Also, I saw in the news today about the guy in Australia that was just sentenced for killing his wife/dive buddy underwater. Such a sad situation, but I think we can take some good lessons away from this happening.
You can never predict what is going to happen underwater. Although extreme, this is a good example of what diver should be prepared to handle. There is nothing you can do about somebody going crazy underwater and deciding to kill someone, but when I saw the picture of the victim on the bottom not moving I knew that there was something that could have been done. Having just finished Rescue Diver class (congrats to Dave and Marcus!), I thought about what I would have done if I had seen something like that.
In Rescue class we work on drills where the students react quickly to a distressed diver (in this case, she was laying on her back on the bottom in the picture). We learn how to take an unresponsive diver back up to the surface keeping their airway open. The key here is that we need to respond quickly to give the diver a chance to survive and avoid permanent injury. The idea behind the Rescue Diver class is to give people the ability to respond without hesitating. One of the things I preach in the class is think through as many scenarios that you can come up with and figure out how you would respond and then when something happens that is close to that you'll have a mental plan already in place that you can modify to the situation. This is how we avoid hesitating to do something.
Please don't take this as I'm saying the response to the diver wasn't adequate - I only have the news reports to go off of and I know that the news leaves a lot out. Please do think about what you would do in an emergency like this - seeing a distressed diver on the bottom and how you would react.
As always feel free to let me know your thoughts as well. Greg
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