Eli5: Why is cave diving so dangerous ? To the point people with 20+ years of diving experience refuse to do so.
In: 17403
Really eerie answer (especially towards the end) I saved from three years ago, worth the read. It also has a normalization of deviance video which is pretty enlightening. Echos a lot of what /u/PM_YOUR_MANATEES said.
>You have to learn how to kick properly and hold your buoyancy so that you don’t silt up the cave. Untrained OW divers will rototill with their fins pointed down and even if they’re floating in the water column they’ll be blowing out the viz behind them. If they’re not neutral and they crash into the bottom then that’s really going to blow the silt out there.
>We’re trained to know roughly what the failure rates and causes is of all our equipment and how to handle failures and emergencies under water. So we carry 3 lights and we have at a minimum dual tanks with full gas redundancy. We know the burntimes of our light and we plan our gas so that we have enough gas to both get us out and to exit with our buddy if they have a gas emergency.
>We follow a line into and out of the cave, since different sections of the cave may look similar and since going out may look different than coming in and following the cave may be disorientating.
>There’s also just mentality which is taught. If you are back in a cave and have some kind of issue and stop and futz with it for 10 minutes then you’re slowly dying. It can be better to make progress to your exit, while cleaning up your equipment on the move (or trying to figure out what to do about a failure). At the same time any failures that will slow down your exit you probably should stop and address (if you’re 60 minutes back in a cave and you have some issue that will ultimately delay your exit by 10 minutes, its better to spend a minute or two to clean it up — its also usually better not to stack up multiple failures you’ve ignored which is how you start to swirl around the incident pit).
>We don’t actually think about this all the time though or we wouldn’t do it. You’re trained to the point where all of this is just second nature and you just dive into the cave and enjoy it mostly.
>What kills trained cave divers, though, is usually complacency of one form or another. For example there’s the rule that you must have a continuous guideline to open water that is maintained at all times. Very often cave divers start to slack on this rule in caves they think they know and they start not running reel into the cave or start taking jumps from one line to another without putting in jump spools to maintain their continuous guideline. Eventually those rule violations will catch up to you (which is normalization of deviance
).
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