I've thought long and hard about posting this - I know it's going to attract a fair amount of flak - but please accept that my intentions are good and I post it for the right reasons.
I love diving and I love divers - by which I mean that I invariably get on well with people who participate in this sport. Regardless of how we dive and / or how we've been trained - it's very rare that I meet a diver who I don't consider a kindred spirit and care about. Somehow, what draws us to the sport in the first place - draws us together.
I'm really anxious that this doesn't develop into an agency bashing / rivalry thread as well although I cannot have the discussion without drawing that into it and making comparisons.
We nearly lost a well loved and well known member of our community on Monday. It strikes me that Big Si came about as close as you can to dying doing what we all love. Were it not for Jay's actions, we'd be posting an obituary and mourning our loss. Likewise with Adrian adrift in the middle of the busiest shipping lane in the world - we could have had a double catastrophe.
That Si was honest enough to post his warts and all report of the dive in the "What I Learnt About Diving From That" forum is to be applauded and I greened him to say as much. But for me its a sad irony that the thread contains so many "pat on the back" and "don't worry about the bad day at the office" messages because it means that we're all learning "F*ck All About Diving From That". Perhaps this is just a nervous reaction to his candour - but I know that when Garf posted his account of the Markgraf incident - a load of bonhomie was the last thing he was looking for: He wanted people to learn from his experience - trouble is - we don't appear to be learning.
This is on top of the avoidable fatality on the Ronda a few weeks ago and the coroner reporting this week that Mike Marsh's blameless incident from a couple of years back was caused by the diver leaving his isolator shut and running out of gas.
We simply aren't taking this stuff seriously enough. We need to be diving the safest possible gasses, appropriate deco gasses, executing careful dive and gas planning and routinely training inland so that when we need stuff from the toolbox in a panicked moment - it's just muscle memory.
Its not good enough to say - I'm responsible for me and me only. We endanger the lives of our dive buddies, our rescuers and the people who try to recover the bodies. The psychological knock on effects to those on the boat at the time, our relatives, loved ones and friends plus the wider dive community like YD mean we aren't just responsible for ourselves - whatever we may think.
I know from conversations that I had with my sadly deceased friend Richard Green about the fatality on his trip to Malin last year - he was deeply affected by the incident for many months afterwards - considering could he have done more, was he in some way to blame? - even though he was barely involved.
Paul Oliver who works bloody hard without much thanks organising loads of affordable great diving out of Dover could just as easily have found himself in the same position.
It's not much of a secret that all my own tech training is with GUE and over the last few years I've endured a fair amount of abuse from you lot for it
There have been times when I've even questioned whether the lengths we have to go to and the toughness of the standards and the training aren't overkill? I'm not naturally that cautious and even now I'm known for pushing limits and the odd dive beyond my certs before anyone accuses me of being holier than thou.
The conclusion that I'm coming to is that GUE really has got it about right. Whether we're DIR or not and without blowing things out of proportion - we need to be practising stuff with our buddies even when it's cold and horrible - we need to be prepared to spend the extra £20 on gas or just say I'll dive a bit less - we need to stay dived up and we need to strive for higher not lower standards.
In short I believe we need to accept that just because the chances of something going wrong are very, very slim - the consequences - not just to us - both immediate and long term are huge and too horrible to consider.
These consequences need to be foremost in our minds in everything we do and we need to accept that we have responsibilities in our diving that extend way beyond ourselves?
Respect to you all