I agree with your comments but if certifying agencies put more strict
control and limits on receiving cards, less people will dive and less
money made. Everything always come down to the profit margin. The
NAUI standard for OW is becoming easier based on the PADI standard
only because PADI is grabbing a larger percentage of the market. One
thing I will say is, look at the number of new divers hitting the
water and the number of fatalities. The ratio is pretty low.
Maybe, the level is sufficient.

My .02 cents


On Mon, 26 Feb 2001 22:02:57 +0100, "Rob Turner"
wrote:

>I want to relate a story from my past and make the connection with a few
>discussions I've been following on the subject of training.
>
>The Incident
>---------------
>
>My buddy and I had just started a dive along a cliff. We were at about 120
>ft when we came up behind a group doing a deep dive. We were following
>along about 20 ft behind and a bit above them when I noticed the guy at the
>end of the line start trashing his arms around like someone getting stung by
>bees. When this went on for a few seconds it became pretty apparent to me
>that he was panicking about something.....then he started to sink. (I got
>thinking about this incident again because of the epileptic guy). His
>buddy, who was in front of him, didn't notice and kept swimming further. I
>signalled to my buddy to partner up with the buddy of the sinking guy and
>take him to the surface. (to stop a bad situation getting worse) and I took
>off after the sinking guy myself. This cliff is about 600ft deep at the
>bottom and by the time I caught him we were really deep. I pinned him
>against the cliff and then I could see that he was wound up like a mummy in
>an enormous mass of fishing line. My new problem was that I was pretty
>narc'd and I was thinking like "ok...uh...now what? .... cut him loose? go
>up? where did I put my knife? Do I inflate my BC or his? ... this is
>pretty bad eh?...." etc. which made it hard to formulate a plan. Just
>about then, my buddy arrived on the scene (he sent the sinking guy's group
>to the surface) and was signalling like a mad man to go up, which helped me
>decide to go up first and then cut him loose. I checked my depth gauge,
>which maxed out at 200 ft, and it was pinned. Based on how narc'd I was, I
>guess it was 200-230ft but I can't be sure. My new problem was "how do we
>get to the surface without DCS"? (at that moment, I thought we
>couldn't...) Having no idea what to do, I took our friend to 30 ft and we
>breathed our tanks empty at depths between 30 and 10ft. (I'm not even sure
>we were over the NDL's with this dive profile). To stop this story from
>getting too long, none of us got sick and it was a miracle that nobody died.
>It did, however, teach me a few lessons and help me form an opinion about
>how we are trained, which I would like to share:
>
>Lesson # 1 - My basic training never taught me what to do in a decompression
>situation, which never bothered me when I thought "I'm a good boy, I'll
>never do that". It's like the sport diving world is flat and certification
>agencies want you to believe that if you exceed the NDL's (or 135 ft) that
>you're so f*ed there is no point in even talking about what to do about it.
>Leaving it to blind-faith in computer manufacturers to save you is no excuse
>for not including it in the training. Getting to the point, I think every
>diver needs some training on the basics of making deco-stops in case of
>emergencies. You might not avoid DCS in an accident but you could lessen
>the severity if you had any idea what to do. To give myself a better chance
>in the future, I personally started diving with a decent computer but I
>still maintain that this should have been a bigger part of my basic
>training.
>
>Lesson #2 - It's dark down there. I happened to be carrying a light that
>day but since then I've carried a small one on every dive.
>
>Lesson #3 - Certification training should contain an element of
>psychological evaluation. I'm pretty calm under pressure but I've seen so
>many things happen to "stressy" people that I now firmly believe that it is
>WAY too easy to get certified for scuba diving. I'm not qualified to
>criticize all organisations but, despite some very strong points, the
>organisation that certified me creates a lot of accidents-waiting-to-happen
>based on too-low criteria for calmness and good judgement. The moral of the
>story above is that Panic Kills. That's what got this guy in his particular
>pickle, not the fishing line.
>
>Lesson #4 - so THIS is nitrogen narcosis! This experience convinced me that
>nitrogen narcosis is way more dangerous than people think. Hearing about it
>isn't like having it and having it at 100ft isn't like having it at 200+ft.
>I guarantee it! You become as stupid as a cow and your ability to reason is
>(can be) severely impaired the deeper you go. You can simulate this sort of
>thing on the surface and by incorporating such simulations in the training,
>I believe a few lives could be saved every year. My buddy recently told me
>a story of a woman who died diving because she sank to the bottom (250 ft or
>so ... she was carrying too much weight and may have had an inflator
>problem) anyway, after finding herself too heavy to ascend, neither she nor
>her buddy could come up with the simple idea of dropping her weight belt and
>she died. My assumption is that they were both narc'd to the gills and
>couldn't formulate a plan. My point is that nonchalance about nitrogen
>narcosis is dangerous and misleading and I think it should be given centre
>stage in the part of the training about emergencies.
>
>Lesson #5 - More on Panic Kills. As long as training agencies pursue the
>policy of making people afraid of anything outside the sport diving limits,
>people will die from a lack of knowledge. The woman in lesson 4 was in a
>very serious situation, but her tank and reg were still functioning, her
>buddy was with her and she couldn't sink any more. In short, this was
>definitely a survivable situation. Why did she die? She might have been
>able to remain calm if her training didn't convince her that anything deeper
>than what's on the tables meant certain death. She might have been able to
>handle her gear narc'd if she'd have done it during training and she might
>have gotten to the surface with only a mild case of DCS if she had been
>taught a deco model. Basically, this was a case of death by training.
>(ergo, the subject of this message).
>
>Summary: To summarize, I think that training agencies need to do better in
>the following areas:
> 1) Stop discussing what's in the charter and what's out of the charter
>and start teaching the *whole* game to sport divers. At least the theory.
>Information about what happens when you fall off the flat end of the world
>won't kill people, but deliberately withholding this information already
>has. Students trust their lives to certification agencies but I doubt the
>wisdom in this as long as certification agencies are withholding critical
>information.
> 2) Give students training in "deco-stops for dummy's" in their basic
>certification. It's better than nothing. It's not enough to say "never do
>it" and close your eyes to the reality that accidents happen. We should be
>prepared for them.
> 3) Narc students in a simulated dive during the training and get them
>handling their gear in this state.
> 4) Learn how to identify people who are at a high risk of panicking and
>refuse to certify them. Develop a screening test for this, or something...
>
>That's all I have to say about that....
>
>Cheers,
>R..
>