| So you ran out of air - whose fault was it and will you let it happen again? We might think we learn from bitter experience, but John Liddiard wonders whether we always draw the correct conclusions |
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We all learn from our mistakes, which is why letters and short items along the lines of 'it happened to me' can be found in the diving press worldwide.
Those of us fortunate enough to have avoided making the same mistake can smile at others' misfortune. Those who have made the same mistake can find solace in not being the only ones.
And we should all learn something from the description of the incident and the author's reflections on it.
You can read about my mishaps often enough in Diver, and I am not about to analyse any more of them here. The Deep Breath page is for airing an opinion, and what bugs me is when the 'it happened to me' reports get the lesson wrong.
Not completely wrong, necessarily, but perhaps with an incomplete conclusion because the analysis did not go back to the root cause of the problem.
Such reports in UK magazines do this occasionally, but for the worst personal incident analysis you need to read diving magazines from overseas, something I do more than most as I travel and dive.
I pawed through the magazines on my top shelf to dig out a few favourites. A story that comes up in some form fairly regularly goes along the lines of 'my buddy and I took our boat out, dropped anchor and went diving'.
Leaving a boat unattended is an idea alien to most UK divers, but seems to be normal practice in some communities. You can guess what happens; either they surface and the boat has gone, or it stayed put and they surfaced too far from it.
The unfortunate victims then go on to analyse the incident and reflect with new-found wisdom that 'next time I will make sure to swim upcurrent from the boat', or 'I will secure the anchor at the start of my dive', or 'I will tie a double knot'.
All sensible enough, but the victims miss the real lesson. It is rarely safe to dive while leaving a boat unattended.
In another story, a diver gets sucked away from his less-experienced buddy in a down-current, then shot the other way by an up-current. Through heroic personal effort, he gets things under control, makes a safety stop and then aborts the dive.
The lesson learned amazes me: 'Never dive with an unfamiliar and less- experienced buddy.' I can see several lessons that should have been learned, but to lay it all on the buddy? The buddy might have been less experienced, but it wasn't him who ventured too far into the current and got sucked down - he had the sense to stay close to the reef, and surfaced without mishap.
Even more amazing is that, having made the excuse, the diver writes about it and a magazine publishes it.
When it comes to solo-diving, I confess to doing it often, and fully agree with John Bantin's Deep Breath of September 2001. So perhaps I am a little biased in my criticism of divers who conclude that the buddy system is the only way, and that they will never solo-dive again.
One diver reports dipping down a few metres by herself to take a photograph during a surface swim back to shore. The pillar-valve O-ring blew and she swam to the surface, but was unable to inflate her BC and stay there.
As she sank, her buddy pulled her to the surface, partially inflated her BC and towed her to shore.
In the analysis, she states that she has learned never to dive alone, no matter how briefly. Perhaps a valid lesson, but it misses the point: had she been correctly weighted, she would have been able to look after herself.
Another good one is the diver who runs out of air, ascends on his buddy's octopus and from that concludes correctly that the buddy system saved him.
The point is that he ran out of air in the first place. He should have learned to do better gas planning, to watch his pressure gauge more closely, or perhaps to carry a redundant air source. The buddy would then never have needed to donate air.
Even more ridiculous is the diver who unwittingly starts a dive on an unfilled cylinder and concludes that he will always do a buddy check in future. There's nothing wrong with buddy checks, but it's far more sensible to perform a thorough self-check first.
Sometimes it's not the quoted lesson learned that amazes me, but that it has no connection to the incident. Divers do a shallow dive, then a deep one. The first time out, one gets badly narked and concludes that you should always do your deep dive first. I could understand the rationale if decompression sickness was the problem, but what does a narcosis attack have to do with having made a shallow dive earlier in the day?
I might have been harsh, so please don't let me put you off airing your incidents in public. The subsequent lessons learned help us all to be better divers and can make entertaining reading.
But when you do put pen to paper, please think things all the way through and make sure that the lesson learned is the right one.
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