DIR: questions and answers

[Maverick]

isn't Mr Bailey a Moderator also?

[CaptnJack]

There seem to be some misconceptions above with regard to gas selection (ala air is for tires and narcosis issues). So to elaborate on each gas and my understanding of GUE's take on it...

I'm not going to discuss why something is not DIR though. Just the standard gases and why they are the way they are. I have references for alot of this stuff, just ask and I'll see what I have. Realize I'm only Tech1 (0-170ft ish). Remember its a technical training agency, choosing standard gases to allow one to be intimately familar with the required deco from known gasses. Deco is not viewed as anything special or to be avoided by gas selection. Gases are considered tools just like hardware.

O2:
The princess of gases. Treat very gingerly or she'll get angry unpredictably. It has been known for decades that O2 tolerance is random and bizarre. People can tolerate a pp02 of X for hundreds of mins one day and tox after 10min at the level another. This is why GUE advocates max ppO2 of 1.2 for the working phase of the dive. For deco, the average ppO2 concentration of a deco gas over its utilized range is also about 1.2. It obviously spikes to 1.6 then declines.

GUE has never used "best mix" because this is predicated on reducing deco through maximum O2 content. As a technical training agency GUE is not at all afraid of deco. Deco is just part of doing certain dives. Minimizing it by pushing ppO2s is not their way. If you use Buhlmann or VPM to plot to identical profiles one with a ppO2 of 1.2 on the bottom and another with 1.4, you'll see there's only a few mins difference.

O2 is considered narcotic by GUE.

N2:
An ugly heavy brute of a gas. Slow to enter tissues, slow to exit. "Inert" but likes to microbubble, which can stimulate the body's immune system and make you feel hammered after diving. Hard to get rid of this gas easily once accumulated. Narcotic and viscous at depth. Viscosity can lead to CO2 buildup (see below).

He:
The friendly gas. Requires good bouyancy but offgasses fast (what you want from an inert gas once you're saturated anyway). Easy on the lungs on deco (allows for good O2 breaks). Easy on the work of breathing on the bottom. Lightness minimizes CO2 buildup. As a noble monotomic gas it does not tend to interact with the immune system. Percentage not a critical component of the breathing mix (a mixing error of even 5% [huge] is not critical - like it would be with O2)

CO2:
The worst gas of all (outside of CO). Highly narcotic, leads to major tunnel vision, can lead to panic attacks and a hyperventilation spiral from rapid shallow breathing. Exacerbates the propensity to O2 tox at depth.

So with those general gas philosophies in mind here is air compared/contrasted with the GUE standard gases by component.

Air:
Max N2 content = both worst from an offgassing perspective and thick and viscous at dpeth potentially leading to CO2 buildup. Not recommended but used for <40ft dives based on its sole positive, low cost.

32% 0-100ft gas
Lesser N2 content, longer bottom times and if not pushing deco less overall N2 accumulation. If marginally into deco slightly more effective offgassing late in the dive. Only appropriate for low work dives to 100ft. For high work dives below 80ft not the preferred gas due to viscosity/CO2 buildup. -20% EAD used.

30/30 80-100ft
Lesser N2 content still. Same pluses as 32% except very limited potential for CO2 accumulation. Good choice for deepish high flow caves. Reduction in END is a secondary benefit in this range. -20% EAD used. PITA to mix without a booster (not a concern of GUE, but a concern of some other "DIR" divers, see bastard stepchild 25/25 below).

21/35 100-150ft
END of 100ft or less starting to get important, potential for substantive narcosis and/or work leading to CO2 accumulation. Dived as if it were air. If you are diving in this range deco is pretty much a given (if you stay long enough to bother diving at all). Easy to off gas from. Easy to mix. 35% He topped with 32% = 21/35

18/45 150-200ft
Still trying to back off ppO2. Maintains END of <100ft. Dived as if air from a deco perspective.

15/55 + 10/70 (beyond my limits, no new issues beyond 18/45 anyway)

25/25 80-130ft
This is not a GUE gas but is advocated by some west coast "DIR" people. Potentially more useful than 30/30 since it has a broader range. Typically dived as -10% EAD so once you're 120-130 you're not given much "minimum deco" time anyway. Partly chosen for easy of mixing over 30/30. 25% He transfilled at home topped with 32% from a shop = 25/25

Deco gases
50%
Chosen partly because for ~150ft 21/35 (and greater) dives it gets your minimum gas reserves down to a managable level (~65-70cf). The 80-30ft stops to get up to the usable depth of 100% O2 requires alot of gas. When used from either 70ft to 0 or 70ft to 30ft, there is a spike to 1.6ppO2 but the average ppO2 is about 1.2

100%
Chosen to help off gas the slowest tissues from deeper dives (in conjunction with 50%) or alone from longer shallow dives where minimum gas needs aren't sky high to ascend up from the bottom to 20ft. Used about 10mins on and with a 5 mins break off onto the highest He gas available/breathable at 20ft. Used this way, alternating ppO2 of 1.6 and ~0.30 (e.g. assuming 18/45 backgas breaks) your average is actually below ppO2 of 1.2 throughout the O2 deco time.

I hope this clarifies the choices DIR divers make and why.

Richard

[CaptnJack]

Therein lies the strength of DIR...good buddy skills are more prevalent. There's never been a question there in my mind.

Actually its a bit different than that.

There's a commonality of training which is not found in other agencies. With pretty much all the other tech/cave agencies quality comes down to having a good instructor. GUE has some strong and weak instructors too, but... GUE is the only major agency which has publically posted their training standards and holds all their students to them regardless of instructor. (I have inquired with NSS and NACD about getting their training standards and they won't give them out for 'liability reasons'). GUE's are shown on the website.

So when I hook up with a (relative) GUE trained instabuddy, once I know what GUE class they have taken and we discuss our relative strengths and weaknesses I pretty much know where we stand. I know what was expected of them in their previous class(es). I know when they decribe their strengths and weaknesses what scenarios are easy and challenging for them. If they are from out of town, I know which of our local sites are suitable and which are pushing their limits.

The common training provides a background that 2 NAUI or 2 TDI divers trained by different instructors do not (necessarily but might) have. You'd need many dives to figure out all the potentially major and endless minor variations in training and skills.

But for GUE trained DIR divers, right at 1st introduction we have alot in common (above and beyond common gear). So friends can show up here. I take them to Edmonds for their 1st dive. I watch their light discipline and buddy awareness. I give them small tests to see how matched we are. We openly talk about strengths and weaknesses (something which is actually modelled in GUE classes). Then we're pretty much ready to choose whatever sites are within our respective training/experience limits.

[gcbryan]

And then you go to Cove 2

[CaptnJack]

And then you go to Cove 2

Haha, nope then I take them to the Bomber, or Waterman's, or one of our other (relative) destination dives. You forget I have a boat We only do Cove 2 as a 3rd or 4th dive of the day in the summer when the patio's open for beers after

This last weekend we did:
Lobster Shack (20mins deco)
Les Davis (recreational 2nd dive)
Dalco Wall (25mins deco)
Z's (recreational 2nd dive)

The first 2 cause it was nasty Saturday. We had arranged their weekend up from LA around good tides, but the San Juans was not to be.

One of my 2 buddies I had virtually never been with before (2x tech dives as part of a group down in LA). The other was an older friend, we have a dozen or so tech dives together and a few cave dives. Seamless communication and protocols amongst the 3 of us.

Last May I did a couple of cave dives with a brand new GUE Cave1 diver. We had never met before, he was a 3rd buddy in some friend's cave class which ended the day before. We had a great zero stress time in Carwash.

Normally I would do some sort of non-deco, non-overhead checkout. But he had just finished his cave class and he had to go home to Belize the next day. So I took a gamble. 100% same planning/communication/skill page from the get go and his 1st language wasn't even English (he was German).

Maybe its misplaced confidence, but I have never been surprised by weak buddy skills or physical skills in a DIR diver who has finished one of the classes. Or even if they haven't finished and just describe where they provisionaled, which so far all have been willing to do.

[gcbryan]

Ah! I forgot about the boat and I am truly jealous on that count!

I don't get to Waterman often enough. All of those dives are good except Les Davis in my opinion. Les Davis, EUP, and KVI are the only dives around here I can do without.

I can remember one year when a boat as backup at Deception Pass would have been a welcome sight.

I can see how GUI training takes some of the guess work out of new dive buddies. I've had several main dive buddies until recently and haven't had to deal with that situation for some time. Now that several of them have more or less quit diving I am dealing with it from time to time. I've been pretty good at picking other people to dive with but it's definitely not the same as diving with a long time buddy.

[Grateful Diver]

isn't Mr Bailey a Moderator also?

No ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

[Jeff Kruse]

gcbryan,

GUE teaches us to go to a "working" regulator in an OOG situation. Durring all of my training through GUE never once were we told to try our neckless reg or our deco reg in an OOG. This is a very important point. Your buddies reg is working. Thats the one you want.

When we cary a deco bottle we carry it turned off and with the Reg stowed. It takes time to turn the bottle on and unstowe the Reg.

Last but not least, when you carry a "ponny/slung bottle" you might have a tendency to get just another foot or two away from your buddy. Maybe more for some. This may lead you to loose your buddy. If you don't have redundant air then you will probably stick to your buddy like glue.

Any time you want to come down and visit we have a place for you.

Jeff

[CaptnJack]

Yeah I did my first checkout dive at Les Davis 15 years ago. If its 15 more years until my next dive there that's fine with me. I found it rather mundane. But hey at least we actually have backup sites. The last time I went out of state for diving the fires (and winds!) precluded diving in LA.

[gcbryan]

gcbryan,

GUE teaches us to go to a "working" regulator in an OOG situation. Durring all of my training through GUE never once were we told to try our neckless reg or our deco reg in an OOG. This is a very important point. Your buddies reg is working. Thats the one you want.

When we cary a deco bottle we carry it turned off and with the Reg stowed. It takes time to turn the bottle on and unstowe the Reg.

Last but not least, when you carry a "ponny/slung bottle" you might have a tendency to get just another foot or two away from your buddy. Maybe more for some. This may lead you to loose your buddy. If you don't have redundant air then you will probably stick to your buddy like glue.

Any time you want to come down and visit we have a place for you.

Jeff

Hi Jeff, thanks for the invitation. If the rain doesn't stop soon I may be down there renting out that room permanently!

[lamont]

Why address recreational diving as a "belief system" rather than just dealing with each issue that comes up with objectivity?

DIR isn't a belief system. And you have to get off of the internet and get into classes to understand that. And it does depend a lot on who your instructor is.

So for example, during Tech 1 with Bob Sherwood we started talking about what to do when you've got a real gas loss problem with a manifold which cannot be stopped. The pat DIR answer is to isolate, get on the other post and exit with your remaining gas and share gas with your buddy if you need to. The answer that Bob gave, however, is that procedur is what we should be doing at our level in an introductory level technical diving situation. What Bob would do would be to breathe off of the side which is losing gas and maximize the amount of gas he could get out of his backgas. He would be expecting to run out of gas on that side and would stay prepared for that at all times, and if he hit a single-file restriction would get onto his buddies backgas and then after the restriction get back onto the leaking side. And then he explained that we're really not there in our ability to manage all that going wrong so the procedure of simply getting off of the post with the gas loss is a much better choice for us.

You'll get other DIR instructors (particularly instructors who are only certified to teach fundies) who just give you the procedures without delving into the grey areas like that. When it comes to the internet you'll just get pat answers regurgitated from DIRF instructors regurtigating what their ITC instructor told them sometimes. Unfortunately that puts you very far from the source of the actual information and you've got Telephone-Game corruption of the whole message going on.

Why the need for the group mentality? Why all the pat answers instead of your own answers...air is for tires, I didn't know what I didn't know, computers rot your brain, etc.?

Again, you largely need to get off the internet.

Why contort logic to fit a belief...must disable a computer because to not do so would cause one to not pay attention to the dive?

Bigger problem with computers is that GUE schedules aren't generated by any decompression computers out there. None of the computers out there model lung physiology for example, and none of them give you really useful information on free or dissolved gas loading (once you're at the surface you're 'clear' -- but after a 40 minute 30 foot dive you're in a much different situation than a 60 minute 120 foot dive, even though the computer is reading exactly the same thing).

Why mandate a long hose just because it's easier to practice with? This wasn't the original reason for it at all. It's nice to have or not to have.

The original reason for the long hose was to be able to share gas single file through a restriction. It turns out that there's advantages to diving in open water, however.

I started, but never quite finished, a FAQ page on why people would want to use the long hose for recreational diving:

http://www.scriptkiddie.org/diving/longhose.html

I've looked at most of the DIR practices and even though many are controversial as implemented today there is no controversy in their original function. The reason for no computer is that there were no computers for technical diving, the long hose was to pass gas to a buddy thorough a cave restriction, everyone has to be on the same page in a technical diving scenario just like the military, commercial diving, etc.

Yeah, when you get past the b.s. on the internet most of it makes sense, and most of it is being copied by other technical diving agencies.

Logic is getting contorted when you say don't dive with a pony bottle. Your buddy is your pony bottle...unless you are diving doubles then your buddy and your doubles are your redundancy. Don't dive with a pony bottle but if you do sling it....don't do something but if you do I have a belief system for that as well!

Let me tell you a secret which is that DIR dive with pony bottles, they just call them stages or deco bottles...

The reason at the entry level for not diving with pony bottles is that a beginning diver is likely to get lulled into complacency due to the presence of a pony bottle and wind up in a situation where they need the pony bottle but can't access the gas or the gas isn't there. This is what happened to Ben Giard where he died with air in his pony bottle that he couldn't access because the regulator was trapped. Adding more valves, more bottles and more regulators adds more things that can go wrong.

Also, at an entry level divers should be practicing being good buddies and practicing donating gas to each other. At least 9 times out of 10 when someone posts on scubaboard that they want a pony bottle it is because they are diving with bad buddies.

And even at a technical level, if you do have a catastrophic manifold failure your buddy must be able to get you out with the gas on his back. Diving with an isolation manifold you are still dependent upon your buddy to a certain extent for some very edge case failures.

Practice for drill team precision for recreational diving. This is like training a soldier for duty in Iraq by sending him to school for drill team skills. The skills needed in combat are different than those used in a parade.

I don't really understand this analogy at all. Training for S-drills as a recreational diver with a long hose makes you much better at getting gas to another recreational diver. If you recall Sheryl's accident at cove 2, inability to complete an OOG regulator exchange immediately preceded the fatal injury. Meanwhile, everything that I learned about S-drills in DIRF and recreationally diving served me just fine in cave 1, only we added a bunch of long hose/line management stuff for OOG blind exits, but the basics of donation worked identically. I don't understand the training for parade / training for combat analogy at all. If anything that argument cuts the other way -- i started training for s-drills back when i thought cave divers and technical divers were completely insane, and after i realized the risks were actually managable, i wound up using those skills for technical and cave diving...

[lamont]

GUE teaches us to go to a "working" regulator in an OOG situation. Durring all of my training through GUE never once were we told to try our neckless reg or our deco reg in an OOG. This is a very important point. Your buddies reg is working. Thats the one you want.

I've been taught in multiple circumstances now both from GUE instructors and GUE tech2 divers to go for the necklace reg first upon an OOG on a stage/deco bottle.

[kjc]

Ah! I forgot about the boat and I am truly jealous on that count!

I don't get to Waterman often enough. All of those dives are good except Les Davis in my opinion. Les Davis, EUP, and KVI are the only dives around here I can do without.

I can remember one year when a boat as backup at Deception Pass would have been a welcome sight.

I can see how GUI training takes some of the guess work out of new dive buddies. I've had several main dive buddies until recently and haven't had to deal with that situation for some time. Now that several of them have more or less quit diving I am dealing with it from time to time. I've been pretty good at picking other people to dive with but it's definitely not the same as diving with a long time buddy.

Thank you very much for having this discussion Gray! I think you are remarkably courageous for even initiating it as a topic in the first place. Good for you!

I realize it was just simple chit chat along the way in the discussion, but there are alternatives to everything, including boats. You don't have to be jealous of what someone else has.

I prefer to be friends with my dive buddies as friends before the dive as well as after it. I don't think its possible to white knuckle relationships.

I think it is an absolutely huge personal challenge within diving for an individual to change their personal dive style (gear wise as well as philosophy) to match up to someone else's when they may have just been trying to be friends with the others in the first place.

I think if any person dives long enough and as friends or dive buddies come and go for whatever reason, everyone faces a renewed challenge of change.

[lamont]

Why the need for the group mentality? Why all the pat answers instead of your own answers...

One more thing....

Why do I use Linux instead of writing my own O/S kernel?
Why do I use gcc instead of writing my own compiler?
Why do I use perl instead of writing my own scripting language?
Why do I use GTK+ instead of writing my own window manager?
Why do I use openssl instead of writing my own crytpo libraries?

I view GUE/DIR as just a well debugged toolkit for diving so I don't have to reinvent the wheel...

I've never understood people who object to DIR because they think its a virtue or even a mandate to come to your own conclusions about everything...

(And this whole analogy gets worse... Why do I buy a Honda instead of building a car myself? etc...)

[CaptnJack]

GUE teaches us to go to a "working" regulator in an OOG situation. Durring all of my training through GUE never once were we told to try our neckless reg or our deco reg in an OOG. This is a very important point. Your buddies reg is working. Thats the one you want.

I've been taught in multiple circumstances now both from GUE instructors and GUE tech2 divers to go for the necklace reg first upon an OOG on a stage/deco bottle.

(3 years ago) my now heretic instructor - who's was also Jeff's - taught me to go for a working reg in my buddies mouth. At the time that rather mindless strategy worked out since I happened to be OOG on backgas when he failed my deco bottle on me too. Not a pat answer one way or the other since if your stage may go kaploooy and your buddy have had some other (e.g. left post) problem or vice versa.

So with the benefit of (some) experience I would say you simply need to know what's working and what isn't across the whole team (easier said than done). Then go for a working reg on either yourself or on a buddy who still has at least 2. So you might need to: 1) go for your necklace, 2) skip your own necklace or 3) even skip over one buddy to a teammate with 2 working regs.

Not really part of Gray's questions.

[gcbryan]

Why the need for the group mentality? Why all the pat answers instead of your own answers...

One more thing....

Why do I use Linux instead of writing my own O/S kernel?
Why do I use gcc instead of writing my own compiler?
Why do I use perl instead of writing my own scripting language?
Why do I use GTK+ instead of writing my own window manager?
Why do I use openssl instead of writing my own crytpo libraries?

I view GUE/DIR as just a well debugged toolkit for diving so I don't have to reinvent the wheel...

I've never understood people who object to DIR because they think its a virtue or even a mandate to come to your own conclusions about everything...

(And this whole analogy gets worse... Why do I buy a Honda instead of building a car myself? etc...)

Why do the red shirts always die?

[lamont]

GUE teaches us to go to a "working" regulator in an OOG situation. Durring all of my training through GUE never once were we told to try our neckless reg or our deco reg in an OOG. This is a very important point. Your buddies reg is working. Thats the one you want.

I've been taught in multiple circumstances now both from GUE instructors and GUE tech2 divers to go for the necklace reg first upon an OOG on a stage/deco bottle.

(3 years ago) my now heretic instructor - who's was also Jeff's - taught me to go for a working reg in my buddies mouth. At the time that rather mindless strategy worked out since I happened to be OOG on backgas when he failed my deco bottle on me too. Not a pat answer one way or the other since if your stage may go kaploooy and your buddy have had some other (e.g. left post) problem or vice versa.

So with the benefit of (some) experience I would say you simply need to know what's working and what isn't across the whole team (easier said than done). Then go for a working reg on either yourself or on a buddy who still has at least 2. So you might need to: 1) go for your necklace, 2) skip your own necklace or 3) even skip over one buddy to a teammate with 2 working regs.

Not really part of Gray's questions.

Right. The lights really went on for me (amusingly enough at the same time as all the physical lights were going out) in cave 1 about resource management.

This is really a resource management problem. If you have working backgas, you should use it. If you don't have working backgas you should go to your buddy. If you think you have working backgas, but try to get on it and you don't actually have working backgas, then you should go to your buddy. Under any circumstances your buddies should be involved so you should be signalling to them as you're going onto your backgas and communicating that you've got a problem.

I understand where The Heretics position comes from, though, since its simple and mindless and easy to do under stress. However, if we're able to think through swimming around a diver with a failed post to get gas from a different diver, I think we should be able to think through going to our necklace before throwing an OOG on our buddies...

[LCF]

I missed the part about military style drilling in the original question . . .

We do tend to get together and practice stuff. We practice air-sharing pretty regularly, whether it's formally decided to do it at the beginning of the dive, or whether we throw an OOA at a buddy who's irritating us by being inattentive or distracted I do valve drills on a lot of my dives, because I'm bad at them and I need the practice. But probably what everybody else would think is really weird are the ascent drills. Why on earth does a recreational diver need to do 30 second moves/30 second stops on ten foot intervals from half max depth, and hold them within 20 degrees of horizontal trim and within 3 feet of correct depth?

The answer is, of course, that they don't really. Even if you're a believer in slower ascents and deep stops, which I am, you could do it with less accuracy in either time or depth, and certainly with less accuracy in trim. But what practicing the ascent drills does for me is work on my control overall in midwater. If I CAN do the drills the way they're supposed to be done, then I'm showing that I have control of my position and orientation in the water, anywhere in the water column, and I have come to believe that's a good skill for any diver to have.

So we do military-style drills because we like to do them, and because we enjoy the consequent ability to exercise a degree of precision in the water that makes things . . . well, more FUN.

[CaptnJack]

Right. The lights really went on for me (amusingly enough at the same time as all the physical lights were going out) in cave 1 about resource management.

Yeah me too. I didn't really get this in Tech1 since I was part of a team of two and I was overloaded with the ascents (and they are relatively too fast to think that much). There's much more time to think and then shuffle around resources during a 25min cave exit vs. a 7 min Tech1 ascent.

I agree about going to the 'closest' source of gas which might be hanging right there on your neck (duh!) or might not.

[gcbryan]

Why the need for the group mentality? Why all the pat answers instead of your own answers...air is for tires, I didn't know what I didn't know, computers rot your brain, etc.?

Again, you largely need to get off the internet.

Ironic, huh!

Practice for drill team precision for recreational diving. This is like training a soldier for duty in Iraq by sending him to school for drill team skills. The skills needed in combat are different than those used in a parade.

I don't really understand this analogy at all. Training for S-drills as a recreational diver with a long hose makes you much better at getting gas to another recreational diver. If you recall Sheryl's accident at cove 2, inability to complete an OOG regulator exchange immediately preceded the fatal injury. Meanwhile, everything that I learned about S-drills in DIRF and recreationally diving served me just fine in cave 1, only we added a bunch of long hose/line management stuff for OOG blind exits, but the basics of donation worked identically. I don't understand the training for parade / training for combat analogy at all. If anything that argument cuts the other way -- i started training for s-drills back when i thought cave divers and technical divers were completely insane, and after i realized the risks were actually managable, i wound up using those skills for technical and cave diving...[/quote]

FYI-I knew Sheryl and a smooth regulator exchange was not the ultimate problem. Buoyancy control, infrequent diving, being out of her experience range, etc. was the problem there.

Regarding the military drill team analogy...I was just getting at drilling and real life aren't usually the same. You're saying your S-drills prepared you for multiple drills later thrown at you in Cove 1. The real test would be how you react in real life when not diving with other DIR divers I suppose. I'm not against practice by the way. I think Rjack answered this one well by the way.

[lamont]

FYI-I knew Sheryl and a smooth regulator exchange was not the ultimate problem. Buoyancy control, infrequent diving, being out of her experience range, etc. was the problem there.

I said very precisely that the failure to do an OOG exchange immediately preceded her fatal injury.

Regarding the military drill team analogy...I was just getting at drilling and real life aren't usually the same. You're saying your S-drills prepared you for multiple drills later thrown at you in Cove 1. The real test would be how you react in real life when not diving with other DIR divers I suppose. I'm not against practice by the way. I think Rjack answered this one well by the way.

Multiple drills during *CAVE* 1. Down in mexico, with hard overhead. Hopefully I'll never have to figure out how the zero viz OOG exit really works inside a cave for real. And if I do have to do it for real, it'll be with other divers trained similarly.

Cave 1 is very, very far away from Cove 2 on multiple different levels...

[lamont]

Oh yeah, I forgot, I've been on the receiving end of an OOG for real in OW as a recreational diver. It was around dive #20 and I was in the habit of opening my valves up fully rather than doing open + 1/4 turn back. Someone on the boat must have felt that my valve was at the stop and turned it the other direction so that it was closed + 1/4 turn back. I didn't check my valve position immediate before donning my gear and all the testing I did of inflating my wing and breathing out of both regs worked fine at the surface. At about 60 fsw I was getting a little bit of gas, but it was being delivered through one of those coffee swizzle stick straws, so I went OOG on the DM for the dive who was also Tech 1 and using a long hose. It worked to get me to the surface fine, for "real", with a recreational OW newbie diver as the recipient.

[CaptnJack]

Regarding the military drill team analogy...I was just getting at drilling and real life aren't usually the same. You're saying your S-drills prepared you for multiple drills later thrown at you in Cove 1. The real test would be how you react in real life when not diving with other DIR divers I suppose. I'm not against practice by the way. I think Rjack answered this one well by the way.

I think you meant Cave1 not Cove 1...

For me I only dive with non-DIR divers in pretty benign circumstances. Places where sharing gas would be well within my comfort level even if the reg were ripped from my mouth (it actually was once, on a no-lights exit from a cave, my buddy was a bit exurberant - wasn't a big deal).

The thing I try to discourage is the "drill team" concept. Go for this reg or go for that reg. Or the valve drill in 45secs etc. My (and many many other divers) biggest issue when poo hits the fan is to rush. Speed + pat robotic answers will not serve you well in most problems unless its exactly the same problem as your drill, and those are pretty rare.

[Grateful Diver]

For me I only dive with non-DIR divers in pretty benign circumstances. Places where sharing gas would be well within my comfort level even if the reg were ripped from my mouth (it actually was once, on a no-lights exit from a cave, my buddy was a bit exurberant - wasn't a big deal).

The potential issue, as I see it, is that the GUE-trained diver may not be qualified to affect a rescue outside his own team ... as illustrated by the recent incident at Cove 2. The first diver on the scene was someone from the DIR community. However, he had no rescue skills and had no clue how to operate an inline backup (Air2) to inflate the victim's BCD. Essentially, while he may have been well qualified to conduct basic safety drills with a similarly configured dive buddy, he was useless to help anyone else.

The stricken diver was ultimately brought to the surface by a much less skilled, less trained diver who arrived later.

One of GUE's failings, to my concern, is that they teach no rescue skills at all until Tech 1/Cave 1 ... and then they're only geared toward helping a similarly configured, similarly trained dive buddy. It wouldn't be a problem except that they don't recognize the need to take any training outside of what GUE teaches ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

[Jeff Kruse]

GUE teaches us to go to a "working" regulator in an OOG situation. Durring all of my training through GUE never once were we told to try our neckless reg or our deco reg in an OOG. This is a very important point. Your buddies reg is working. Thats the one you want.

I've been taught in multiple circumstances now both from GUE instructors and GUE tech2 divers to go for the necklace reg first upon an OOG on a stage/deco bottle.

(3 years ago) my now heretic instructor - who's was also Jeff's - taught me to go for a working reg in my buddies mouth. At the time that rather mindless strategy worked out since I happened to be OOG on backgas when he failed my deco bottle on me too. Not a pat answer one way or the other since if your stage may go kaploooy and your buddy have had some other (e.g. left post) problem or vice versa.

So with the benefit of (some) experience I would say you simply need to know what's working and what isn't across the whole team (easier said than done). Then go for a working reg on either yourself or on a buddy who still has at least 2. So you might need to: 1) go for your necklace, 2) skip your own necklace or 3) even skip over one buddy to a teammate with 2 working regs.

Not really part of Gray's questions.

If you go OOG for some unexpected reason then you don't know if your necklace reg is working or for that matter any other regs you may have. If you know why your OOG then by all means go for whatever you think may work.

I have never seen in any GUE manuals recomending someone to go to their backup first but I am only Tech/Cave 1.

I can see if your buddy was a ways away or some other circumstance then you might try your backup first but this should not be the norm.