Regarding John's Reply

[Scott912]

I would like to respond to John Greenstreet's reply to my previous post. First of all John I would not say I am an inexperienced diver. I have been a diver since 1975 and have logged numerous dives all over the world. I have both lake and ocean diving experience as well as commercial diving experience. My guess is that I have a lot more experience both in number of dives and number of years diving than you. I don't consider myself a know it all and am not a dangerous diver. In fact I consider myself a very safe and cautious diver. I regularly dive and continue my diving education both by reading and even plan to upgrade my certification level next month. My brother is a certified diver and is perfectly capable of making his own decisions as to dive or not. He did do a check out dive in the resort pool with Dressel to see if his ears were ok prior to this dive and he felt they were fine. If you were an experienced diver then maybe you would know by now that 1) each diver is different in their air consumption. I was very conscience of my air usage and was trying to slow down and conserve my air on this dive. I have dives that lasted from 30 minutes to 1 1/2 hours with the same amount of air. 2) There are bad dive operators/dive masters in the world. I took the time to research this particular dive shop even before I left for my trip and decided not to use them because of bad post by other divers on diver post boards. I only decided at the last minute to use them because it was a one tank free dive and it would be my only opportunity to get to dive with my brother and nephew. Anita Divers called me at my hotel that evening to confirm my dive the next day and agreed with me that the divers should have been recalled. They said it was a large squall that they had monitored on radar from Cozumel. I had even asked Dressel before leaving what was the criteria for canceling a scheduled dive. They said the Navy has to give permission to leave port and it must not be bad weather such as raining or large waves because the captain must be able to observe the diver's bubbles to follow the group. If the weather was this bad prior to leaving it would have been cancelled. So using the same criteria, it should have been cancelled during the dive when the same conditions were met. When dealing with bad weather , you err on the side of safety. Dressel either did not stay properly informed of the bad weather moving our way, chose to ignore it or underestimated it's size and strength. When the weather turned bad and the Captain could no longer see the diver's bubbles, they should have either gave an audible warning such as banging on the ladder or sent down a diver to recall us. 3) A dive instructor such as Jorge should not lose his cool. This is totally unprofessional and does not give a good impression. Also if their employees cannot even supervise people's gear on the ground a few feet in front of them, how can they be trusted to supervise people below the surface? There is alot more I could say about this event and I will treat it as a learning experience. My main concern is to warn other divers about this particular location. I am sure there are other Dressel locations that are well run and operated. This is not one of them.
Regards,
            Scott M.