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Diving Officer's Report
My report this month really requires a
response from the membership - I want to
hear how you feel.
I’m sure everyone read about the very
tragic accident that happened in August in
the
Farne
Islands when a diver was caught in the
propeller of a dive boat. The boat was
Sovereign II belonging to the
Douglas family. Our club has dived with Sovereign for many years
and had complete faith in Ian and his son
Andrew. When Ian died, his other son,
Toby, came to join the family business. We
have dived with both Andrew and Toby. The
enquiry into the accident is not complete
and nobody in our club knows what actually
happened. The business is still operating
and we decided to continue with our recent
trip as planned, assuming that there is no
obvious blame or negligence and that the
family would be implementing stringent
safety procedures.
Although we enjoyed a superb weekend of diving there were several
issues that concerned me:
·
12 of us were on a Sovereign III with a skipper we had
never met before. He did not introduce
himself, made no attempt to assure us of
his competence and did no boat briefing.
On the second day I requested that he ran
through a briefing for the sake of those
on board who were doing dive marshalling,
and he ‘jokingly’ said that to that he
would have to find out where things were.
He never did the briefing.
·
On approaching one dive site the skipper failed to see two
large yellow buoys marking lobster pots
and got them entangled in his rudder.
Toby, skippering the other boat thought
this was hilariously funny. I had to ask
myself ‘if he can’t see objects as big and
brightly coloured as those, what chance is
there of his seeing a diver’s head?’
·
4 of our club members were on Sovereign II. At one stage,
one of them had a problem at the surface
and his buddy sent a distress signal to
the skipper. It was nearly ten minutes
before he was picked up, even though the
boat was quit near.
·
There were a lot of boats and divers about on the sites.
Some divers had SMBs, some, not. It was
difficult to distinguish between divers’
heads and seals’ heads. We see seals with
scars from boat propellers and now, a
diver has suffered a serious injury.
I want to know how our membership feels about all this. HSE regulations
are so strict, we are surrounded by risk
assessments and safety procedures and yet,
a lethal rotating propeller is allowed
near divers. Even on Billy’s boat there
are many times when there is a serious
risk of injury if a diver were to surface
rapidly, shortly after descending. It’s
not just Sovereign. How often do we ever
see any type of guard around the
propellers? Taking precautions against DCI,
narcosis and health/training-related
problems is up to he divers. Making the
dive boats safe is up to the skippers.
Perhaps the entire diving fraternity
should refuse to dive from boats without
propeller guards. Should we express our
concerns to Sovereign Diving or is this a
wider issue that should be taken up with
the HSE? None of us can begin to imagine
the horror of witnessing an accident of
this nature, let alone having it happen to
one of us. I know I for one was quite
nervous about surfacing and waiting to be
picked up this weekend. Please email me to
let me know what you think that we should
do?
kate@bsac18.co.uk
Thanks, Kate, D.O.
Kate is going to send a letter to
Sovereign Divers explaining our concerns.
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