers will first complete OW. and that 10% of those will continue. Okay, so lets start with a sample of 1000 OW students per year. The first year, there would be 1100 divers, (the students plus the continuing) the second year 1200 (1000 new students, 100 continuing, 100 continuing from year 1) third year 1300, etc....so it takes a period of ten years for there to be equal numbers of new students and continuing divers. After ten years, theoretically there would be a majority of continuing divers, but only if ALL continuing divers continued for the entire ten years. Plus, this does not include non-certified divers such as discover scuba students, all of whom I would presume to be inexperienced (less than 20 dives).

Now, I guess diving has been reasonably popular in the general population for about 40 years, but certainly nowhere near 10% of those 'certified' forty years ago are still diving. There's definitely attrition. I also realize that my scenario is wildly over-simplified, but I would not be surprised at all to learn that if the 90% statistic is true, a majority of divers on any given day have less than 20 dives, if you were to count every diver underwater world-wide.

 

[DevonDiver]

Well, the thing that makes me think that a high percentage of people underwater at any given time are inexperienced is the often-mentioned fact that more than 90% of those getting OW certification do not continue to dive.

I've heard that 'statistic' mentioned often with the dive community, but never seen any references that support it. Frankly, I think it is very much an 'urban myth'.\

How could the statistic account for people who wouldn't dive again? Does someonbe survey every diver and ask them their future intentions?

At worst, the statistic should be:

.... more than 90% of those getting OW certification do not continue to dive regularly.

 

[Poggus]

This seems like a cheery thread!

Also, tl;dnr.

 

[Quero]

An interesting question would be, on any given day, what percentage of divers in the water (world-wide) have fewer than 20 dives, as opposed to more than 20 dives?

If it turns out that more than 50% of divers underwater on 'average' at any given time have fewer than 20 dives, which I believe is likely, then on average the inexperienced divers are actually safer! Of course, many of those underwater with fewer than 20 dives will likely be diving with an instructor during OW cert classes.

It just goes to show you how misleading statistics can be.

Do other people think that is probable? If so, the diving industry has some bigger problems than I thought.

That may depend on location. Using what I'm most familiar with (Thailand) as an example, the diving on the west coast of the country, in the Andaman Sea, is dominated by liveaboards. Yes we have our daytrip boats and our Open Water students, but many, many fewer people are on them on a given day than are on liveaboards. The main customer base for the liveaboards is experienced divers. Not many of the people I've booked on liveaboards have fewer than 20 dives, especially given the cost and the necessary planning to do a liveaboard trip. On the other side of the country, in the Gulf of Thailand, the diving is dominated by Open Water course training. One small island in the Gulf, Koh Tao, is one of the largest "producers" of newly-certified PADI OW divers worldwide. Over there in the Gulf, while there are a number of more experienced divers and a thriving technical diving community, I would expect that the proportion of divers with fewer than 20 dives to be much higher than over here on the Andaman side. I have no hard numbers to back this up, but judging by my own bookings, I think it's a reasonable hypothesis. If we were to take Thailand as a whole, I believe there are more divers coming to the Andaman side than there are going to the Gulf side, but I have to admit that this is also a guess based simply on the sheer numbers of dive businesses operating on either side of the country.

For a US-based example, a married-couple of instructor colleagues from Maui who came to dive with me here a few years ago told me that they do almost exclusively DSDs, so for that particular location, swarms of inexperienced divers underwater seem to be the norm, but on the Big Island, where I've done most of my Hawaii diving, the boats I've been on have had mostly hobbyists (except for the night manta dives, which... well, never again).

 

[halocline]

I believe the 90% of divers not continuing to dive comes from PADI, and I'm not sure how they came up with it. Whether or not someone "ever" dives again or simply dives so infrequently as to never make it to the 20th dive is not really important for the sake of this thread. Given PADI's exhaustive market research, I suspect that the figure is not too far off. But, I don't know for sure.

Of course it will vary widely by location, but famous dive destinations are going to be very skewed towards experienced divers. Then think of all the inland dive shops turning out students but without much of a local diving community....those will be skewed towards inexperienced (I.E. student) divers.

I obviously could not say for sure what the ratio is, but my suspicion is that there is a surprisingly high percentage of divers with fewer than 20 dives in the water.

This sort of reminds me of the auto insurance statistic that says drivers are much more likely to get into an accident very close to their home, with the implication that it's more dangerous to drive near your home. The reason for the preponderance of accidents close to home is because you do a high proportion of your driving near your home, not because its any more dangerous.

Here, the implication is that divers with less than 20 dives are more likely to die diving than those with more dives, and I don't believe that this statistic actually shows that; at least not until there is some data on the percentage of new (under 20 dives) divers to more experienced.

 

[Bubbletrubble]

Here, the implication is that divers with less than 20 dives are more likely to die diving than those with more dives, and I don't believe that this statistic actually shows that; at least not until there is some data on the percentage of new (under 20 dives) divers to more experienced.

I'd recommend going one step further than simply figuring out the composition of the diving population (stratified by experience). You need to know more than that because a diver's experience level says nothing about how many dives he/she contributed to the data pool. In the most rigorous method, for a given time frame in a specific geographic region, you would need to track who is actually conducting dives -- i.e., dives done by inexperienced (≤ 20) diver vs. dives done by experienced (> 20) divers -- and the outcome of each dive (death or survival). It's a Herculean task for sure because you'd have to figure out how to account for every dive being conducted within a certain time frame (calendar year?). Maybe some small Scandinavian country with good record-keeping skills can do this study. Getting this data in the U.S. would be difficult (too many divers, too spread out geographically, personal privacy rights, etc.), to say the least.