6.3 George Irvine and the WKPP

I recently attended a lecture at 5th Dimension Diving in Seattle Washington. George Irvine, ex-director of the Woodville Karst Plain Project spoke.

I have a pretty good nose for bullshit (I know: everybody thinks that), and when I first started diving seriously lo these many, er, months ago, I found I was getting a hell of a lot of bullshit from the local dive shops, so I ended up going online to look for a lot of info.

Whenever I got an explanation about some question that really seemed well thought out and really made sense, I found pretty quickly that it could almost always be traced one way or another to George Irvine and/or the WKPP.

So, frankly I don’t much care if he has given to the "cave diving community as a whole," as some say. As far as I’m concerned, he’s given a hell of a lot to me. And I’ve never spoken to him.

Now as far as his verbal style, I’ve never had him flame me so maybe this is easy for me to say, but though I don’t know enough about diving to say, I can say that if I went to a mountaineering forum and some bozo went off about how you don’t really need to equalize belay anchors, or how they are bad-asses because they free solo on rotten rock, you can bet I’d flame the living shit out of them. Not for their sakes, but for the sakes of any one reading who might think such things are good ideas. So if Irvine really knows as much as he seems, I find I can’t really blame him for being a little high-strung.

At any rate, the lecture was very very interesting. Andrew Georgitsis and Mike Kane from Global Underwater Explorers were there as well and added to the lecture.

Though most of the lecture was focused on issues relevant to technical cave divers, there was some info about gas management and deco that I think will be useful in my simple "recreational" diving.

Irvine seemed like a nice enough guy. I don’t see what all the fuss is about. He had several funny anecdotes to tell about the WKPP. They showed a video with a graphic by Dr. Todd Kincaid that really effectively brought home just how enormous an 18000 ft trip in an underwater cave is.

There wasn’t much about scooters—the ostensive subject of the talk—but it turned out to be a Doing It Right (aka DIR) lecture in general, so teamwork and decompression were the two biggest subjects.

The talk lasted something like four hours of really information packed time. I find it difficult to believe that they do this for free. I also can’t believe only some 70 or so people came. I would think anyone interested in diving at all in the Puget Sound area would have fallen all over themselves to show up.

2003
Based on posts to thedecostop.com