A story that comes up in some variation fairly regularly goes along the lines of “My buddy and I took our boat out, dropped anchor and went diving.”We all learn from our mistakes, and that is no doubt why letters and short items along the lines of “it happened to me” can be found throughout the diving press world-wide.
Those of us who are fortunate enough not to have made the same mistake can smile at others misfortune. Those of us who have made the same mistake can find solace in not being the only ones. And beneath all this we should all ideally learn something from the description of the incident and the author's reflections on it.
All very good, but what a shame that such reports have a habbit of getting the lesson wrong. Well, maybe not completely wrong, maybe just an incomplete conclusion because the analysis did not go back to the root cause of the problem.
Such reports in UK magazines have the occasional missing lesson, but to really see some of the worst personal incident analysis you have to read diving magazines from overseas, something I get to do more than most as I travel and dive.
A story that comes up in some variation fairly regularly goes along the lines of “My buddy and I took our boat out, dropped anchor and went diving.”
Leaving a boat unattended on the surface is something completely alien to most UK divers, but it seems to be normal practice in some diving communities. You can no doubt guess what happens next; either they surfaced and the boat was gone, or the boat stayed put and they surfaced too far from it.
The unfortunate victims then go on to analyse the incident and conclude they have learned their lesson. They reflect with new found wisdom that “next time I will make sure to swim up current from the boat” or “next time I will secure the anchor at the start of my dive” or “next time I will tie a double knot.”
All sensible things to do, but the victims continually miss the real lesson. It is very rare that it is safe to dive while leaving a boat unattended.
In another story which has nothing to do with boats, a diver gets sucked away from his less experienced buddy in a down current, then shot upwards by an up current. By heroic personal effort he gets things under control, makes a safety stop and then aborts the dive.
The lesson learned was incredulous: “never dive with an unfamiliar and less experienced buddy.” I can see several lessons that the unfortunate diver should have learned, but to effectively lay it all on the buddy? No way, the buddy may have been a less experienced diver, but it wasn’t the buddy that ventured too far into the current and got sucked down. The less experienced buddy had the sense to stay close to the reef and surfaced without mishap. Even more amazing is that having made the excuse, the diver then puts it in print and a magazine publishes it.
When it comes to solo diving, I confess I do it often, so maybe I am a little biased in my criticism of lessons learned where the protagonist concludes that the buddy system is the only way and 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 then unable to orally inflate her buoyancy compensator and hence stay there. As she sank her buddy pulled her to the surface, got the BC partially inflated, and towed her to the shore.
In the analysis she states the lesson learned was to never dive alone, no matter how briefly. Maybe a valid lesson for this diver, but it misses the point that if she had been correctly weighted then she would have been able to look after herself and her buddy would not have had to rescue her.
Another good one is the diver who runs out of air, ascends on his buddy’s octopus, and from that concludes quite correctly that the buddy system saved him. Again he has neglected the real point that he ran out of air in the first place. Maybe he should have learned to do better gas planning, to watch the cylinder pressure gauge more closely, and maybe to carry a redundant air source. If he had, the buddy would never have needed to donate air.
Even more ridiculous is the diver who unwittingly starts a dive on an un-filled cylinder and subsequently concludes that he will always do a buddy check in future. While I don’t condemn the use of buddy checks, it would be much more sensible to perform a thorough self check first.
Sometimes it is not the quoted lesson learned that amazes me, but that it has no connection to the incident.
For example, the divers make a shallow dive followed by a deep dive. On the deep dive one gets a bad attack of nitrogen narcosis and concludes from it that you should always do your deep dive first. I could understand the rationale if the problem was DCS, but what has an attack of narcosis got to do with having made a shallow dive earlier in the day?
I may have been harsh, so please don’t let me put you off airing your incidents in public, letters and short items about what happened and the subsequent lessons that were learned help us all to be better divers. They also 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.