Posted by MHK on May 10, 2001 at 17:52:29:
In the last 12 months or so the dive community, taken as a whole, has had it's fair share of tragedies and it's got me thinking lately about WHY????
Back in the 70's cave diving pioneer Sheck Exley decided to study all the fatalities piling up in Fla. and see WHY, and more importantly, how could future fatalities be reduced.. He put together his blueprint for survival ( highly recomended reading even if you don't cave dive) and in short, he put together a bunch of practices that still stand as a model in todays cave diving community..
If you look at some of the fatalities we've had in the last year or so, there were many, many experienced divers that didn't come back, both locally and beyond.
Here in SoCal we lost a diver with 3000+ dives;
We lost a highly decorated Air Force diver;
We lost Ron Fuller who came to embody San Diego diving;
We just recently lost Tim who by all accounts was a very experienced guy;
Just recently we've heard about Steve Berman ( one of the guys that did the original mapping at Ginnie Springs ) dying in the cave that he literally wrote the book about;
What I have been thinking about a lot lately, (particularly since I'm leaving for 10 days of cave diving on Saturday) is that we spend way too much time parsing language and trying to prove whether it was solo or deep air, or would a buddy have helped or whatever the disagreement de jour is...
But basically we spend a lot of time saying that *that fatalitiy differs from my diving habits for the following reasons* and then I think we dellude ourselves into thinking *it can't happen to me*..
The dive season for many is just beginning, not everyone is hard core and dives during the winter months, and whether we all want to agree or not about the fact that training has gotten watered down, we need to understand as a dive community that we have more diver's, we have less trained divers and it's up to the more experiences guys/girls to help set the tone.. Advocating added risks isn't sensible and should be discouraged. Promoting bad habits or lazy attitudes only serve to dumb down the bar at a time when it should be getting raised..
If you look objectively at some of the recent fatalities you'll notice a common thread.. I have my views on what that thread is but everyone should look at them for themselves because there was more in common with these fatalities than just the lack of a buddy...
Just food for thought....
Later