Date: January 26, 2003
From: George Irvine
To: DirQuest List
(quest@gue.com)
Subject: For you cave divers - OOG
Guys, just to clear some things up that got brought to my attention. I hear some people have been taught to "donate stage bottles" in an OOG situation. This turned up in the "clip off deco regs to the harness" nonsense.
I am going to get with Andrew and David Rhea and make sure there are not people teaching this or giving the wrong impression, but for now, we obviously need to go over OOG situations the DIR way - there is only one right way to do this.
Let me start with a horror story and preface it by saying this: when you do have an emergency of any kind, I will tell you up front that your own personal set of brass balls is the only thing that will allow a positive outcome: YOU MUST STEP IN , TAKE CONTROL, ACT DECISIVELY, AND SO DO WITHOUT ANY SHOW OF FEAR, NO MATTER WHAT. You can not back off.
You then have to think about what is going to be the fastest, most effective way to get out of the cave. This is part of why we use our stage gas up - we want to have all our gas in one place if we have to run for the door, not be dragging ten bottles with 700 psi each in them. We only take useable bottles and we never leave a working scooter.
You have to link up and share gas from the main supply. Obviously, barring a sudden, total manifold failure, the divers should be either on stages or done with them. Handing off a stage is bullshit. It guarantees repeated OOG situations, is too stressful, slows you down, and is a cop out and does not solve the problem. If there is stage gas left, and it is in sufficient quantity to where bringing the bottle will add some befit and do so without using more gas due to being slowed down than by not having it, then bring it and have the donor breathe it, but do not pass off a bottle and leave a guy with only that.
The right way is for the donor to breath the stages to save the main supply.
Now, let me tell you the horror story. Bill Gavin, Lamar English and Sherwood Schile did a dive up past the Bitter End in Leon Sinks. JJ and I set it up, as I was supposed to dive, but I thumbed it when I realized that Sherwood was not on the same page with us and was not in the right frame of mind to do this dive.
They did it anyway, telling me that I was wrong, and what happened, to make a long story short, is that Sherwood drowned on the way out. He was on a triple stage, and he left all three bottles on, did not stow the regs, but rather had them clipped off to his right chest d ring or hanging there. There is a nasty restriction (very long, tight and twisty with projections everywhere) that they went through.
Sherwood got hung up and at the same time ran out of gas, or thought he did on his bottle. He then started grasping for regs (now has five around his neck), and can't get one going. He signals Gavin, who passes the hose. The whole place silts out totally and the flow pushes the silt over Gavin - he can't see Sherwood. Lamar is behind and blocked by Sherwood and can only see his feet. At the same time, his scooter triggers and sticks on.
Gavin takes off a stage and hands it to Sherwood (who now has four). He sees his long hose come back. Lamar ends up pulling Sherwood back, leaves his scooter, grabs Gavin, and Gavin tows him out. They get to the deco bottles and Gavin turns around and sees it is Lamar, not Sherwood that he is towing.
Gavin went back the next day to get Sherwood and he told me this: he told me that he just wanted to make sure that he did not back off from Sherwood and that he had made a clean pass and done the right thing and given him a full bottle. Now keep in mind that this is number three for Gavin - Bill McFadden ran out of gas on him and nearly drowned him (Gavin not on the dive but went back into the cave when McFadden;'s buddy had left him), Parker Turner ran out of gas on him at Indian and died, and then this situation. By the way, that is when I took over the WKPP.
They did several things wrong besides taking Sherwood on this dive and not using enough scooters. They let Sherwood do it his way, they balked when the shit hit the fan, they did not positively control and solve the situation and put it to bed, they left working scooters and went out on one (could have then killed those two if the batteries died , which is amazing that they did not after the distance they traveled on one scooter), and they failed to recognize any of their mistakes. What they both did right was quit cave diving shortly thereafter. Not that these two guys did not posses more skill than I have ever seen, but you just can't lose the game that badly and keep playing.
The way to win the game is to do it right.
I do not let things go by like this and then wonder what the problem is, and I sure as hell do no go on repeating it. Learn from this, and if anyone is teaching you anything different, know that it is not DIR and it is not right.