Category Archives: safety

The Mirage of Mount Stupid: Diving and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t real! Or is it? My latest piece for Alert Diver is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek deep dive into the intricacies, popular reception, and criticism of the Internet’s most popular psychology study and how it pertains, or doesn’t, to diving.
Read here: https://alertdiver.eu/en_US/articles/the-mirage-of-mount-stupid-diving-and-the-dunning-kruger-effect

When Easy Doesn’t Do It – a deep dive into bailout rebreathers

The work for my first article for GUE’s InDepth magazine put me in touch with some absolute legends of cave exploration, past and present. This piece is a bit on the technical side, but if you have half as much fun reading it as I had during the research and writing, then I’m happy. I’m sure pretty damn proud of it.
https://gue.com/blog/dual-rebreathers-in-extended-range-cave-diving/

Gas reserves… honey, we need to talk.

Everybody agrees that planning your gas reserves is an essential part of dive safety. At the same time, hardly anybody teaches it. That’s because it involves numbers and a bit of logical thinking – two things that recreational training agencies avoid like the plague. Instead, they’d rather talk about how snorkels come in different colors.

Now, some responsible instructors, including quite a few a know personally, go above and beyond and teach proper gas planning anyway, maybe in an AOW course or a Deep Diving specialty. However, if you want to take a class that actually requires systematic gas planning as part of its curriculum, you basically have to learn tec diving.

While I’m the last person to dissuade anyone from taking a tec diving class, I still don’t think that recreational divers deserve to be left in the dark like this. And if you want to know how I teach gas planning at the recreational level, then you can read my article in Alert Diver.