Scuba Accident - Harsh Reality

[sfef84]

Did a little follow up. The dive site ia at the blue hole, in the red sea. People say its "the most dangerous dive site in the world" because there is a cave about 80 ft down and has an entrance that is at a wierd angle and more than 50 people a year die there due to their combobulator getting discombobulated, missing the entrance and keep going down. Scary stuff.

[sfef84]

He was clocking 30meters/min. Thats a rate that doesnt leave much of a margin for error considering the danger of the site.

I would be interested to see the whole video and also would be interested to know why only bits and pieces have been released.

[RonE]

I agree that the dead guy did many things that were contrary to the training standards of our sport diving agencies. I believe that poor training and the divers inability to learn and apply the techniques that he was supposed to learn contributed to his death. Many people fail to realize that a dive computer cannot save your life, a video camera does not make you a competent diver and too much weight is almost always a problem.

My questions would be: Who was his dive instructor? What certification agency issued his card? Was there a competent divemaster on the boat that would have seen how he conducted himself getting geared up for the dive?

We teach diving the "buddy system" and one of the reasons for this is to prevent holes in the training from causing accidents.

Once a student has purchased his dive gear the only thing left for the dive shop/instructor to sell is more training. In many, many cases dive students and newly trained divers are led to believe that without the proper training they can't do certain things, for example: Do not exceed 60 fsw, do not dive alone, do not dive at night, do not dive without a computer, do not operate a spear gun, camera, video camera or any other equipment without proper training.

I have seen people with over 20 speciality cards that have never done a dive withour their instructor on the trip. I have also seen divers with nothing more than a basic certification card who were better divers than many instructors. I have seen instructors that were so out of shape that they couldn't put their gear on without help.

Watermanship is seldom considered a factor in training with very few exceptions. It seems (to me) that the attitude of most certification agencies is that if you don't dround in the pool and you repete every exercize 10 -20 times you have learned to be a SCUBA diver.

[WestEndAngler]

Did a little follow up. The dive site ia at the blue hole, in the red sea. People say its "the most dangerous dive site in the world" because there is a cave about 80 ft down and has an entrance that is at a wierd angle and more than 50 people a year die there due to their combobulator getting discombobulated, missing the entrance and keep going down. Scary stuff.

I dove this site. Beautiful dive but most dives in the red sea are drift dives due to the extreme current. I remember one dive when we went from Shark's Alley to the WWII supply ship wreck. Most amazing dive. We were dropped off and started out drift at 60' then went from the reef called Shark's Alley with the current straight on course across open blue water then finally the bottom appeared with a ship laying in 60'. I have a photo of us drifting through a school of Jacks with sharks mixed in. I really need to get all my photos moved to digital some are in the process but it's not cheap especially when you have 50 rolls of film that have been developed and you need to transfer film to CD

[Bigwater]

That's why I wade fish. Very sad to watch indeed.

Biggie