Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right (but three rights do make a left)

There are two pictures on the internet right now.  Almost identical: a diver sits on a boat, smiling at the camera, breathing oxygen to mitigate a minor DCS hit.  I don't know the circumstances of either incident, but as I saw each I had a very different reaction.

The one I saw first I thought, "Now that's pretty funny."  To the other I thought, "That is terrifying."  

Bear in mind, there really is very little different from photo to photo.  Both divers are safe and comfortable back on board their boat, both look in fine spirits, and most importantly, both apparently walked away from whatever incident precipitated first aid without any residual effects.  So it's the same picture; nothing different; except for everything.

In the one picture is one of the most experienced divers you'll find anywhere.  The other is of a relative newbie.

So in the one picture is someone who should have known better, or had something unavoidable happen, or wasn't hydrated or was over-hydrated, or inadvertently had any number of countless other variables in the barely-understood physiology of decompression stress bite him in the ass.  Or maybe it was nothing... just one of those days.  Like a pro athlete sometimes steps down wrong without even noticing it at the time, but pulls something in their leg... if you're diving at a certain level for long enough every once in a while divers get minor injuries, too.

The other diver has NOT been diving at that level long enough.  And when I say "long enough" I mean "at all."  So what frightened me is the smirk.

Why should someone with suspected symptoms of a potentially debilitating injury be smiling into the camera when they have not been around long enough to have any frame of reference about what is happening to them?  Let's drop a mental bookmark there and flip to a different chapter for a bit.

Recently I was testing a different set of counterlungs on my rebreather, these sleek neoprene jobbies.  Thing was, there was nowhere on them to stow my oxygen and diluent pressure gauges with them over my shoulders the way I usually do.  The number of times I check my gauges on a normal dive I can count on one hand.  Sometimes on only one finger.

So I removed them for the dive.

Rebreather divers, on reading that, are now having one of two reactions.
A) You goddamn fool!  Diving without gauges?!  I'm amazed you're still alive!!
B) So?  I took my gauges off forever ago.  Just one more hose and more failure point.
If there are people with some reaction in the grey zone between those two opinions I am not aware of their existence.

I started this particular dive with a pretty good handle on my oxygen consumption that comes from almost a decade of CCR experience.  I was also perfectly comfortable that in only 60 feet of water there was no way I was going to be able to use the entirety of the 2L bottle of dil.  The dive itself was lovely.  Until...

"PSSSHT!" said my solenoid.

Then, a few minutes later, "PSSSHT!"

"PSssh...." some time after that.

"What the fuck was that?" some functionary toward the back of my consciousness said.

"What was what?" said my conscious mind absently.

"Shut up!  Listen!" said the functionary.

(Yes, I imagine the inside of my mind like Mission Control, and the guy who noticed an issue is in charge of some lower system that no one usually cares about, but right now he's pushed back all the papers on his desk and is standing up in fixed concentration.  All eyes in the room are on him.)

"pssh..." said the solenoid.

"That!  Did you hear that?"

"Yeah, we heard it," says Ed Harris, now standing and straightening his vest.

"CLICK," said the solenoid with finality.  "CLIIIIIIIICK," and again with a lot more oomph.

Ed Harris adjusts his headset and sighs, "OK, people, we've got us a situation.  Let's stay calm and work the problem."

Here's the thing.  I had started the dive with a good grasp on my oxygen metabolism -- I had also started the dive with a minor leak out of the tank valve.  It had been there for a day or two, a nearly insignificant little bleed, and I had intended to tell the place I rented the tank from about it toward the end of the week.  I didn't want to be the asshole customer who insists you overhaul shit for me on the spot when the failure was so small, so until then I figured it wasn't impacting me poorly.

BUT... this was the dive that the tiny leak decided to escalate to a major leak.  So it was on this dive that I ran completely out of O2.

I signaled to my wife asking whether the bubbles she had pointed out were still there?  She smiled when she signaled back, "No," certainly thinking that the problem had resolved.  She stopped smiling when I signaled, "It's because that tank is empty."

She held up a questioning thumb and I signaled, "No, the spool I dropped at our exit was just over there."  So we swam back to the spool, collected it, and exited normally.  Well... normal-ish; I had a regulator in my mouth by the time we hit the surface.  Before putting the regulator in my mouth I admit using a couple of unconventional tools to complete the dive staying on the loop for as long as possible.
Mostly I was grateful to that little functionary at the back of the attic of my mind who was listening to the solenoid.  Always recognizing what "normal" sounds and feels like and instantly recognizing when something not normal has just happened.  It has taken a long time to get there but just as when you can feel when your sock has twisted and the seam is pressing against your pinky toe, so is some little part of my mind always monitoring the solenoid.

I didn't know for sure that was true until this dive.

I had hoped.  And I am delighted as hell to know that it is true; that I detected the problem even before my PO2 started dropping.

Can you?

I am sure a great many of you reading this could (assuming fucking anyone is reading this).  But I am also sure a great many can not.

I have been doing this a while.  Longer than some, no where near as long as others.  But long enough that some things are second nature.  Long enough that I've been exposed to a great deal of the diving world.  Long enough that I've seen friends bent.  Long enough that I've had minor DCS hits myself.

And with that let's go back to where we bookmarked.

It takes time and experience to get to where you can or should be comfortable with certain things or having a fair gauge of what's normal and what isn't.  If I was a brand new rebreather diver who ran out of O2 would I have noticed?  Would I have even lived?  People have died for less, but even as I knew what was happening I viewed it mostly as a minor inconvenience.

The couple of times I have felt symptoms of DCS it scared the crap out of me.  I knew I probably wasn't going to die... but I damn sure didn't like it.  And I damn sure wasn't in the mood to pose for pictures.
"So why," I thought, "Is this inexperienced diver sitting there smiling at the camera, happily accepting that they are showing signs of DCS?"
Lest anyone think I am simply picking on this one person in this one photo, I have heard and overheard a conversation like, "I got so bent," a number of times from people who really should't have had that happen at that point in their dive career.  Or, more to the point, at all!  

Just as often as not the reason these folks got hurt is not because of an "undeserved hit," but because they were doing some shit they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.  

The reason I think of it now was the surprising contrast, the almost double-standard, I found in my reaction to those two pictures.
Is it a perceived badge of honor to newbies?  Is it about the perception of being a bad-ass diver?  Do they think that in getting "hit" they have now achieved some level of credibility, that they are closer to the same level as the wildly experienced diver in a similar circumstance?  Don't they recognize that's not how it works?  That there's not even an "it" to work like that?

I wonder if it is like inexperienced CCR divers who take their pressure gauges off because some person they respect told them that pressure gauges are for babies?  They forget that the person telling them, "You don't need them," is someone who knows exactly their metabolism level to two decimals of LPM given any range of workloads* when they, themselves, barely remember the basics of emergency procedures.

(* I do not claim to be one of these people.  I am back to my normal counterlungs and my pressure gauges are back on.  I don't think you're going to die without them... I just like having them there.  A tool I probably won't use, but doesn't bother me when they're just sitting there not being used.)

Diving is not a competitive sport.  There are no ranks, there are no secret handshakes, there is no reason to try to be bigger, meaner, tougher, deeper, or more cavalier about being bent than the next guy.

If you are going to stay in the sport for long enough, yes, things are going to happen.  Sometimes bad things.

My original rebreather instructor sat me down before accepting me as a student and told me, very soberly, that if I was going to start doing this I was going to have to accept that I was going to lose friends.  What's more, I was going to have to accept that I may, myself, die doing it.  

It did not spark any ember of bravado in me.  Sadly and inevitably, it turned out that he was right.  

Because he was right I get really upset when I see people doing things like moving too fast or diving too ambitiously.  It's why I make this same blog post bitching about how people need to slow the fuck down and dive more cautiously over and over again.

Of course taking chances are essential to growth, but zealous growth can be dangerous.

Think about tomatoes.  Do you ever think about tomatoes?  I'm Italian and it's the season right now; I think about tomatoes frequently.  When they grow large they can spread out and you get a ton of flowers which turn into a ton of tomatoes.  But a tomato plant needs a trellis.  You need to be careful to make sure that you keep the plant comfortably within an appropriate frame and that it doesn't grow to fast.  Otherwise it will probably fall over and die.

Learn slowly.  Learn over time.  Dive safe.  And eat a lot of tomatoes.  They're really good for you.



(Thanks to Tom McCarthy for "donating" the questionably uncopyrighted image above.)

We Don't Need No Education

You absolutely must follow training standards.  Until you don't.  

When is that point?  How distant a deviation is acceptable?  What is your responsibility, if you are an instructor or mentor, to act as an example at all times?  You start really getting into the long grass with these questions; the frontiers through which there are a couple of well-worn, lazy paths which can be dangerous and destructive, like a commonly used hike shortcut which becomes a torrential waterfall at the first showing of rain.

Example:

How did you learn deco gas switching?  Instructors, how do you teach deco gas switching?  Now… how do you actually do it?

I am not going to walk through the steps of the former two in my own case, but I'll tell you how I actually make a gas switch.  I always wear my gasses in the same places, distributed on both my left and right sides.  When it's time to make a switch I reach for the regulator on what I know will be the right tank, I get the second stage out and ready, confirm the tank is on, then put the thing in my mouth and start breathing at the correct time.

Those of you either recently trained or otherwise familiar with standards will notice about 42 steps missing up to and including showing everyone in your dive team both the tank, the first stage, the second stage, and a notarized living will detailing exactly what steps they should take if you accidentally forgot to label your MOD in the correct units.

In a recent discussion with another instructor they scoffed when I told them this.  They were wondering after the red valve knobs I have on my 50% bottles.  “It just catches the eye,” I explained, “My 50% regs are red, too.”

“But you would switch to 50% at 70 feet where red wavelengths would have already been diffused, so it would just look black,” they correctly, if pedantically, pointed out.

Ignoring both that I mostly cave dive where everything looks black unless you shine a light on it, I ignored the comment.  I also didn't say anything about how I don't bother looking at the tank valve when I'm making a switch.  What I depend on is that I put the right distinctive regulator on the right distinctive tank before the dive.  Then, during the dive, when I deploy a plastic Cyklon (as distinctive a regulator as exists) I know that 50% will come out of that mouthpiece, because whatever color it is, whether I can even see the reg or not, the only thing I use a plastic cyklon, in all it's weird looking glory for, is as a 50% reg.

It isn't that I'm immune to physics or that I have outsmarted training standards.  I have preparatory procedures and equipment to confirm a series of data that do, indeed, need to be confirmed before making a gas switch.

Do I teach it this way?  No.  There are way more steps in the way I demonstrate it and teach it... even though I'm using my awesome regs.

“I'll just get different regulators, like you,” some eager student may say, if they happened to read this blog.

“This is one of only a very few regulators that trick will work with,” I'd explain, “And they're about seven hundred bucks new… you gonna spend that on a deco reg?  Follow the steps as you learned them.”

Instructors, especially vastly experienced instructors, run the very serious risk of behaving as a poor example.  Perhaps not during classes, but when simply out diving their vast experience and the tools and refinements and personal style over the years has developed into something seamless, which works perfectly for them, but could turn things critical on someone without their many years of experience.

Few instructors I know, either recreational or technical follow training standards during their own, personal, non-teaching dives.  Because… and here's the crux of it… training standards only apply during an active class, when there is a teacher(s) and student(s).  When there is no formal, documented teacher/student relationship, the training agencies have no oversight.

(Note: when people who have a pre-existing teacher/student relationship are diving together, say, right after a class, things get ethically and, probably, legally hairier.  A responsible instructor should continue to encourage strict procedural adherence through those times, as opposed to, “You're certified now, do what you want,” or worse, encourage potentially reckless behavior like, as a totally random example apropos of nothing, diving to/past 200 feet more than twice a day.)

That said: it is pure folly to interpret “instructors don't follow training standards” as “training standards are overly conservative.”

The standards are there as minimums… minimums with the best, most capable students in mind. A more typical student will require more work on top of these, repeated exposure over time. Whether ideal or ordinary what they initially learn from their instructor will be used as a foundation upon which they can build their own styles and decide on their own tricks.

When?

Yeah, I'm not going to answer that.  It's a long, wide, blurry line between when the standards as you learned them should be followed to the letter and when you can start fooling around with what works for you. This line gets even blurrier if you haven't learned according to standards, when an instructor has allowed you scope to believe the shortcut that will turn into a waterfall is acceptable... as long as it doesn't rain (which it inevitably will sooner or later). Poor buoyancy control, crap finning, sloppy gear configurations, lack of buddy or body awareness: these are paths to the dark side.

So while I can't give you a standard answer on when standard breaking becomes safely allowable I can parrot back to you is an old line I’ve variously heard ascribed to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Pablo Picasso:

“You've got to learn all the rules so you can break them.”

Learning them -- mastering them -- comes first.

Afterward:

All this comes with a very, very big BUT. As you evolve and learn you must ALWAYS be vigilant for the creeping evil of normalization of deviance. Think things through. Don't ever do shit just because you got away with it this time or someone (even someone you like or even respect) told you you could. Just because some lazy shortcut worked today doesn't mean it will work tomorrow.

The Four Instructors

The Setting: Corner booth of a dive bar on some tropical island. Four tanned dive instructors raise their glasses in a toast.
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PADDY: Ahh.. Very passable, this, very passable.

PATTY: Nothing like a round of irish carbombs at the end of a charter, ay Pat?

PAT: You're right there Paddy.

PATSY: Who'd a thought when we were studying for the IE we’d make it here, teaching divers, living the dream, buying rounds of irish carbombs?

PADDY: Yeah. In them days, we'd a' been glad to have the price of a carbomb.

PATTY: A warm carbomb.

PATSY: Without bailey’s or whiskey.

PAT: OR beer!

PADDY: In a filthy, cracked mug.

PATSY: We never used to have a mug. We used to have to drink out of a customer’s used paper cone cup.

PATTY: The best WE could manage was to suck on a corner of a beer-soaked bar rag.

PAT: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were just tank monkeys.

PADDY: Yeah. BECAUSE we were just tank monkeys. My old Course Director used to say to me, 'Certifications don’t buy you happiness.'

PATSY: 'E was right. I was happier then and I had NOTHIN'. We used to work in this tiny old shop, with great big holes in the roof.

PATTY: Shop? You were lucky to have a shop! We used to work in the owner’s garage, all twenty-six of us, no classroom. Half the BCs leaked; we would all fight over the one regulator that didn’t freeflow for fear of drowning!

PAT: You were lucky to have a garage! *We* used to have to work in an alleyway!

PADDY: Oh we used to DREAM of working in an alleyway! Woulda' been a palace to us. We used to work in a public restroom in a fishing marina. We’d start class every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! Alleyway!? Heh.

PATSY: Well when I say “shop” it was only a construction site covered by a piece of tarp, but it was a shop to us.

PATTY: Our boss got us evicted from *our* construction site; we had to go and work in a quarry!

PAT: You were lucky to have a QUARRY! There were a hundred and sixty of us working in a mask box in the middle of Route 1.

PADDY: Plastic box?

PAT: Yeah.

PADDY: You were lucky. We worked for three months in an old pizza box in a dumpster. We used to have to start class at six o'clock in the morning, clean the dumpster, eat a piece of stale crust, crew the boat for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got back to the shop, our course director would make us do paperwork for the next four hours!

PATTY: Luxury. We used to have to get to the quarry at three o'clock in the morning, clean the quarry, eat a handful of yesterday’s guest trail mix, crew the boat every day for $10 a month, come back to the quarry, and our boss would beat us until we made $5000 in sales, if we were LUCKY!

PAT: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get to the mask box at twelve o'clock at night, and lick Route 1 clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of month-old trail mix, worked twenty-four hours a day on the boat for $5 every six years, and when we got back to the shop, the boss would slice us in two with a dive knife.

PATSY: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of seawater, work twenty-nine hours a day on the boat, and pay the captain for permission to crew, and when we got back to the shop, the boss and the course director would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'

PADDY: But you try and tell the DMCs today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope..