scuba diver passed away

[bwerb]

radagalf once bubbled...
Have you been driving in Vancouver and across that horrendous bridge again???

Man...I see so many "boneheads" while driving in this city it's absolutely unreal. You really don't like Lion's Gate do you, stall one car and that's it for you huh?

Do you remember the drivers licence scandal a few years back where they found some of the driving instructors and driving schools in Richmond were taking bribes and they announced that "up to 30,000 licences" were illegally obtained from this scam?. But...good old "politically correct" government response to this was to let everyone keep their licences because they couldn't be totally sure which drivers didn't have the skills to continue and it wouldn't be "fair" to make everyone come back for a retest. Oh for everyone else around the world reading this...the government also controls the car insurance...hmm...we keep the bad drivers on the road and crank-up the insurance for everyone...yeah...good call!

Brian

 

[MikeFerrara]

At least in this coumtry driver training and testing is a complete joke and a total wast of time and money.

IMO, diver training is going the same rout.

Apparantly the point is that everyone must pass.

With the skill level of divers I see in the water I am really suprised that the safety record is as good as it is. I guess it's because most divers dive under some level of supervision at divesite where the dives are essentially pre-planned for them. It's underwater tourism and that's ok because there is clearly a market for it but they should stop calling it diving. Calling it diving confuses the issue and endangers people by letting them believe they're divers when they're not.

 

[Walter]

........Mike, I disagree.

"driver training and testing is a complete joke and a total wast of time and money............diver training is going the same rout."

I am forced to disagree, because with a few exceptions, it's been worse than driver training for years.

 

[PnL]

MikeFerrara once bubbled...
At least in this coumtry driver training and testing is a complete joke and a total wast of time and money.

IMO, diver training is going the same rout.

I agree that there are exceptionally poor drivers out there and I'd love to see a 5-year retest which is strict enough so people really begin to see that having a driver's license is a privelage and not a right. But having said that, it really comes down to how much the student wants to learn. Some people just don't care and have a very laisez-faire attitude towards these things (unfortunately).

As far as diving classes, my wife and I took them very seriously and we questioned what ever we did not understand. We were fairly thorough in this for one reason ... our lives depended on our skills and knowledge! I'm sure there are divers out there whose ego's are much larger then their logical conscience, but hopefully they'll stick out and I can avoid them on a dive . And hopefully, most diver's will realize that its their lives that are important, not their ego's.

One important difference between drivers and divers - a driving accident can impact the lives of innocent bystanders/drivers. Ignorant divers, hopefully, won't take down a whole boat-ful of divers because of their carelessness.

 

[MikeFerrara]

I see your point and I stand corrected, walter.

Walter once bubbled...
........Mike, I disagree.

"driver training and testing is a complete joke and a total wast of time and money............diver training is going the same rout."

I am forced to disagree, because with a few exceptions, it's been worse than driver training for years.

 

[raxafarian]

PnL once bubbled...




One important difference between drivers and divers - a driving accident can impact the lives of innocent bystanders/drivers. Ignorant divers, hopefully, won't take down a whole boat-ful of divers because of their carelessness.

What about the boat captains, dm's, and other divers that will have to live with what happened? Questioning what they could have done different or how they could have prevented the incident, even when nothing could have been done differently and it's not their fault?

 

[Dryglove]

raxafarian once bubbled...



What about the boat captains, dm's, and other divers that will have to live with what happened? Questioning what they could have done different or how they could have prevented the incident, even when nothing could have been done differently and it's not their fault?

Thats human nature but life goes on.Same as a major auto accident where lives are lost.Even though you had nothing to do with it you still tend to wonder the how's and why it happened and it tends to rattle you for a while.You make yourself a more aware driver and life goes on.You just dont quit driving.The same with diving unless it rattles you so much you give it up.Thats a personal choice.

 

[Genesis]

You are responsible for your own reaction to events around you.

To argue that something I do "affects others" if I choose to off myself by whatever means (diving, jumping off a bridge, etc) is to travel down a road that allows you to choose how much I eat, what (and when) I drink, etc.

Now, if the effect is DIRECT - such as my DAUGHTER being the one doing the complaining - that's a different matter. But if you as a person on a DIVE BOAT get bent out of shape because I get bent (or dead), that's your issue - not mine.

I can no more control your reaction to events in the world around you than you can control mine.

And to claim that such is a reason for me to temper my enthusiasm for something I enjoy - even if risky - is to travel one more step down the road towards you choosing for me where the line of "acceptable risk" to my own life and health lies.

That way lies fascism - and madness.

 

[raviepoo]

lal7176 once bubbled...

Same as a major auto accident where lives are lost.Even though you had nothing to do with it you still tend to wonder the how's and why it happened and it tends to rattle you for a while.

I wonder if the (then) teenage boy who killed my father with his pickup truck ever thinks about the repercussions of what happened on that night in 1986. The cops determined that technically no one was at fault for the accident. But I still wonder if the boy just got on about his business the following day as if nothing had happened. Does he ever think about the man who lay bleeding on the memphis roadway, or the wife and children, the father, the sister, the friends, and employees, and colleagues whose lives were altered as a result?

The impact on my family, while devastating, was quite minor in the scheme of things. But many, many people outside our family were harmed.

One second earlier or later, one foot to the left or the right and nothing out of the ordinary would have happened. But my father in his rental car and the boy in his truck were in precisely the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. That one instant of bad luck led to the closing of one of the last few shoe factories in New England. It left hundreds of people out of work. It undermined the tax base of a small town in New Endland. It was one more nail in the coffin of the domestic shoe industry. It opened the door to foreign imports a tiny crack wider than before.

I wonder how many worlds end when someone has a heart atack under the water, and how the bystanders on the boat deal with standing on the outer fringes of loss. I hope I never find out. If something happens on a boat that I'm on I want to know that I've done everything possible to help the victim and the people who will suffer if the victim doesn't survive. That's what first aid and rescue training is for.

I still wonder what the person who started this thread was ranting about. How odd that she hasn't come back to fill us in.

 

[raxafarian]

Genesis once bubbled...
And to claim that such is a reason for me to temper my enthusiasm for something I enjoy - even if risky - is to travel one more step down the road towards you choosing for me where the line of "acceptable risk" to my own life and health lies.

That way lies fascism - and madness.

What are you rambling about?

Nobody said anything about complaining or tempering your anything.

The point that was mentioned was "diving is NOT like driving.... driving can impact others, diving won't"

I was just disagreeing with that statement. Maybe I wasn't clear. If somebody dies while diving there certainly can be an impact on others. The charter captain that tried to perform cpr.... the diver that has to recover the body, the buddy second-guessing, etc.

If you are insisting that you could perform one of these actions and not give a second thought to it.... don't know what to tell you. I wouldn't be "bent out of shape", but I would have to say that there would be an impact.