A salvage diver in Seattle said something that still bugs me about our gear checks

We were prepping for a deep dive on a sunken tugboat in the Puget Sound last fall, about 200 feet down. I was going through my usual pre-dive check, and this older diver, a guy named Carl who had been doing it for thirty years, just watched me. After I finished, he said, 'You know, you just trust that gauge. But your brain is the first piece of gear that fails.' He meant we rely so much on the tech telling us we're good that we stop really thinking about the feel of the suit, the sound of the air, the little signs. It stuck with me because it's true. I've seen guys get complacent after a thousand dives with no issues. But he made me slow down and actually think, not just look at dials. Do you think that over-reliance on instruments is making us worse divers in some way?

2 comments

2 Comments

skyler_fox721mo agoMost Upvoted

Ever think about how this starts way before we even get in the water? We learn on computers in a classroom, then train with all this gear beeping at us. The whole system teaches us to watch the screen, not listen to the dive. So maybe it's not that we're getting worse, but that we're never really taught to be good in that old-school, feel-it-in-your-bones way anymore.

skyler_fox721mo agoMost Upvoted

You know what's funny? I'm the perfect example of this. My first dive after certification, I got so focused on my computer beeping at me that I swam right into a coral head. Felt like a total idiot. The gear was screaming about some minor depth change while I completely missed the giant rock in front of my face. That's when it hit me that I had zero feel for the water, just a dumb reaction to the noise. I was trained to be a screen-watcher, not a diver. So yeah, maybe the problem is we're all just really good at following beeps now, lmao.