How safe are you when you dive and how do you measure safety? Think about the following story and how safe the situation was...

Six divers had decided to undertake a 30m dive from a RHIB. John and Dave were diving as a team with their local university dive club and had over 2000 dives between them. Graham was relatively newly trained as a marshal and had not worked with Brian before. On the dive boat, there were two new divers to the club, Gail and Mark. Both Gail and Mark had successfully completed a check-out dive & dry suit familiarisation course with another instructor in the club, and they were already certified for 40m diving. Graham was keen to do a drift dive in 32m of water. Brian, the cox, was somewhat worried about the conditions as there seemed to be waves forming. However, as long as all divers were certified to 30m diving and effective at getting into the water and back onto the RHIB, he was happy that the risk was acceptable. To allow the Cox and Marshall to...

Where there are accidents, incidents or near misses, there are parts of your behaviour, your team's behaviour, your centre's behaviour or your agency's behaviour that you don't want other people to see. It is only natural. We are hard-wired that way.

Divers make mistakes they don’t talk about, especially given the adversarial culture which is present in the diving industry. However, they are often acting on partial information because they don’t want to ask dumb questions, and they are hiding the things that aren’t going well because they don't want to be humiliated or they don’t want to be the person who thumbs the dive because it will let the others down. As an example of this, of the people on my webinar last night, more than 75% recounted an issue where the dive didn't go to plan because they were unable to speak up and either thumb it, or not get in the water to start with. Inability to communicate due to real or inferred peer pressure is a massive...

One of the worst dives I have undertaken was in the Red Sea on a night dive scootering between the four wrecks on the Abu Nuhas reef. The dive itself had the potential to be awesome. 10 divers on scooters, a mixture of OC and CCR divers (I was on CCR), following the reef from left to right on the image below, stopping off at each wreck for a quick look inside and then moving on. Relatively clear warm water. But it was night time. We entered the water late, around dusk. We hadn't planned it, but there was an issue on the boat which meant we were delayed. 

The reason I hated it was because I was responsible for the divers in the group. I wasn't leading it, that was the guide's job, but they weren't keeping track of the divers and I didn't want to lose anyone. At night, 10 HIDs or powerful LEDs all look the same so diver identification was really hard. Ever tried counting 9 black cats in a dark room?! I felt accountable, so I led.

After 70mins, during which...

About ten years ago I started up a small section on a UK diving forum (YD then TDF) called “I learned about diving from that…” (ILADFT)  which was based on the RAF Flight Safety magazine section “I learned about flying from that…” where aircrew would write in about their mistakes and close calls and others could learn from them. ILADFT was to be the same. It took a little while to get going, and people would talk about things that went wrong. The basic rule was that negative criticism was banned and posts which ridiculed divers for putting their hands up were stamped on quite quickly; it was the genesis of the ‘Just Culture’ work I have been doing over the years. It was also this that piqued my interested in diving incidents and how to prevent them - the same stories were coming up again and again and yet nothing appeared to be done to talk about them.

Failure...