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A softly softly approach to rescue training is not doing divers any favours, argues Mark Hayford - we should take a cue from special forces and adopt a harder line |
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I MET A LADY AT A WAKE RECENTLY. Informed that I was a newly qualified Divemaster, she said: "Wow! I'm just an Open Water Diver - compared to me, you're God!"
Hardly. But the word Divemaster does have a touch of the superhero about it, as if one had a titanium crotch or Teflon nipples. I have both, obviously, which is why I shall be assisting on a rescue course at Stoney Cove next month.
Rescue skills need to be practised once a week to have any lasting impact. After six weeks out of the water, I was recently invited to try rescuing an unconscious diver. I was rubbish. By the time I got the poor chap to the surface, my instructor's face was longer than Gandalf's beard.
I recall that when I was retrieving panicking divers as part of my rescue course, all they did was fidget a couple of times before going limp - the story of my life. I'm not suggesting that one should bite people during a rescue, or set fire to their cummerbund, but surely a smidgen of authenticity wouldn't go amiss?
Look at any report about drowned divers. Which one phrase comes up time and again? "They became separated."
It's as if there's a brief, frenetic struggle between would-be rescuer and distressed diver and then it's: "They became separated." How does that work?
It works because we consistently put up token resistance in rescue training, because anything else would be deemed silly, over-the-top and unfair.
In three years I have only ever had to cope with one panicking diver, and he was about as brutal as Quentin Crisp.
The reason people distrust their dive training is the nagging suspicion that it's all about paperwork, all a bit Blue Peter, lacking in unsettling experiences.
The PADI Rescue manual on how to cope with a panicking diver: "The victim may claw, grab and struggle with tremendous strength, possibly yanking out a rescuer's second stage or knocking off the mask.... you may have to force the mouthpiece into his mouth."
On Day One of a recent trip to Sharm el Sheikh, our robust dive guide Luther was horrified to find one of his party sitting on a turtle, just for kicks. When he finned over to intervene, the man started screaming abuse and lunged for Luther's mask - at which point Luther punched him in the mouth.
Hurrah. At last, some affirmative action. This is a spiffing example of someone who was physically prepared to deal with a bad situation.
Our very own SBS (Special Boat Service) believes in what it calls "the surgical application of force", which frankly is what Luther applied here. It did the business: order was swiftly restored.
Am I seriously suggesting that "mixing it" at depth is useful for bringing not just agitated but aggravating divers under control? Absolutely. Whack first, ask questions later.
Furthermore, it is not melodrama to state that panicking divers are trying to kill you: they are. They're not Bond villains, but they have entered a realm of terror, a circle of scare, and you may need all your guile and brawn to get them out intact.
In his book Neutral Buoyancy, Tim Ecott writes: "I have met divers who claim that... no one should dive unless they are competent at handling the type of physical harassment that military divers include in their basic training - masks knocked off or regulators snatched from their mouths without warning..."
Hear, hear. If you read my AOW Diary (Advancing Under Fire, October 2002), you'll know I implied that my ex-military instructor Dimitri went too far when he deliberately switched off my air without warning during my 13th dive.
I held him up as a bad example but perhaps he was tired of churning out Advanced OW divers who had never experienced anything real?
In Roy Mason's mesmerising book Chickenhawk, about his time as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, I found this: "Throughout training, whether you were trying to hover, land or take off, the instructor would wait until we were bucking in someone's rotor wash and then cut the power. He wanted to see how you would react when everything else was going wrong. There was no way you could be ready for it."
So, engine gone, pilots had to crash-land, and God help them if they got it wrong. Come back Dimitri, all is forgiven. It's not just the Navy that practises "in at the deep end" tactics, it's the Air Force, too. "There was no way you could be ready for it." Precisely.
Inspired by Dimitri's "sink or swim" approach, my dive club is "going military".
When being rescued, I now thrash around like an extra from Thunderball, clawing at masks and bashing regs. Yes, it's still a controlled experiment, but the first time I tried it, it went so quiet in the pool you could have heard a fin drop.
We live in a pro-active world, so let's introduce some awkward diving practices into our training and be more pro-active. If scuba becomes more "hands-on", this can only result in a tougher, more pragmatic breed of diver, which in turn means more lives saved.
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