Posted by seahunt on January 01, 2001 at 21:44:21:
I've been hearing about DIR this and that for a bit and sorta
wondered what to make of it. I've seen dive fads come and go before.
DIR seems to evoke more hostility than any other fad I've seen though.
I never did care about it much one way or the other though. I just
dive. I was on a boat the other day though and there was a 'well
seasoned' looking gent with a GUE logo on his shirt. I wondered what
he had to say. It gave me a few thoughts on DIR and made me look into
it for how it related to California diving.
Really he was an East Coast diver. As always, I was most
interested in the development of diving. He told me stories of early
Florida divers that would scoot on down to some.. uh.. 'indescrete'
depths and return in 15 minutes with a couple large groupers and an
empty tank. He spoke of one person, that I had heard of, that took
divers out and fed sharks while they watched the show. This was long
before there were shark cages or any concern for the sharks. The
reefs were only lightly impacted than and it must have been some
spectacular diving.
He had also been a cave diver for long time. Anyone that knows
the history of those times knows how dangerous it was and how many
fatalities and DCS incidents there were. He spoke of the pioneers
and the 'Dorf Markers' made of tape that were made to point the
directions on guidance lines in caves, long before the marker
arrows became standard items. He said that some of them can still
be found deep in remote caves. He told how all of the DIR techniques
were developed and used by the old time cave divers long before they
were compiled and standardized by the current DIR officiados. It
was a process of experimentation and evolution. Diving was so
new.
Now there is no way for me to verify any of this, though I did
know a bit of the lore he told me from reading over the years. (You
should have read about powerhead bangsticks and shark riders. Things
that were sorta characteristic of Florida some years ago.) In any
case, what he said the ring of truth and I had no reason to doubt
him. This was a diver with long experience and years of ongoing
development of knowledge and skills. More years than myself.
I wasn't sure what brought him to California. He was rigged
for an overhead envirnment and showed me some minor developmental
modifications he had made on what would probably be considered
standard DIR gear. He well knew Jarrod Jablonski, George Irvine
and others who's names I didn't recognize, but he said that they
were recognized as leading advocates of the DIR methodologies. It
was interesting, but I am always more interested in California
diving, so I prompted him, to try to get some lore from the early
days of local diving, but I was disappointed because he was really
telling me about the early days of Florida diving. This guy was so
cultured as a diver that he was full of the lore, but not
surprisingly, he was so much a product of East Coast diving that
he could tell me nothing of California diving. It was interesting
though, in that he illustrated so well the difference of the
diving cultures... It again made me think about diving culture.
Scuba became popularized in the early 50's. Before that there
were many local free divers, but it was different. Scuba came along
and became absorbed into the existing diving culture on both coasts.
It gave the existing divers a greater range and new possibilities.
It brought new people to the sport and gave birth to the start of
amatuer underwater photography. Before that, on both coasts, the
primary activity of divers had been hunting. There were differences
to the diving cultures early on. In California, there was far more
opportunity to dive from shore and hunters did not have the variety
of fish that the Florida divers had, but they did have abundant
abalone and lobster to chase. Diving tended to be shallower in
California and another determining factor was that it was
significantly colder.
California Diving Culture... All Of Them
Please note the dificulty of writing this accurately both because
some information is not all that well documented and because it is
always difficult to accurately describe the nature and origions of
any culture. Still, I think I can get the important points right,
even the Florida part.
To understand the development of California diving culture, a
number of factors must be considered and it must be examined in the
context of the wetsuit. While there were divers in California before
wetsuits, they were an intrepid few and it was severly limited. It
was warm enough to dive.. sometimes, but it was cold enough to kill
and it hurt. There were some divers, mostly spearfishers and shallow
water abalone hunters. Going deep, even with scuba, was difficult
because of the colder water. Diving along the shore was fantastic
and there was little reason to go to the offshore islands, though
Catalina was very accessable and well visited. Water in Southern
California could get to a balmy 70 degrees in summer.
According to the story, Jack O'neil had a job laying neoprene
as padding under the carpet in airplanes in the San francisco Bay
area. He was a surfer and the water up there is nasty cold. He
figured that he could make a suit out of the neoprene. It worked
and he made some for his friends as well. Since then, O'neil
Wetsuits have tended to be ahead of the competition in design.
The wetsuit changed things. A diver could stay in the water
and didn't come out colored bright red. Diving could become a
popular sport in California and did. In the 50's and 60's dive
clubs flourished and both commercial divers and sport divers
in wetsuits started frequenting the nearer Channel Islands. The
main focus of the sport was still spearfishing though.
Another thing the wetsuit changed was to make diving on the
North Coast more feasable. Before that, people ventured into the
tidepools to collect abalone, but the water was so cold that
diving just wasn't very feasable.
By the 70's, a maturing dive culture in California could be
recognized. It was a hunting culture of very independent self
reliant divers. A few things made it this way.
One big part was that hunters tend to be very solitary,
self sufficient and personally skilled. They were interested in
maximizing their dive time and would regularly do 5 tanks in a
day. They range as far as they can swim. They were not looking for
good conditions. Sometimes quite the opposite. Game is often in
the most difficult spots. Diving really took only one person though
buddy diving was what was basically taught.
Another thing was that almost all the diving tended to be
relatively very shallow. There was no reason to go deep. The reefs
of much of the shore diving ended at about 35 feet. It was the
same at the islands. Some people were going deep, but not that
many or that often. Deep was considered to be past 60 feet. The
best diving was shallow and most of it was almost untouched. This
made demands on gear fairly minimal. You didn't worry near as much
about equipment failure, the surface was close by. Submersible
pressure gauges were neither available or really needed. By the
mid 70's this was changing, but so was the gear. The mindset
really didn't.
Another factor of note was that many of the divers at this
time were the aerospace engineers of California. They were very
young and adventurous, and basically gadget heads. They loved the
new dive gear and had the knowledge, tools and techniques to
innovate anything they wanted to.
There was a very high selection factor in Southern California.
There was a huge population of divers with close by, direct access
to a great deal of excellent diving. A lot of people took up diving
as it was promoted by the various agencies. A huge percentage of
them just quit diving. This is in contrast to the east coast where
while there was lots of diving, it is not directly adjacent to a
large population. Most divers have to travel some. Most local
divers were actually involved in a commercial aspect of diving in
some way.
The one factor that most determined the attitude of the
California diver though was the ocean itself. This is especially
true in Northern California and almost makes that a different
culture itself. It is cold, rough and treacherous. First you have
to wear a wetsuit and heavy gear. Then you have to be able
to resist the cold. It requires a certain basic toughness and
fortitude as well as a real desire to dive. Also, diving meant
shore diving. If you shore dive much, you are bound to get into
some extremely hairy situations, as a regular thing. First you
have to get yourself and your gear to the water and out through
the surf. Then you have to be hyper aware of currents. There is
no boat to come get you. Then after the dive, you have to make it
back in. All other factors just make this more of a challenge. Do
it over rocks. Do it when it is rough. Do it where it is just hard
to get to the water. Do it when local currents suddenly start
ripping away from the shore. What this means to the diver is that
the dive itself is not near as hazardous as just getting in and
out of the water. The shallow water diving that is typical
provides very few noticable hazards. The entries and exits are
regularly death defying, especially up north. Even in deeper water,
huge waves can suddenly make conditions like a washing machine.
This is what makes the attitude of the California diver. This is
what they must deal with to survive... and they learned to deal
with it well.
Things have changed some since then. Really, most dives are
relatively shallow, though many sport divers are regularly going
much deeper. But then gear is much better and more reliable now
as well. Boats are bigger, more comfortable and longer range. A
far greater percentage of divers are not game takers. As a
percentage, far fewer dives in Southern California are from the
shore. Still, these are just developments in the ongoing evolution
of the California Diving Culture. The divers still must manage a
lot of gear and still must resist the endless cold. Many do not
have the devotion necessary to continue diving here. Many are very
casual and just go around under the boat to wave at the fishes.
Still though, there are many who go out into the California oceans
for the wonder and excitement they provide, quite willing to accept
the difficulties and dangers inherent to the private experiences
that the primeval ocean will provide the adventurer.
Currently, there seems to be 3 types of divers in California.
Hunters, sight seers and technical (decompression diving or dives
that go beyond the scope of sport diving).
Some Notes On Florida and East Coast Diving Culture
This is not meant to be complete. It is meant to be a
comparisson. Really, I don't have quite enough knowledge to
perfectly describe the diving cultures there, but I can create a
good enough description to be able to make a comparisson and,
ultimately, make a point.
There are a few of kinds of diving on the East Coast that
are worth mentioning here. Diving on the extensive coral reefs of
Florida. Diving in the many caves and sinkholes of Florida and some
of the other eastern states. Diving on the many wrecks, some of them
quite deep, that are off the Eastern Seaboard.
The eastern diving culture first flourished before scuba on
the vast, pristine coral reefs sandy shores of Florida. It was
epotimized by Flipper. A kid jumps in the warm water with a round
mask and fins. That's all you needed for endless diving.
Spearfishing was the activity of choice and there was an endless
supply and variety of fish to choose from. For many, there was no
distinction between commercial and sport spearfishing other than
that some sold their fish and others didn't. Like on the west coast,
the introduction of scuba was an extension of a developed, healthy
diving culture. It was a larger culture though, because of the warmer
water. Again, it opened up the possibility of underwater
photography as a sport activity. There was one immediate difference
though. There was reason to go much deeper. There were reefs and
wrecks to explore as deep as you dared go and divers were going
deeper than you would expect. Careless ones often didn't come back.
Another major difference between the coasts, was that there really
wasn't much shore diving on the east coast. There was some, but
most diving was done from a boat of some kind. Divers there just
didn't deal with the waves that the west coasters did. At the same
time, decompression diving was fairly common in Florida, but
basically non-existant for the west coast sport divers.
Here too, the introduction of the wetsuit expanded the range
of the divers, but in Florida and the dive areas of the warm Gulf
Stream at least, it wasn't as important as on the west coast.
At the same time a new type of diving and a new diving culture
started. Cave diving. There are numerous limestone caves, many
submerged, throughout the lower eastern states. It was extremely
challenging and extremely dangerous. It demanded developments in
dive gear, including lighting and innovations for reliability.
Specialized techniques had to be developed, but still it was
extremely hazardous and much of it was dangerously deep.
Parellel to this was wreck diving. The same problems of depth,
silt out, getting lost and other things encountered in cave diving
were encountered in the many wrecks off the entire coast. Many
times, the same techniques developed by cavers were used by wreck
divers and vica versa. Many times they were the same divers.
Now the point of this is not to describe Florida Diving Culture.
It is to describe diving cultures. If you understand this, then you
can understand the differences in the cultures. You can then also
understand something of how DIR fits in on the west coast. It's like
an American going to Paris and declaring 'your bread is the wrong
shape, you drive funny and you don't have correct plumbing. I will
show you how you should do it right'. Some people are going to be
hostile, some will ignore you and some are going to tell you that
you don't know what you are talking about.
Some DIR proponents loudly announced a total disrespect, no
contempt, for the entire California diving culture (and all others a
well). Something that won't get you too far in any local
culture.
Unfortunately, the claims of the failings of the instructions
agencies to push for high standards gives the DIR proponents some
basis of legitimacy, that they have parleyed into a critique of the
entire diving culture. (I suspect DIR sometimes engenders the same
hostility in coastal Florida that it can here in California.)
Still, due to the basic demands that the cold ocean enforces, this
may be true for advanced certifications for teaching others, but
the necessary standards of a basic certification are quickly enforced
by the ocean itself.
They claim that DIR, unmodified, should replace the entire
California diving culture, all present gear configurations, all
training concepts and diving philosophies. They have never considered
that the good ideas of DIR must be absorbed into the existing diving
culture instead of replacing it. At times they have (logically)
carried this far enough to suggest things that would largely end
current California diving... presumably to be rebuilt in a DIR
image.
They have suggested regulating diving in California to conform to
DIR principles. They have pushed a methodology of diving that was
developed for overhead and deep diving environments, that just don't
exist on the west coast.
They have ignored that DIR does not address the elements the have
created California diving, including hunting and shore diving. I
suspect that they have ignored the needs of underwater photographers
everywhere.
Personally, I tend to be of the sort that will ignore DIR. But
since they have tended to come across like a loud 'ugly American', I
am inclined to notice them. My responce still is that I don't really
care (which is a Southern California thing), but their claim of a
superior methodology force me to critically examine DIR. My
conclusions are mostly, but not wholey, critical. So that means that
after thouroughly trashing on the messengers, may I turn my gentle
attentions to their message.
*** Since this is already incredibly long, I'll cut it off here
and post the actual examination of DIR diving methodologies as they
relate to the different California Diving cultures, later.
Enjoy the diving, seahunt
And remember the energy shortage, so make your responses good.