Well......it happened again! :(

[Diver0001]

Well,,ill watch the local news at 11and see what happened , if this has happened again we are going to have to make some changes in educating boaters about dive flags , this is getting ridiculous and scary.

In the interior of BC they used to teach divers (seriously) to put the flag where they were *not* diving to keep the boaters away. A sort of flypaper......

There is another thread about this. It sounds like the victim died.

R..

 

[Ontario Diver]

Prove it.

Prove that the boater knew what he was doing.

Prove that he saw the flag.

Prove that he knew what it meant.

You will have to prove all of that and more in an American court, and you will have to prove it to the point where no one doubts it.

They are well protected, I doubt anyone's ever been convicted of vehicular manslaughter in a boat in this country.

In Canada, if you are in "care and control" of a vehicle - you are required to be in total control of the vehicle.

You were the driver, there was an accident, as the driver it is your responsibility to be in control - there was an accident therefore you weren't in control thus it is your fault unless you can show mitigating circumstances.

And in Canada, kill or injure someone with a motor vehicle: You are going to be punished probably with jail time. Happens all of the time.

 

[diverlady]

In Canada, if you are in "care and control" of a vehicle - you are required to be in total control of the vehicle.

You were the driver, there was an accident, as the driver it is your responsibility to be in control - there was an accident therefore you weren't in control thus it is your fault unless you can show mitigating circumstances.

And in Canada, kill or injure someone with a motor vehicle: You are going to be punished probably with jail time. Happens all of the time.

And to further that, accidents aren't referred to as "accidents" anymore (at least in Ontario). They're now called "collisions" since the word "accident" implies a lack of fault and there is always someone deemed to be "at fault".

Diverlady

 

[sparky30]

I will be willing to bet the people operating the boat don't even know what happened. If you have been in a boat at any appreciable speed, you know how loud the wind noise and engine noise is. You could hit something and very easily never know it.

Being a boater and a diver I have I'd like to add a comment. I have to agree with you that dive flags are hard to see.. Especially in 1 foor chop.
However, that is all the more reason to slow down so you can react in time.. Speeding down the lake and saying I had no time to react is the same as driving your car down a residential street with children playing and runing someone eover.. The "i had no time to react" excuse won't work.. The same applies to the lakes..in a busy recreational waterway like Lake Simcoe you can expect divers near show.. just like swimmers.. a swimmer in the water is even more difficult to see than a dive flag..If you are in an area where you might encounter swimmers or diver, I would (and do) slow down to a manageable speed.. something that gives me time to react.. and if that means a hard turn where all the dishes fall out of the cupboard, so be it..

 

[Groundhog246]

If he was only 50 feet from the dock, he may have been "speeding". The following is an excerpt from the Safe Boating Guide.
Shore-line speed restrictions
Certain provinces have adopted a province-wide restriction to limit speed to 10 km/h within 30 metres from shore on all waters within their boundaries, except for:

waterskiing, where the vessel follows a trajectory perpendicular to the shore; or

in rivers of less than 100 m in width, or canals or buoyed channels; or

in waters where another speed is prescribed under these or other regulations.
This limit is not posted. These restrictions apply in the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and British Columbia (Inland waters only).

As far as comparing this to an automobile collission. A diver is more akin to someone out running (or jogging) at night, clad all in black, and running across an intersection in a non residential area, not like a kid running across the street in front of his house in the middle of the afternoon. While you might have been on a crosswalk and have the right of way, after the police look at what you were wearing and lighting, as long as it doesn;t appear the the driver was speeding or failed to stop for a red light, etc, the odds are real good that the driver will not be charged.

I don't want to sound unsympathetic to the victim here. We dove Big Bay Point on July 1 and noted a lot of boat traffic. I still can't figure why so many of them run so close to shore (maybe they figure they can swim to shore if something happens the boat). Noted the same thing yesterday at Cedar Hill. Why, in a bay that's miles wide at that point, would you run up the shore less than 500 feet off the beach? Maybe it's the same reason PWC's (jetskis, etc) need to play close to beaches and swimming areas. They need an audience. Hey, look at me, I've got a boat, see how fast I can go, see how big, white, shiny it is. What they really should get is a LIFE!!
When we entered/exited at Big Bay we nearly crawled along the bottom until we were well along the dock and right beside it before surfacing. And we nearly got jumped on by a couple of kids jumping/swimming off the dock.

 

[advtech]

Several years ago, I took a course with someone south of the border. I don't remember which state he was from, but he did tell me an intersting story. After a couple of accidents involving boats and divers with flags, the states diving council petitioned the governmemt to make dive flags law as far as both using them and obeying them. Problem is, the state did it, but went a little overboard. They figured that if 100' was good, 100 yards was better. So no0w flags must be used. Boater must stay 100 yards clear. However, divers can not restrict navigation and must also give boaters a minimum of 100 yards beyond the flag for navigation. In short they lost a lot of popular dive sites. If you want to dive down the middle of a river it must be more than 1200' wide and you can be no closer than 600' from a dock that is used by boats. I guss what I'm saying is be carefull what you wish for.

I think one of the main problems we have is that most dive flags aren't worth s**t. A 2' square piece of cloth on the end of a stick can't be seen from upwind or downwind but only from right angles. I ran a dive shop for years and stocked a flag that was four sided and could be seen from any angle. It stood up from the center of an inner tube which was waited to hold it upright. It took me years to sell the half dozzen I ordered as the were about twice the price of a normal float & flag.

The news report I heard said that a float and flag was in use but they commented that it probebly was not visable in the wind and waves.

 

[wetbehindtheear]

When we entered/exited at Big Bay we nearly crawled along the bottom until we were well along the dock and right beside it before surfacing. And we nearly got jumped on by a couple of kids jumping/swimming off the dock.

Perhaps it would be safer to surface swim out to the point where the bottom drops off. Shouldn't be too hard to place a marker buoy there. There are some spots where even hugging the bottom, you're probably not even 3' underwater. We've all done it, but in hindsight, I know i'll be surface swimming it next time.

 

[Groundhog246]

I wouldn't bet that a powerboat, going moderately fast, would see you on the surface either. They have been known to run over swimmers, logs, buoys, etc. I'm more inclined to think a previous post had the right idea. Someone staying topside, perhaps equipped with an airhorn to get their attention. We're also going to work on a portable flag pole (thinking a patio umbrella base that can be filled with water for ballast and emptied to transport for a base) that I could set up on shore (or at Big Bay at the end of the dock) and fly one of my 3'X5' dive flags. We've certainly never had any problems with one of them flying from the spreaders on our boat. I've also added binoculars (to read boat names/numbers) and our handheld VHF to the gear we carry. Would a meagphone be overkill?

 

[Groundhog246]

*** Removed quote and my hasty reply to a rude comment*** My apologies

 

[ScubaTexan]

We're working on it.