My girlfriend and I got open-water certified through PADI a few weeks ago.
Last weekend, we went on a dive boat to the California Channel Islands for a
day trip.

On her third dive, with another buddy, she somehow got her regulator pulled
from her mouth at about 45'. She got a good breath of sea water and
panicked. She shot straight to the top.

Long story made short, a Coast Guard helicopter picked her off the boat and
took her off to get tanked for 5 hours.

This has left me with 2 questions.

First, I'm a little disappointed with the PADI instruction. We were required
to do partial and full mask floods in closed and open water. We were also
required to remove/replace our mask and reg (not at the same time) in closed
and open water.

However, when removing our mask or regulator, we always got to remove them
when WE were damn good and ready... which usually means after finishing
taking a breath. Now, having almost gotten my regulator pulled out a few
times since then, I know enough to know that it's an entirely different
story if I were to lose my reg in the middle of taking a breath.

With that in mind, my current opinion is that current PADI remove/replace
drills are marginally better than useless.

Now, I'll digress for a moment. I saw a show on the Discovery channel about
the storm portrayed in "The Perfect Storm". They interviewed a few of the
para-jumpers, the divers who jump out of the helicopters for the coast
guard. The story I've heard is that their training is hellacious. I heard of
one part of training where the instructors bascially try to drown the
trainees until half of the current candidate pool has dropped out. That's
just ONE lesson. Whether it's true or not, I figure it's probably a decent
representation of what they *really* go through.

But anyway, back to the interview with the PJ's. They interviewed this one
guy who said that the rescues he performed in that storm... the worst storm
anyone has ever seen... was "the hardest operation I've done.... except for
my training.".

".... except for my training...."

Does everyone realize how important that is in helping someone not panic in
real-life situations? No matter how bad it got, he'd always know that he had
lived through something even worse than what he's in now.

So, it dawned on me that normal divers... divers who really want to be
prepared for most anything they're going to run into in recreational
diving... should be drilled in situations that are just a smidge more
hostile than anything they're likely to experience in the real world.

I told my girlfriend that we need something like "SCUBA fight club" where,
in about 6-8 feet of water, on the bottom on our knees, a group of divers
could just generally mess with each other (remove their regulator, remove
their mask, maybe unlatch their weight-belt, whatever....). The last one to
shoot to the top wins.

Although extreme, this would definitely expose a diver to losing their
regulator or mask at a variety of places in their breathing cycle and with
marginally higher levels of fatigue.

What I would prefer, instead, would be some more formal program for doing
this. The guy at my local PADI dive shop tells me that PADI offers no
program like this due to liability and also because it would increase the
drop-out rate (one of the bad things about having a self-regulating sport).

So, my first question is: Does anyone know of any training program for
divers that are open to the public (so things like SEAL training don't
count) that would expose me to conditions and or equipment failures
exceeding that which I'm likely to encounter in normal recreational diving?

Now, the second question is this. If I were in her situation, having just
bolted to the top, I expect that my first reaction would have been to try a
"do over" of sorts so as to, hopefully, lessen any DCS symptoms; Resolve the
equipment problem, and quickly get back to the depth from which I came
(maybe even about 10' deeper or so) and stay there for a couple of minutes
and then come back up *slowly*... 20' per min or so. It would be my hope
that a "half-assed" decompression like this would help erase the results of
the emergency ascent.

After they airlifted my girlfriend off of the boat, one guy said that it's
strange that they don't have a decomp chamber *on* the island since it
happens frequently enough. I wanted to retort that there IS a decomp chamber
all *around* the island, only certification organizations like PADI would
never, ever, advocate something like that for liability reasons.

So, off the record, my second question is: Would it have worked?

Sincere thanks in advance for your advice,

- Joe