I honestly can’t tell if teaching methods have changed while I was looking at something else, but I am left confused. The issue is what seems to be the current rush to treat a closed-circuit rebreather like an open-circuit machine with a long hose, and bolting for the exit at the first sign of a hiccup. This completely misses why we strap these expensive magic boxes to our backs in the first place.
Maybe it’s time to start wearing one of those T-Shirts with “In my day, we did things different...” blazoned across the chest. (Bad grammar but the sentiment seems appropriate for me lately.”
The thing is that a growing number of CCR Cave divers seem to be managing serious emergencies all wrong.nIn my day, we did things differently!
LOL,
Allow me to explain.
I was taught that when your CCR misbehaved, while bailing out to open circuit was option one, a better, and common best practice was to “evaluate, consider the options, THEN act.” The catchphrase, the recommendation was to bailout to open circuit, take a few ‘sanity breaths,’ and give some thought to what was the best option available.
One of many advantages of diving a CCR – especially in a cave or any overhead when the surface is some distance away – is that the technology and CCR configuration protocols give one options. Open circuit divers faced with a similar situation – a dive that’s gone totally pear-shaped – aren’t so lucky. Often, the safest and most common call for them is to get things squared away asquickly as practical and head for home. That’s an oversimplification, but essentially, that’s what was taught. Still is.
However, the standard procedure on CCR faced with the same sort of nasty surprise was (and should still be) to stop everything and assess the situation. Bailing out to OC and leaving as soon as practical MIGHT be the best option, but we were taught to think about the situation before reacting: to take a few minutes (literally three to five minutes) and think things through.
Some failures on a CCR are irreversible. For example, a flooded scrubber signals your dive is over and there’s a messy cleanup in your future back on the surface. But some malfunctions are fixable at depth: cable ties, double-enders, and paracord are our friends.
If the reflex reaction to a manageable loop issue is an immediate, full-speed bail-and-bolt, we aren't practicing rebreather diving; we're just open-circuit divers carrying a very expensive, very complicated contingency device.
I’ve recently witnessed (first, second, and third hand) otherwise experienced CCR cave divers bailing out and heading for the exit as though being chased by the taxman or an ex-partner. Rather than taking the time to assess the best option, and most importantly, to explain to their team what was at issue, they were gone like a golden retriever attacking a plate of canned dog food.
Not only is this poor cave and team etiquette, it’s also dangerous... for everyone involved.
The Panic-Exit Paradox
The irony is thick. Divers adopt CCRs for extended range, gas economy, and thermal preservation in overhead environments, yet some of them treat a fixable electronic or loop glitch with the same panic as an out-of-gas emergency for a newly certified open water diver.
Maths and logic support taking a pause and thinking about options. If a team’s bailout margins are so razor-thin that three to five minutes of hovering, communicating, and troubleshooting at depth breaks the gas plan, then the gas plan—or the team's discipline—is broken. In a cave, blind flight is often more hazardous than the problem you're running away from. A diver rocketing out of a system while scrambled and hyper-focused on their own exit is a liability to the entire team. They stop communicating, they stop monitoring their environment, and they create a secondary emergency.
If we don't push back against the "bail and sprint" dogma, we're training a generation of poor CCR divers. Just an opinion.
Moreover, if the margins of safety – the volume of bailout gas each team member is carrying – isn’t sufficient for a three-to five-minute assessment when needed, then those margins need to be revisited.
Certainly, for beginning CCR divers, the aviation/military maxim “if in doubt, bailout” applies. When the nuances of CCR operations are being learned... perhaps for the first 70-100 hours on the unit... bailing out makes abundant sense.
But this discussion should bring at least two points to the front of mind: Divers with fewer than 70-100 hours on their CCR don’t belong in a cave. And secondly, if your first reaction to a challenge is to bail out and head home at full speed, ask yourself: why are you going to the trouble of diving a CCR in there when you’re not taking advantage of it.
You've purchased an expensive tool: learn to use it.