Instruction question: to spin or not to spin

[BabyDuck]

good point, james. and something my instructor brought up. in class, when we'd do air shares, the next move after giving someone a reg was to get on the line. maybe you didn't silt it out in that moment of stank, but fin kicks can happen in an emergency and you probably did and the viz can go to hell quickly. i think his point is that we spend so much time doing lights-out-air-shares not because of the unlikely septuple failure of all lights and a gas source, but because mucking up your viz while getting settled air sharing is so likely. i dunno, probably that was everyone else's first thought, but it was a bit of a lightbulb for me.

 

[ucfdiver]

How do you know thats what most people consider a complete silt out?

Did you miss all the pissing and moaning that happened when they were exploring the "new ginnie" and lowered the viz to 20ft, canceling classes, saying it was putting everyone in danger and reporting it to the police?

 

[SuPrBuGmAn]

Regulars at Ginnie just don't register as most people to me I guess?

 

[AndyNZ]

Andy said earlier (and he is right--it was his thread that inspired this one) that he spins in wreck diving to make it harder. It makes it harder to find the line, but are the skills any harder? Don't you still exactly do the same thing, only without the chance to think about your orientation?

A minor clarification, in the wreck I don't spin... wrecks are generally a much more confined space so the chances of losing complete orientation is rare. The "message" is to use what you know about your environment to direct your search as best you can.

Part of the challenge I have teaching our advanced wreck (well, intermediate wreck...) is time and keeping a course to something that doesn't mean more than a weekend away. This makes it tough to do many lost line drills in the wreck - there are too many other skills that I think are more important (in the context of this particular course).

What I have been toying with is whether to conduct lost line drills in an open water dive prior to doing it in the wreck, but after doing land drills. Start by reinforcing the message "it can take you a long time to find" by spinning, then introduce the idea of using environmental clues to improve the search. So the skill is conducted in different ways at different times for different reasons. Some of the ideas that Trace and Rob have given me have caused me to think about this in different ways.

It's very much work in progress, and am finding this discussion useful and fascinating.

 

[Dive-aholic]

Trace, I am in no way advocating standards against spinning. I prefer vague standards that allow instructors to teach differently based on their own experiences.

DA, how do you know the location of your instructor? I pu my students in a completely blacked out mask. I get right in their faces to check gas pressure throughout the exercise and they never know I'm there. I know there &21 @?-32)83"2- 3$&3 4" 3$@- +@3$ '@6$3- ")3, but I'm not one of them. I've already had one issue that could have gone bad if it were a different student and no lights.

Richard, I teaxh the ceiling return but it's still in the form of a spoke. The spoke shape starts at the tie off.



Choosing the location of this drill is very important for several reasons. Dirst and foremost is cave conservation. After that I look for neutral locations with some landmarks but nothing real obvious. Out of the flow (and there are locations in JB like that), fairly flat area (meaning no slope), and moderate size.



James, a few vocal divers doesn't mean most people.

 

[BabyDuck]

rob, i think i'd know where the instructor is because as i spun i'd feel hands on me from the same spot. like spinning before 'pin the tail on the donkey' - the spinner doesn't move as they spin the spinnee.

now if the instructor was changing his or her location during the spin, then where the hands came from wouldn't be helpful, of course.

 

[LiteHedded]

In my experience, if you're in a real silt out, you see it coming at the very least, seconds in advance and know to start getting near the line. The worst I've had was a small passage where my buddies argon bottle got tangled behind me, and the passage was siphoning so I got somewhat blindsided. A 30 second pause (I grabbed the ceiling to avoid "drifting") and viz was back up to a few ft, the line was quickly found, and we were on our way. It was easy to find it because I had seen passages like this before, and knew how fast they could get nasty, so I was much closer to the line than in let's say, the gallery or pothole line.

Here's an example video I took last weekend-
Minor siltout... on Vimeo

You can see that even in what most would consider a "complete silt out", there's still 2-3ft viz other than around the 40 second mark where it goes down a bit. That's quite a bit of viz in a small passage, especially with even mediocre line and situational awareness. Furthermore, we knew before going down this passage what we were getting into, so you can see that we return to a completely full stage bottle as a "safety".

I don't believe that spinning a student simulates a real life scenario, and if it does, there's more important issues to deal with other than lost line drills. I also don't believe it's an entirely bad thing, either. Both methods prove the point that the only good way to survive a silt out is to know it's coming. I took the lost line drill as more of a lesson on "here's why you don't get yourself into this situation" rather than "here's how to get out".

oooh ooooh
I wanna play!
this one's kinda nasty. I think i win cus most of it came from the ceiling

 

[ucfdiver]

oooh ooooh
I wanna play!
this one's kinda nasty. I think i win cus most of it came from the ceiling

You certainly won the silt battle last time we dove together!

 

[LiteHedded]

BWAHAHAHAHA
what's the point of training if you don't get to use it?

 

[ucfdiver]

BWAHAHAHAHA
what's the point of training if you don't get to use it?

I'll take credit for leading us where we didn't plan on going if you take credit for blitzing 1000ft of the cave

Scootering out in 10ft of viz does make the dive more memorable, so thanks for that.