Especially 50 pounds of weights!

Adrenalin, thats whats difficult.

Its gets all of us in different ways and with all the training in the world,
you cant plan for how the rush will hit you.  Recent inquests, St Abbs and
Fort William, have shown that trained divers who get into difficulty,
sometimes dont do as they are trained.

Personally speaking I've not been in a serious situation diving (A couple of
freeflows and an entrapment) but in my line of work I have been trained in
how to deal with an armed raid.  This involved mock ups and having knives
and unloaded guns pointed at me in a controlled environment.  There is no
adrenelin rush in this situation, excitment yes, but fear of death no.

A year after this training took place, I was involved in an armed raid which
involved a pistol being aimed directly at me in 20 feet in front of me by a
14 year kid, in the space of 2 seconds I'd gone from going about my everyday
job to realising I'm very close to death and every action I do from here on
in, my life, and those of my staff depend on it.  This wasn't a rush like
parachuting, bungee jumping, motorbiking or whatever, this was a life or
death situation.  It like your first dive, jump, orgasm, all in one go and
then amplified 1000 times.  You feel every heartbeat as if your heart is a
V12 engine in your chest, your limbs are ten times their weight, and your
blood feels 5 times its normal temperature.  Forget about breathing, thats
an involuntary action that up until now you never thought about, then all of
the sudden you realise that you need to breathe and force your lungs open.
Thats all you think about for what seems like hours, but it is in fact micro
seconds.  Then you react, some react as per training, do as the situation
dictates, the enemy is the dangerous animal, you are the hunted, you do as
they say.  I can talk about from experience now.

Then there are ones who react with their instincts, to counter react or do
something completely irrational, these are normally the ones who currently
have an epitath six feet above their heads.  Its not their fault, its not
the trainings fault, its natures fault for making us all different.

I have friends who have personal involvement with an underwater death.  The
man they failed to resusitate was a man of good intelligence, who was a
trained, qualified and experienced diver who didn't react to a problem as he
was trained (his BC hose was unconnected at the surface).  This man was also
GP who had saved many lives and helped hundreds of people live a better or
longer life than nature intended.

Next time you find yourself, a loved one or a friend,  being dragged out of
the water, just remember those who are trained to keep you alive, and
experience adrenalin rushes similar to those I speak of, whilst performing
CPR etc.

Whats so f**king difficult about that then?

There are any number of reasons it may happen.
The longer post here pointed out that it takes a lot of training to do it
without thinking.
Divers don't get enough practice in doing this, even with soft weights and
in the old days it was at best simulated because messing up the bottom of
the pool was a no- no.
There is also the cost of the weight belt. No this should not be a
consideration but you hear it a *lot* in classes and shops and it enters
into the equation.
If the diver decided to go against what all the agencies have taught since
at least 1968  and put the weight belt under something it adds to the
problem. If the diver *did* have enough training with it outside and did not
retrain it would probably be fatal.

The California Highway Patrol was among the first to realize that most
firefights took place at about 21 feet. They developed a training program
which included 12 rounds in 20 seconds.
Fire six, eject, reload, fire six.
But they were concerned about money.
So the training went fire six, eject the rounds into the palm of the hand,
place them in a container, reload, fire six.

They modified this when officers in the field did exactly as trained under a
real situation. Fire six, EJECT THE ROUNDS INTO THE PALM OF YOUR HAND, then
stand there and get hit because you had no place to put the valuable
cartridges and had a hard time dropping them.

After a few incidents they started "wasting" the brass.

Have you read the article? This was a commercial dive, using umbilicals,
walking about on the bottom without fins on. The deceased had not dived in
years, was using unfamiliar equipment(unsupervised and solo) which he'd had
one hour's training on, was not in sight of his buddy at the time of the
incident. When he had a problem with his new kit, he failed to execute the
correct emergency procedures, the "last ditch" of which was to pull a weight
release situated in an unusual position. That he was carrying 50lb of lead
probably means that even if he had had fins on, he'd have been so
overweighted as to be unable to fin to the surface.

In the mean time, his buddy, who found him in time to watch him sink to the
bottom (in 12m), decided not to go after him.

Once more someone dies because they broke pretty much every basic rule in
the book...

Iain

Now that was inciteful.

Toto

steps back to allow Kevin to take a drink from her bowl.

On 2 Nov 2003 16:33:24 -0800, kpjfalconer@aol.com (Kevin Falconer)
wrote ...

And the statistics show that those divers who were listed as
fatalities tended to never have any subsequent accidents on later
dives? <grin>