Peacock to Olsen via Pothole Line 11/12/08

[guru caver]

I remember doing several weeks of workup dives in order to swim from Challenge to Peacock, circa 1973. We thought the dive was technical & difficult.

When you have bleach jugs instead of tanks, it is difficult and very technical!!

(That's right, I've been through the cave diving museum)

[Wizard]

The last time I was there, a guy told me the first time he made that dive he felt like he had climbed
Everest.

[skip]

THAT was a good thing. The line of thinking has changed so much. All one has to do, is a body count and be old enough to have witnessed how mentality has changed over the years. Sometimes I believe people think the advancement in equipment makes up for the "rest" of what could go wrong, so they end up and start doing dives they should not. Waynes World just a couple of days ago??

I wonder if advances in gear really have anything to do with recent "body count." I've read the accident analysis for the new millenium, but the powerpoint is not much on data and long on speculation from anecdote.

No one it seems has tracked the impact of older divers on younger divers. When a handful of people are cave diving, every dive is a major task, requiring major planning and effort. But when hundreds or thousands are doing it, talking about it to everyone else, when gold line provides the path, then it seems the bar has been raised at least psychologically. We live in the days that Peacock has descended from Everest to training wheels. And when viewed like that, complacency reigns. Cave diving is easy, everyone's doing it....

-skip