Posted by MHK on February 08, 2001 at 09:35:19:
Obvioulsy this issue has reared it's head again and several of you posted questions that warrant a response, some are still clueless and will never get it, and some seem to simply want to take an alternative viewpoint with little to offer so I'll make a few comments in response to the issued raised.
1) Frank Farmer asked was there a particular event that changed my previous solo habits.. YES...
It was on the Andrea Doria trip 2 years ago. A three man team went in about an hour before me and my buddy Mike Carpenter did our dive. During the dive of the 1st team one of the team ( which was a crew member and a very experienced Andrea Doria diver) indicated as they were decending that something wasn't right and signalled his buddies that he was aborting. Since he was an experienced guy they let him ascend solo. When Mike and I did our dive, he did the same exact thing to me and I continued my dive solo. When I returned I saw Mike on the stern as I was getting back on to the boat and he had this dismal look on his face and simply gave me the OOA signal. I immeditaley thought he had run out of air, somehow survived and was now pissed at me for leaving him. As it turns out it was Charlie that had the problem and after a detailed briefing with the Captain about my dive plan and the areas that I had just explored we started a search. An hour later I was dragging Charlies body onto the boat and since he was already dead the Coast Gaurd wouldn't take his body, so for the 10 hour ride home his body was laying on the deck and all I could think of was that could have been me or Mike and that we had dodged a bullet and I felt it was time to take a fresh look at my diving practices if I didn't want to end up like Charlie..
2) EINS posted some nonsense about me trying to get Mia as a solo death.. Yaddi Yaddi Yadda.. Eins you are clueless and all you want to do is cyber dive and debate definitions.. The lax attitude towards allowing a buddy to unexpectdely go into deco, to provide a tank and than to not stay with her when she is OOA and in deco is a decision I'm sure Eric will regret for the rest of his life. Ask him if he had to do it all over again would he have allowed his wife to be in deco while OOA solo.. You keep jumping through hoops to find a loophole to justify the solo habits and we went through a tortured game of verbal gymnastics with respect to every fatality last year which lead to you and Ken Kurtis introducing the brilliant term of * buddyless*.. You guys want to debate semantics rather than confront an issue that is killing very experienced divers. In the last two days you have come up with positions almost as bizarre as Ken Kurtis. First solo diver's aren't solo and now diver's with 3000+ dives aren't experienced because they made a few mistakes on their fatal dive... The whole point, even Ken Kurtis understood this, is that experienced people make mistakes that kill them..
3) Ken Kurtis refuses to answer the ridiculous juxtaposition about how he is si comfortable with solo diving that he feels justified in posting a * How to Solo* list, even dispite the most liberal definition favoring your position, we had 5 solo fatalities in SoCal. But yet feels justified in telling divers that they WILL die if they breathe Nitrox, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and the fact that per DAN's report only 3 diver's died last year in all of the US and it isn't even clear that Nitrox was the cause.. These ridiculous positions go unchallenged, but yet Seahunt takes a ludicrous position that I evade his questions.. Failing to acknowledge that I spent an extraordinary amount of time addressing his concerns and then when internet type discussions proved unsuccessful I invited to pay for him to be on a boat to discuss/demonstrate his concerns..
You guys use words like hypocrcy and evasive in terms of my contributions to this list but it seems clear that it's not a two way street. I answer every question, to the extent it can be answered in cyber space, and if not I'll meet you on the boat or at a DIR demo to further explain, but yet it seems OK for Ken Kurtis, EINS, Seahunt, Chris, Dimitrios et. al to post bizarre statements without any support and refuse to back them up...
Either put up or shut up...
Later