New Jersey woman dead - Key West

[DandyDon]

Article says that she was reportedly an experienced diver with over a 100 previous dives.
At 100 dives you are just "really" learning what you doing. Additionally if 100 dives are spread over several years that is NOT an experienced diver.

Of course not, but it's a hundred more than the typical news reporterw has experienced. Typical articles of divers using oxygen and others are simply because most reporters have not trained for scuba. It might be worse if they all had a dozen dives and an AOW card.

 

[keyshunter]

Article says that she was reportedly an experienced diver with over a 100 previous dives.
At 100 dives you are just "really" learning what you doing. Additionally if 100 dives are spread over several years that is NOT an experienced diver.

One would think that a press reporter in this area would be pretty knowledgeable about diving. From reading what they write, that does not appear to be the case. In fact, I would venture that the average reporter in the Keys knows far more about North Korean nukes than about diving.

Number of dives is a very poor indicator of "experience". Someone with 100 dives may indeed be experienced and a person with 1000 dives (other than knowing how to breath under water) may not. It depends upon the definition of "experienced" that one is using.

 

[Dan]

To me 100 dive experience is still considered as a beginner. Flash back to 10 years ago, I can tell you my 100 dive / 2 year diving experience case. I still had pretty crappy buoyancy skill, ear clogging up by the end of dive trips, mask fogging up due to exhaling though my nose (bad habit that I finally got rid of) & consuming air like a hog. I started to feel more comfortable & confidence with my diving skill after about 200 dive / 4 year diving experience.

 

[Wookie]

To me 100 dive experience is still considered as a beginner. Flash back to 10 years ago, I can tell you my 100 dive / 2 year diving experience case. I still had pretty crappy buoyancy skill, ear clogging up by the end of dive trips, mask fogging up due to exhaling though my nose (bad habit that I finally got rid of) & consuming air like a hog. I started to feel more comfortable & confidence with my diving skill after about 200 dive / 4 year diving experience.

But did you do it naked?

 

[Dan]

But did you do it naked?

Too late. I didn't know about it until I got my 500 dives.

 

[DandyDon]

As I said, a hundred diver is not necessarily experienced to us...

Of course not, but it's a hundred more than the typical news reporterw has experienced. Typical articles of divers using oxygen and others are simply because most reporters have not trained for scuba. It might be worse if they all had a dozen dives and an AOW card.

 

[Chavodel8en]

"experienced" isn't an exact word, and really its a gradient.

However, I would generally describe someone with 100 dives as experienced. Not necessarily an expert, but no longer a beginner, i.e, experienced.

If a diver hasn't mastered the basics of diving by 100 dives (assuming continual diving), its probably not experience that is holding them back.

And many an experienced diver makes mistakes -- sometimes BIG mistakes.

Lots of inaccuracies and poor wording in reports, but I wouldn't call this one out, especially as the reporter qualified their wording with a number of dives.

 

[boulderjohn]

Clearly when she got down the first time she had enough weight (she did not swim down. She sank down). More than once I have seen crew or instructors add more weight to make their life simpler, namely get diver underwater, as opposed to teaching them how to properly descend.

You are right--if you descend easily, you have at least enough weight--maybe more. If you keep bobbing up, as in this case, you don't need more weight--you need less. Every pound you are overweighted requires nearly a pint of air in the BCD to compensate. An overweighted diver has an over-inflated BCD, and that huge air bubble is reacting to changes in depth. If the diver goes up a few feet--which happens a lot because the overweighted diver is swimming vertically and finning like mad--the BCD expands and takes the diver to the surface. Once there, the diver asks for more weight.

The real question is: Why do people over-weight themselves so consistently? And the answer IMHO is it's because we, as an industry, have taught them to dive that way. Back in basic class or on a checkout dive with five or six people already on the bottom, when someone can't descend they aren't told "Hey, let's take 15 minutes to do some really good weight-checking for you." What they're told is, "Throw another 5 pounds in your pocket and let's go." So that becomes their solution to any descent issue. Add another 5 pounds.

Going on from the comment above....

It starts in the pool, where divers MUST be significantly overweighted in order to do all their skills while firmly planted on the bottom on their knees. Then they go out to dive still overweighted, and as I described above, when the overinflated BCDs they need to wear bring them to the surface, the DMs slap some more weight on to make it worse.

 

[Saniflush]

"experienced" isn't an exact word, and really its a gradient.

However, I would generally describe someone with 100 dives as experienced. Not necessarily an expert, but no longer a beginner, i.e, experienced.

If a diver hasn't mastered the basics of diving by 100 dives (assuming continual diving), its probably not experience that is holding them back.

And many an experienced diver makes mistakes -- sometimes BIG mistakes.

Lots of inaccuracies and poor wording in reports, but I wouldn't call this one out, especially as the reporter qualified their wording with a number of dives.

It is also relative.

Someone like me who has less than 50 dives may be prone to consider someone with 100 dives experienced and they may well be. However, that same person with 100 dives is hopefully looking at those who have more than that, not only as experienced but as someone who they can garner knowledge from.

At the end of the day (at least in my case) I want to find the people that I consider more experienced because I know I am going to have the opportunity to learn new techniques and types of diving.

 

[boulderjohn]

It is also relative.

Someone like me who has less than 50 dives may be prone to consider someone with 100 dives experienced and they may well be. However, that same person with 100 dives is hopefully looking at those who have more than that, not only as experienced but as someone who they can garner knowledge from.

At the end of the day (at least in my case) I want to find the people that I consider more experienced because I know I am going to have the opportunity to learn new techniques and types of diving.

When I had about 100 dives, I signed up to dive with a resort operation that had many boats and attempted to put groups together with similar experience. I was by far their most experienced customer. It was a problem for me because I wanted to do some of the most advanced dives in the area, and they could not get enough divers with that much experience and that interest to meet their minimum number for a boat--4. I later switched to another operator with a lot of boats that was known for attracting the most experienced divers. I had more success with that operation,but I was still one of their most experienced customers.

Divers with many hundreds or thousands of dives may look back at 100 dives and rightfully consider that to be relatively inexperienced, but the reality is that a diver with 100 dives is pretty darned experienced when compared to the totality of the diving world, at least well within the top 10%. A lot does depend upon the quality and variety of those experiences--100 easy resort dives following a DM is very different from 100 dives that include a lot of advanced training--but it is still very accurate to describe a diver with 100 dives as experienced.