beanojones
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Appropriate dive planning and buddy checks are not "ritual". They're an integral part of diving ... which is why they're part of every agency's OW curriculum. The reason so many people don't do them is because their "scuba instructor" taught them to be dependent on someone else to do those things for them ... which is how threads like this one come to be ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
Did you actually read the content of the first post, or just the thread title? I'll quote it here just so we all remember what the topic at hand is.
First dive in a new location (St Eustatius). Heavy (for us) current at surface. Descended and regs sucked water. Returned to surface, changed regs and went down again with 2200 lbs. A bit anxious due to new environment and surface conditions. Had 1800 at bottom( 50 ft). Swam around a bit and signalled to DM at half a tank. Went a little bit more (1st mistake) and signalled to DM 1800 (but I meant to signal 1300). As with every dive guide I have ever had, she turned and went further from ascent line. Now the anxiety increased and air consumption with it. Back to ascent line at 500 and we began sharing air. My wife ran our of air shortly after me, she probably was overanxious about me.
We all returned safely and ascended slowly. So a happy ending. But we did both run out, and good thing there were TWO dive guides!
This was a failure of in water dive procedure, and inappropriate ocean behavior and had nothing to do with a failure of dive planning or gas planning or any of those rituals. Though it was a failure of dive preparation, (which see below)
---------- Post added July 7th, 2013 at 04:08 AM ----------
Diving without having some forethought about gas planning to me seems a lot like getting directions where you are told to "take a left about a mile before you get to the church." You know, just divine any of the answers you need. Although, I think anyone who was semi-conscious while reading through any part of this thread would realize that this approach did not work out very well for the OP.
And as far as head to toe checks go, you are welcome to splash into the water as unaware of the status of your equipment as you like. As for me (and my dive buddy), I like to make sure that regulators work, that inflators work and are still attached to BCs, that masks are not leaking, that fins are attached securely, etc. before I splash into the water. But maybe one day I will be a dive pro like you and won't think that I need any of my equipment to be in proper working order in order to enjoy a dive.
Are you trying to have a conversation here is Basic Scuba Discussions or just be snide? Because you started your post about gas planning (nothing to do with the OP), threw in some insults, and then talked about pre-dive safety checks, and then added some extraneous insults.
The problem is that gas planning (whatever that means to you) has nothing to do with the rest of your post, or the OP. Though I think a Pre-Dive safety check (that done properly takes about 15 seconds) is a good thing, it still has nothing to do with the problems in the OP. Getting ready to go diving does. That's what the OP failed to do, and that's what got him in trouble. It's the diver, not the equipment that failed on this dive.
He failed to get ready to go diving precisely not because he needs to do more unnecessary ritual before going diving. Giving someone who is not ready to go diving before they hit the water more things to fail to do is not even slightly the solution to the problem of the OP.
And that exactly is where me being an experienced dive pro (as in someone who actually does this for a living, and has done this and nothing else for a iiving for a long time) comes in. Because yammering on about DIR/GUE or gas planning or whatever is not going to stop people from getting failing to ready to go diving before they get into the water. After all, the GUE OW video is just a bunch of bad ocean behaviors on entry and exits on display, most of which centered on the fact that no one in the video was ever shown preparing to get in the water. Not the instructor, not the assistants, not the students. ANd it showed in their utterly sloppy ocean behavior. (Behavior that would be dangerous in most ocean conditions, like, say the ocean conditions the OP was in) .
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