Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The sport of SCUBA diving generally has a good safety record but it has the potential to be hazardous. Humans have evolved to function in air and without support equipment we would perish very quickly if immersed in water. The environment is often cold dark moving around us and contains obstructions. Divers are subject to huge pressure changes during a dive. Add these things together and an external observer might be forgiven for expecting a tragic outcome to most dives. Yet every year many millions of dives are conducted successfully around the world and the participants emerge elated and unharmed. This manual explores how to make diving successful and safe. While it is about safety and rescue it is the author’s contention that an emphasis on the safety aspects will in nearly all circumstances remove the necessity for the rescue elements. By far the best way to solve any problem is to avoid it in the first place our goal should be to recognise the potential for a problem – or at worst the early development of a problem – and take early and decisive steps to prevent it or to end it. An important point is that a truly skilled practitioner in a potentially hazardous environment is not regularly “just avoiding disaster The challenge is to develop the skills and knowledge that are needed but without being exposed to the actual risks that we seek to avoid. The problem is that human beings learn best through experience. Take any diver who has been lost at the surface and been the subject of a full-scale search; the next time they go diving they are carrying flags whistles and just about every surface detection aid you can think of. The real trick is to learn from the unfortunate experiences of others and this is the main purpose purp behind the annual incident report that is published by the British Sub Aqua Club – the National Diring Committee Diving Incidents Report. One of the issues when writing a book such as this is that both the type of diving taking place and the diving equipment used to do it are becoming increasingly complex and varied. At one end of the scale we have an air-breathing diver diving from the shore to a depth of eight metres on a calm day in the summer. At the other end we have a diver using a rebreather with mixed gases diving to a depth of “0 metres from a live-aboard boat 30 miles offshore on a windy day in the winter. Writing one set of advice to help in these two extremes and all of the other cases in between would be impossible. In certain cases where particularly important issues arise specific advice is given but in general the advice here should be interpreted to fit the circumstances. The comprehensive training programme of which this manual is a part provides a diver with the skills and experience that can then be applied an appropriate way: The author is indebted to those whose earlier work has been carried forward into the latest edition of the BSAC Safety and Rescue for Divers manual. (LL)