Posted by MHK on November 06, 2000 at 12:03:40:
In Reply to: Re: Open Letter to MHK posted by Frank on November 06, 2000 at 11:34:04:
It what can only be described as arrogance of unparralled proportions I was told that when you go to a shopping mall and park your car and then go into the mall and go to Macy's and then Sears and so on, do you run a line???
When you are finished shopping you simply go back the way you went in... It's this kind of mindless stupidity that is getting these diver's killed. The fact of the fact of the matter is that there is a *macho* east coast ( I'm an ex-New Yorker so I can say that ).. My ist year on the Doria all I kept hearing about was how they were going to *teach* the Californian how to dive east coast style. After about 20 minutes of chest pounding and the ridiculous I'll cut your line if I see it statement I got up and said, guy's you can cut the bullshit NY attitude because I was born and raised in NY, I learned how to dive in Brooklyn and if someone cuts my line and I do make it out, I'll be back on the boat to kill someone because I'll have too assume that was your intention inside the wreck so if I make it out I want you to know my intention..
After that the trip went well... But the attitudes are all wrong, they are too set in there ways and despite unprecedented fatalities on a wreck that only has a 6 week dive season the mindset stays the same... The Andrea Doria has enough dangers and risks associated with it and it shouldn't be compounded by stupidity that starts at the dock... They *sell* you on the concept of progressive penetration for several reasons:
1) At $900 per trip they can keep you coming back;
2) Those that buy into this stupidity will only be able to penetrate only so far, most of the mid-level decks are already picked over. You need to go pretty far in to get any remaining china, so the locals want it kept for themselves...
If truth be told that is why they promote this dangerous nonsense. We were going to run my trip this year as a TEAM approach. Walker, Tamara Kendall and myself were going to go in on the 1st dive and run a sisal, complete with stage bottles and strobes. We were going to run the line from Gimbels hole to 1st class and leave it there the whole trip. By sacraficing our firts dive we were putting the success and safety of the team first. When the locals found out what we were doing they asked Danny to cancel our trip, we were told that we * CAN'T* do it this way and that we obvioulsy had no understanding what it would do to diving the Doria..
I responded as you may imagine by saying I could give a shit if it hurt there diving market, I was doing it safer than they were and I was willing to sacrafice a dive or two, or a stage bottle or two for the safety of the team... So appauled were they with this notion that when we called in our mixes ahead of time to the local dive shop they had no idea what we were talking about and then proceeded to give us all the incorrect mixes so we could *dive like the locals*. I spent the entire day before the trip re-blending so we could do the trip our way...
Later