Cave divers may often find themselves susceptible to the same trap that mountain climbers face once they've reached their goal. For a climber, reaching the summit provides a false sense of completion because the climb is only half over. On the summit, the most dangerous and critical part of the climb, the descent, still lies ahead. For the cave diver, the goal, often involving maximum penetration, may be reached due to pre-established gas rules, time, or by having reached a destination or fulfilled a task. Adventurers are often sharp in the goal-seeking phase. For the cave diver, the trip into the cave is the goal-seeking phase in which senses are heightened and the mind is focused and ready for the worst case scenarios such as a catastrophic gas loss at maximum penetration based upon gas reserves. As distance from the exit and/or depth increases, stresses build heightening awareness. On the way out, cave divers may experience a deescalating mental and emotional response as thoughts turn toward home. A diver may not be focusing on where he or she is because his or her thoughts may be on decompression, fulfilling hunger and thirst, or other concerns at the surface. Environmental conditions such as outward flow (possibly increasing exit speed) may give a diver a false sense of security, increasing the danger he or she faces should an emergency occur as gas supply is lessened. Fatigue may create sloppy technique, buddy separation or team breakdown. The diver may be distracted by thoughts not related to the here and now and may even be just "line following" with less attention paid to relevant environmental, team, personal or equipment issues. Two rules for outdoor survival are: Be here now and Everything takes 8 times longer than it's supposed to take. Cave divers, like mountaineers, would do well to stay focused as much on the trip home as on the way to the goal and give themselves plenty of time to solve problems such as OOG or lost off the line. The Rule of (Simple) Thirds, I believe for myself, is the minimum safety margin. Alone, this gives me one third in, one third out and leaves one third in reserve to solve various problems. In a team situation, it gives us enough gas to get out in a catastrophic failure at maximum penetration with no margin of error to solve any other problems along the way. Most often, I incorporate rock bottom or minimum gas, into my planning and I'll even save enough gas for decompression on back gas in addition to the gas volume required to exit assuming a failure at max penetration.
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Originally Posted by BobK
). Once more I'm being bombarded with PM's about this, and I have to agree that the LAST thing I want is to have someone go off on a half assed plan and kill themselves because they haven't properly planned their reserves.
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