Proper diving protocols create safety nets.Originally Posted by Hambo
Unless you violate those safety nets, or are incompetent, it takes an incredibly unlikely cascading catastrophe to kill you.
For instance, in caves, we didn't carry just one light like open water divers.....we carried 3, and ended the dive if one failed; the other two were strictly backups.
We only used 1/3rd (maximum) of our gas supply, that way we had 1/3 on the way out and 1/3 in case of reserve. Sometimes we'd only use as little as 1/6th of our supply on the way in, for instance when diving a siphon (a cave that sucks in).
We had very clear navigation procedures and techniques, that were validated by you personally; in order to pass a full cave class, the instructor takes you off the line, shuts off all the lights, disorients you, and you have to find your way back. While this is the part where many students fail, the techniques work and their failures are due to their lack of capacity for stress management.
We padded our decompression times. Similarly in open water, the usual practice is to take a "safety stop" somewhere between 20-10 feet even if you are not conducting a decompression dive.
When switching gases, we had strict procedures on how to identify the correct regulator you need to switch to so you don't end up breathing the wrong gas for your depth and killing yourself; we'd also verify the bottle we're about to switch to visually buddy-to-buddy. I give you an "OK" when you show me the bottle and I watch you trace your hand from the bottle to the regulator and put it in your mouth....then you do the same thing for me. We don't start counting our time for that deco stop until we've both switched, thereby padding our decompression time even a little more.
If a hose or regulator blows out, we had double valves to isolate the failed regulator and preserve the rest of our gas supply; in addition, a 2nd regulator to use ourselves or to lend to our team mate. We practiced isolating these gas supplies in a crawl/walk/run nature, starting in the pool or quarry, then on actual dives, then on actual dives with the instructor introducing agitating stimuli.
With open water where you don't have a physical or physiological overhead, the risks become even less.....in most cases, even in catastrophic cascading failures, you can just go to the surface and likely end up okay, which is why the training tends to be so soft and imprecise. So, the thing is, the more you understand what the failures are, the more you understand that what you're saying isn't really true.
Reply With Quote
