is "never freedive alone!(!!)" safe?

[Siku]

Apologies my last post was way off subject. I have reposted in a new thread.

Mods i hope this is ok. please feel free to move/delete as appropriate.

(fcallargy thanks for the response).

 

[Andrew the fish]

about the original question - I was thinking similar thoughts. Safety isn't a very straightforward thing. If there is a cliff, people generally wouldn't come close. But if someone decides to improve safety and builds railing at the edge, people will tend to lean against it. Having the loaded gun doesn't mean you can visit problem neighborhood asking for trouble. Safety belts do not mean you can drive in a reckless manner. But...somehow...wearing parachute means you can pin yor airspeed gauge, yeah babe yeehaw

Maybe people still need to know about safer way of doing things, at least everyone else wouldn't feel guilty, I mean - they knew the risks because we told them, right?

How about like this - freediver knows he is doing some inherently unsafe thing, safety protocol was drilled into his head, but this particular time he want to go alone. He is very brainwashed that this is VERY unsafe to dive alone. Sooo, he dive very carefully this time, with full understanding that even this isn't enough and he is still unsafe. He monitor his condition closely, has longer rest at the surface, sets his alarms conservatively, and gets out of the water early. All that because he was told about the risks.

 

[efattah]

I agree strongly that preaching 'never dive alone' is not helpful. Because, despite this warning, people will still dive alone, and do dive alone, and die as a result. One of the reasons they die is because they have no idea how to dive alone. Everyone was too scared to teach them techniques that could save their life if they dove alone. So the person remained ignorant. In their ignorance, even if they were somehow cautious, this cautiousness is not enough to save them. The tricks to safe diving alone are extremely complicated, such that no one, no matter how cautious, could figure them out by a simple attitude of trying to be safe.

Many people die while spearfishing with buddies. It happens all the time. They were not diving alone. A strict buddy system is impossible while spearfishing since you don't even know where the other diver is, or where they will come up, and they often black out on the bottom at 15m or sink back down. So, in the case of spearfishing, telling people 'never dive alone' makes their situation worse. Rather, you should use the slogan we use here in Vancouver: 'pretend you're diving alone.' Even if you have buddies in the water, you should pretend they are not there, and use every trick in the book to avoid problems. You are, for all intents, solo diving, even if there are other people in the water, and you should take adequate precautions.

One thing which is wrong is the statement that 'blackouts come unexpectedly, cannot be sensed, cannot be prevented.' I have had many blackouts and many sambas in the ocean and in the pool, and every *single* time I knew it was coming before it actually did. Sometimes I only felt it coming four or five seconds before it did, but I always felt it coming and it never surprised me when I had a problem. On the other hand, I have been meditating all my life and I am extremely aware of subtle internal changes to my thinking. Other more extroverted people work differently, and for them, it may be true that blackouts hit them unexpectedly. So, the only conclusion we can make is that 'for some people, blackouts come without warning, and you cannot know which type of person you are until you have had many many blackouts.'

In particular, controlling the surface interval is the complex part of diving alone. Acid buildup during a dive is extraordinarily dangerous. To clear acid requires an extremely long surface interval, or some short shallow dives. A long surface interval brings the risk of hypocapnia, so a modified breathing pattern and/or surface static apnea needs to be done to counter the hypocapnic effect of the long surface interval required to recover from a more difficult dive. I have discussed this in other threads. Other things like the ATRC test before getting in the water are highly useful for safety. As well, an extremely gradual build up in dive time and depth, never increasing one dive by more than a few seconds or meters compared to a previous one, and being very careful for the signs of cold, which will throw everything off.

All of these tricks are omitted, replaced simply by the phrase 'never dive alone.'

 

[ThomasB]

Swimming alone in a pool is not safe. Mtb alone is not safe. Almost any sport activity in remote or isolate environment Is not completely safe and I don't see any reasons why this should not be promoted especially in freediving.

 

[esom]

Swimming alone in a pool is not safe. Mtb alone is not safe. Almost any sport activity in remote or isolate environment Is not completely safe and I don't see any reasons why this should not be promoted especially in freediving.

hi Thomas
"diving alone is not safe" is not promoting the systematical dangers of diving alone at all, not to speak of techniques to make it more safe. further it says more about the idea of freediving of the one stating it, than about safty.

"never dive alone!" is not even informing, that there is a systematical risk but just calls for obediency by being formulated as a command

though i see your point, and i like "never dive alone!" much less than "diving alone is not safe". that´s why i started the thread. i feel "n d a!" puts a gap between the short info and the required process, that will lead to safer diving:
with "diving alone is not safe" we start a subject, with "never dive alone!!!" we end it.

 

[ThomasB]

hi Thomas
"diving alone is not safe" is not promoting the systematical dangers of diving alone at all, not to speak of techniques to make it more safe. further it says more about the idea of freediving of the one stating it, than about safty.

"never dive alone!" is not even informing, that there is a systematical risk but just calls for obediency by being formulated as a command

It is indeed. It just need the obvious compendium you get if you learn the basic of freediving safety. I don't think there is a single freediving course where you don't get warned about all the risks involved, the phisiology behind it and the reasons why someone with you can clearly be the difference between death and life.

"never dive alone" on its own it's clearly not enough as it is simply a concise slogan which summarize the safety philosophy behind it.

More over it does inform indeed that there is a systematical risk in freediving alone, if something happens to you, you are alone, how is that not even informing is a mistery to me.

Last it doesn't call for any obedience at all, you've been warned, you (might) have been trained, then you're free to freedive alone as much as you want, many people do, some even believe they know when they'll have a blackout (as if it is going to help them in anyway when they are alone...) some will die in a swimming pool, some will live on and take their chances.

With all due respect this is to me a silly crusade against a simple and effective advice which for some reasons you might have simply misunderstood.

 

[esom]

How about like this - freediver knows he is doing some inherently unsafe thing, safety protocol was drilled into his head, but this particular time he want to go alone. He is very brainwashed that this is VERY unsafe to dive alone. Sooo, he dive very carefully this time, with full understanding that even this isn't enough and he is still unsafe. He monitor his condition closely, has longer rest at the surface, sets his alarms conservatively, and gets out of the water early. All that because he was told about the risks.

brainwash haha.
...and yes, actually for this slogan to work as something increasing saftey we need brainwashed freedivers, as i said before when commenting on the inherent definition.
thankfully we are not all brainwashed. but due to this there arises another serious psycological problem with "never dive alone!". as this slogan dominates the safety talk, more people who are diving alone are dealing with breaking a rule, while they are freediving. and although they rejected the commandment once for good reasons, it still is not gone. the decision to come up will feel in some (only some?) cases like accepting the rule in the end. ...in the end, after rejecting it again although the time was right to come up.

 

[esom]

hi thomas,
i think you got me wrong. i did not say "diving alone is not safe" is not informing that there are risks, i said it´s not promoting the risks. i think repling directly to you was unfortunate, because it suggested that i mean what you understood.

With all due respect this is to me a silly crusade against a simple and effective advice which for some reasons you might have simply misunderstood.

i see the reasons. and i see problems which i tried to explain with arguments in words not with a sword. as i said i think you got me wrong in beforehand

 

[Simos]

With all due respect this is to me a silly crusade against a simple and effective advice which for some reasons you might have simply misunderstood.

I'm with Thomas on this - wish the cause of the accidents and the solution was the phrasing of the slogan (which was put in place to reduce accidents in the first place); then the solution would be simple, just change the wording.

I don't think there are any tricks/techniques to safe solo diving - only techniques for safe diving. If a technique is making your diving safer, why would you want to use it only when you are alone.

I agree on the point though that people should be taught to assume that they are diving alone - the sad reality is that in some conditions (eg bad vis) you are almost diving alone for much of the dive, especially if there are no ropes. Making things look 'pretty' in courses doesn't help eg giving the false belief that it's always 100% safe if you have a buddy, that if you BO it's still ok as your buddy will bring you to the surface etc.

It would be more beneficial if courses could cover more details on what should one do in those cases where external conditions make traditional buddying techniques ineffective but i guess much of that is learned in practice too.

Ps esom I do see your point too but I really don't think this is the main issue on balance - I think the main issue is that education is not always available and combined with solo diving this leads to accidents that could have been avoided

 

[growingupninja]

Interesting discussion. In California, most spearos I know have the attitude that we are always diving alone. Kelp, iffy viz, mean that you could lose someone who is only 15' away. And that is during the day; many divers for some months out of the year are diving exclusively at night. Plus our primary game fish is easily spooked by divers and any sort of noise so there is very little incentive to being close to your buddy. I have a lot of fun taking new guys out and stick close to them but in that case the day is purely social--I'm not there to fish. I would honestly be a little nervous taking someone out who has little experience in the ocean outside the safety net of a freediving class. But many spearos who truly grew up out here have grown up surfing and so they are used to at least being in the ocean. If you tell that person 'never dive alone' they're not going to listen to much else from you since they have likely been diving, snorkling, and surfing in the ocean alone since they were a little kid. Unfortunately I see a divide between many local freediving schools and much of the local spearing culture. Each side is married to their own dogma....

Most spearos seem to be very aware of the risks. California spearos pretty much fall into one of two categories. Those who say 'I wouldn't dive like I do if I had children' and those who say 'I don't dive like that anymore because I have kids now.'

 

[Simos]

Interesting point on kids - best trick for staying safe. Have a baby and all of a sudden safety margins double and depths halve

 

[Bill]

Interesting reading. It's good to question/review all the practices. Snorkel and lanyard use. Weight belt procedures. Warm ups. Add Sonny's reco of two divers, one float and one gun. For me, the biggest argument is that someone watching you surface increases safety enormously. I can remember a few times where the person watching saved, at the least, an ugly incident and they weren't even in the water.
Maybe just an old fool that started diving over sixty years ago but "never dive alone" isn't bad advice, I think.

 

[Apneaddict]

I'm running the sessions in our local pool and have been working hard to install good practices:

* Attentive and close buddying
* Knowledge of safety procedures
* 30" observation
* surface protocol
* others?

Sometimes it feels like they all think I'm crazy - we're only doing 25m lengths after all. One person said "I've been doing lengths underwater (alone) all my life".

Any suggestions welcome.

That is somewhere between "very conservative" and "excessive" safety'ing for 25m lengths.

 

[Andrew the fish]

I have seen very similar rules in UBC pool in Vancouver, never thought they were excessive. I actually enjoyed doing safety for someone, being this close you can observe their technique, speed, surface protocol, I think its more of how you take it. Also, my understanding is, freedivers are more like homeless children, they can lose pool privileges over most innocent incident. What do you think is excessive in such case.

 

[growingupninja]

Re: pool safety lengths. I would never want the responsibilty of running sessions so hat's off, but in the group I most commonly train with the de facto is usually dedicated safety (walking or in water) for anything more than half that swimmers max, or anything involving a static is an in water safety, and anything involving a stop on the bottom at any length needs to be communicated. In situations where we are swimming without active spotters, we communicate our set (dive plan?) to the others in the lane. Any swim with dedicated safety, some surface protocol is expected. And of course anytime somebody requests a safety because they are adding a new element (less air, faster interval, max attempt, etc), they get one. These are all experienced swimmers/divers who train or dive at least 3-4 times a week. I would like to know what other groups do.

 

[Andrew the fish]

One of the reasons they die is because they have no idea how to dive alone.

...The tricks to safe diving alone are extremely complicated, such that no one, no matter how cautious, could figure them out by a simple attitude of trying to be safe.

In particular, controlling the surface interval is the complex part of diving alone. Acid buildup during a dive is extraordinarily dangerous. To clear acid requires an extremely long surface interval, or some short shallow dives.

....modified breathing pattern and/or surface static apnea... to counter the hypocapnic effect of the long surface interval required to recover from a more difficult dive.

... ATRC test before getting in the water are highly useful for safety.

... an extremely gradual build up in dive time and depth, never increasing one dive by more than a few seconds or meters compared to a previous one

...being very careful for the signs of cold, which will throw everything off.

All of these tricks are omitted, replaced simply by the phrase 'never dive alone.'

Eric, honestly, I am thinking, if you ever wrote a book - I would buy. Or just keep talking here . There was a lot of unique information from you on many other threads, DCS, equalisation, now this one here.

My thinking, from years of doing complicated things and having to train other people to do them, is that there is nothing too complicated. Everything can be broken into simple understandable procedures. If you know of some tricks about freediving safety and think they are too complicated for "general public" - maybe you haven't thought long enough, or have some doubts on what is right.

 

[growingupninja]

I have seen very similar rules in UBC pool in Vancouver, never thought they were excessive. I actually enjoyed doing safety for someone, being this close you can observe their technique, speed, surface protocol, I think its more of how you take it. Also, my understanding is, freedivers are more like homeless children, they can lose pool privileges over most innocent incident. What do you think is excessive in such case.

Some pools in Los Angeles enforce a strict 25 meter max even if the pool is a 50m lap pool. Others do not have a specific policy and freediver 'incidents' would likely encourage them to enact one. America is the land of the free, home of the brave, and playground of lawyers.

 

[wes]

Hey,

I train dynamics "alone" 95% of time. I have trained with partners and find that I get only about 1/4 of progress with partner due to complexity of extra person and distractions so I train "alone" with the following safeguards.

- I only train in pools with life guards.

- I never train max attempts (even with safety buddy), I only do max's at comps with "full safety" doctors, multiple safety divers etc. The longest I ever did at pool was 100m dynamic with fin before my 172m dynamic with fin.

- I "bracket" my O2 level with pulse oxymeter, so workout typical is 65% to 80% at end of dynamics (65% is very low and rare, typical is 75% - 85%), Blackout for me is somewhere less than 40% (I measured 34% once at comp with borderline samba static)

- I train at pool with water level decks so come out with arms fully streched out on deck so if I sambaed after coming up I would not "fall" back into the water

- I always swim when I am holding my breath, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, I never am still or do statics as part of training.

- I work with the pool staff and pool directors so they feel comfortable with this style of training. Kind of ironically for the "train with buddy" philosophy (which I think is very safe and am not against) when I trained with a safety partner and the partner has small BO on max dynamic swim one day which I easily helped him recover from the staff felt very uncomfortable with that and requested that there be no black out with the freedive training. This of course goes against the buddy system and competition system which accepts black outs. I decided to build a system that I feel severely limits black outs and I and the pool staff are happy with it. The one thing that I don't like about the system I use is that it sets example of training alone which I think to expose to some people is not safe in some circumstances. Drinking beer in bar or at party has similar effect, sets example which some people will follow that will cause death etc and I sometimes do this as well as do many other people.

- I don't train depth (except at comp training with full safety) and do only "recreational" freediving depth and for this if I am alone or with safety buddy I do dives with measured surface intervals and no contraction rule (no contractions on any part of dive, even coming up) so am diving (I believe) about 1/2 of my "limit". I don't spear fish as I consider this insanely dangerous. (maybe 10,000 spearos have died in last 10 years vs maybe 100 comp freedivers in private training, maybe 1 comp freediver in organized training and maybe zero comp freedivers in AIDA comps)

- Solution to this is to have each person 02 measured in their blood in real time and have limit for pool (and I think will be limit for comp too) so will avoid alot more blackouts. Example swimmer is having difficulty and gets rescued when O2 falls below 70% which would be very rare for most swimmers. For freedivers if limit was 60% could train very intense workouts within that limit. I think we are about 10 years away from widespread use of this and another 10 years away from widespread use of auto injecting O2 into bloodstream on low O2. This will bring another level of problems as people push these limits harder as feel "safe" with these backup systems. Only benefit will people that are pushing will be fully aware they are pushing limits, sometimes now people die breath holding and they believe ignorantly they are not pushing limits (maybe I am one of these I don't know).

- Crossing the street is very dangerous too. In most US cities, more vehicle deaths are to pedestrians than occupants now, so safety in ones life is more than just freediving safety.

Cheers Wes Lapp

PS - For those who don't know me well I have completed the Advanced freediver PFI course and I want it to be very clear that my training violates the safety standards that PFI teaches and uses in all their classes and competitions.

 

[ThomasB]

CUT
and requested that there be no black out with the freedive training. This of course goes against the buddy system and competition system which accepts black outs.).

The buddy system does not "accept" the blackout, it makes it safer if it happens.

- Crossing the street is very dangerous too. In most US cities, more vehicle deaths are to pedestrians than occupants now, so safety in ones life is more than just freediving safety.

So next time we should tell people that "paying attention while crossing" is a brain washing diktat that makes crossing more dangerous.
[/quote]

PS - For those who don't know me well I have completed the Advanced freediver PFI course and I want it to be very clear that my training violates the safety standards that PFI teaches and uses in all their classes and competitions.

So why do you do it? Because it's less dangerous than crossing the street in the us?

 

[esom]

Interesting reading. It's good to question/review all the practices. Snorkel and lanyard use. Weight belt procedures. Warm ups. Add Sonny's reco of two divers, one float and one gun. For me, the biggest argument is that someone watching you surface increases safety enormously. I can remember a few times where the person watching saved, at the least, an ugly incident and they weren't even in the water.
Maybe just an old fool that started diving over sixty years ago but "never dive alone" isn't bad advice, I think.

questioning practices... the talk or the diving in pairs? i want to question the talk. this talk is much harder to put in a row with your basic freediving practices.

about advice:
"never dive alone" is hardly an "advice". simply because it´s saying what not to do. - it´s much more a ban, a commandment, a paternalistic comment, a slogan repeated mindlessly over ond over again, a saying which is driven by fear of life.

but it´s more important how "n d a!" is used. is it really advice, given carefully by a mentor to his (long time) student? a slogan can not be an advice as it´s hardly given carefully.