Why Do It the Easy Way?

If you’ve never been to Captain Don’s, you may not believe how easy they make it to dive right in front of the resort.

• Rather than have to haul equipment back and forth from your room, you stow your gear in lockers right at the water’s edge.
• From the lockers, it’s less than 50 feet to the end of the dock.
• Tied to a piling at the end of the dock is a heavy-duty rope that extends across the bottom, 100 feet to the drop off and then down the face of the wall.

This makes diving from the dock absurdly easy.

• All you have to do is enter the water, descend, then pull yourself along the rope until you get to the drop off.
• From there, you simply turn into the current and follow the wall until it’s time to turn around.
• You can follow the wall back at the same depth as you went out, or at a shallower depth; it doesn’t matter. As soon as you hit the rope, follow it back to the dock and surface at the stairs.

As convenient as this system is, I saw at least a couple of people make it more difficult than it needed to be. Two divers, in particular, come to mind.

• Rather than surface at the stairs, they came up at the mooring buoys need the edge of the wall.
• The divers then proceeded to swim at the surface the 100 feet back to the dock.

So, is there anything wrong with this? Not terribly — except that it reflects a mindset that has, over time, gotten more than a few divers in trouble.

New divers tend to associate the surface with safety when, in fact, statistics suggest the surface is the most dangerous place divers can be.

Surprisingly, most diving accidents don’t happen under water; they happen at the surface. Unless a diver is out of air, being under water is almost always less stressful than being on the surface. Divers who experience difficulty under water generally make it to the surface. Unfortunately, if the stress of staying at the surface proves more than the divers can deal with, or the divers fail to establish positive buoyancy, they may drown or suffer a heart attack or stoke.

Experienced diver know that it’s more difficult and stressful to swim at the surface than it is under water. This is why most boat captains instruct divers to surface at the boat, rather than some distance away.

It’s also vastly easier to breathe from a functioning regulator than it is from a snorkel. This is why many boat captains tell divers to keep a regulator in their mouth from the time they enter the water until they are safely back on deck.

Of particular concern in this instance was that the divers I witnessed appeared to have surfaced from a deep dive. Had they hugged the bottom all the way back to the dock, they could have extended their safety stop and reduced the level of exertion they experienced immediately after ascending from a deeper dive — both factors that can reduce the likelihood of decompression sickness. (Not to mention the wisdom of not surfacing in an area known to be frequented by dive boats.)

In the final analysis, easier is not only more fun, it’s safer.

Eighty two degrees ain’t exactly warm »

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