Practising dSMB deployment
Keep your rescue skills up-to-date
Don’ t neglect the buddy check
Train properly in any configuration before you dive with it, and keep your equipment serviced to manufacturer recommendations. You will have seen that BSAC Accelerated Decompression Procedures( ADP), Sidemount and Twinset course materials have been updated and have even more comprehensive kit configuration and dry run elements.
Don’ t rely on experience alone. Every recent report says the same thing: qualifications and logged dives don’ t make anyone immune. Complacency is a risk factor in its own right. We also need to recognise some real positives from the reports. Collectively they show that rescue skills and BLS carried out by divers work, often better than we’ d expect outside a clinical setting. Many incidents do not end in fatalities because someone acted quickly and effectively. So what you can do as a club or as an individual diver is keep those rescue skills fresh, practise BLS( basic life support) with AED( automated external defibrillator); inwater rescue breaths; towing; O2 administration and rescue lifts. Do engage in proper dive planning and dynamic dive management for all activity.
Finally, if something does go wrong, please report it. Every honest account in these reports helps inform the industry and implement any training improvements or change. The reporting is completely confidential and only used for incident / safety reporting and development.
Sophie Rennie expands
Following Sophie H’ s helpful advice ahead of the latest incident report, I decided to delve into the last 12 years of reports to see whether any particular patterns emerged.
The results were interesting. Of the four most common incident types, DCI( decompression illness) topped the list in nine out of the 12 years, with boating incidents and injuries not far behind.
DCI is particularly relevant to me because I have seen it first-hand this year within my own branch. The diver involved had completed a straightforward, nonrepetitive dive to just 14 metres in good visibility and with no current, hardly what most of us would consider a high-risk profile. Despite this, they required multiple chamber treatments and are now awaiting a PFO assessment. It serves as a reminder that, no matter how experienced or careful we are, diving always carries inherent risks. When incidents do happen, being prepared to provide oxygen first aid and organise rapid transport to a chamber can make all the difference.
The 2024 report also highlighted several
incidents linked to winter diving and challenging weather conditions. Thankfully, forecasting tools are much more reliable than they were ten years ago. Combined with local knowledge and experience, they give us a much better opportunity to make informed decisions about whether a dive should go ahead.
One theme that repeatedly caught my attention while reading the reports was the frequency of terms such as“ unsafe diving practice”,“ carelessness”, and“ disregard of procedures”. That should concern all of us. Safe diving practices exist for a reason and should never be treated as optional.
Take diver separation. The procedure is straightforward: search for your buddy for one minute and then ascend to the surface. Continuing the dive alone, regardless of how tempting the marine life might be, is simply not good practice.
So, if you have a little spare time, perhaps while recovering from an injury like I am with a fractured ankle, take a look at the BSAC Safe Diving guidance and previous incident reports. A few minutes of reading could help prevent the next avoidable incident. �
Do you have a question about dive training, kit or safety for the Two Sophies to answer? Email SCUBA Editor Simon Rogerson, simon @ scubamagazine. co. uk
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