Looking back on your OW course

[Diver0001]

Looking back, if there was ONE thing you wish you had been taught in your OW course that you learned "the hard way", what would that be?

On the instructors section there's always a lively debate about what instructors believe students should learn.... but what about people who aren't instructors....

R..

 

[Monkey_Gland]

Deploying an SMB or DSMB would have been handy much earlier on - especially in the UK!

 

[TSandM]

Well, I think how to plan a dive would be the big one. We were told, "Plan your dive, and dive your plan," but at the end of class, I really didn't have any idea of what a dive plan ought to include, beyond "back on the boat with 500 psi".

There were many other things I think I should have known or been able to do, but either they tried to teach me and passed me without me ever learning, or I didn't learn it the hard way, but from another class (eg. gas management).

 

[robint]

how important it is to buy gear that fits you and is the best you can buy.
We skimped on our first gear (cheap masks, cheap fins, cheap snorkels, cheap wetsuits, gauges instead of computers) and we ended up replacing every piece in the first year. I did go ahead and splurge on my BC as I had a horrible experience with a BC that was a men's and didn't fit. So I bought a nice women's BC. Wow, what a huge difference well fitting gear made! My air consumption went down as I wasn't fiddling with it all the time. New fins helped with muscle fatigue in my legs. New mask - duh, I could see and wasn't clearing all the time. The reg I bought got passed down to my daughter and she used it for several years then sold on ebay. The rest of the crap got thrown away!

 

[seaducer]

SMB is a good one, but I think bouyancy is the most important. I did all my pool dives firmly planted on the bottom. I did my checkout dives firmly on the bottom of the tidal basin. All my first dives were conducted with about 250PSI in my BCD to keep me off the bottom. This is how I thought diving was. If I was not able to touch the bottom, I got nervous I was going to go into an uncontrollable ascent. I think I was diving around 30 pounds in the beginning? Holy crap is all I can say about that.

Everything is far easier, better, and safer once you have a firm grasp on bouyancy.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Actually, the way things turned out I can't really complain too much.
I got certified by a PADI intructor that was really good. He was an ex military diver. The only thing that was PADI as far as our training was the name PADI. Other than that the class was tailored to the conditions and the environment where we were doing the check out dives. I'm not sure they can go over and beyond the regular cirriculum like that anymore, or if it was even allowed then.
We did our check out dives up on the Northern California coast in Sonoma county at a place called Gerstle cove. It was a spring day and the winds had been furious. The ocean was 47 degrees and vis was 5 - 6 feet - murkey and green. There was a good surge whipping us back and forth 5 -6 feet. We were all in rental wetsuits. The DM was told to go out in the cove to about 20 feet deep and run a line about 30 feet long along the bottom and attached at each end with a sand screw. The problem is there isn't much sand in Gerstle Cove so he had to improvise.
Anyway we get out there to do our skills and many people had to learn in a hurry what neutral buoyancy was because of the urchin spines sticking everyone if they tried to rest on the bottom. I got sailed into a rock and got a few in my left bun and others got stuck in the arms and hands.
We wound up hovering 5 feet off the bottom and doing the drills to stay out of the pin cushion zone.
The intructor also made us do a 20 -30 foot skin dive before we put on the scuba gear and grab something off the bottom. We did this with no weight belt and had to fight our way down. I don't think PADI or any other open water cert agency does this anymore. Everybody passed the class though.

So I guess if you asked me this question right when I got certified I would have said a day with better conditions and not quite such an abrupt buoyancy lesson, but now looking back I wouldn't have changed a thing.

 

[DiverDurf]

Peak bouyancy. I know it's an advanced class but it's so danged important that more emphasis should be put on it during OW.

 

[ligersandtions]

Two things: the first one being bouyancy (and being horizontal) and the second being gear choices.

Everything we did was kneeling on the bottom of the pool or ocean. That doesn't help your buoyancy at all because you obviously have to be negative to stay planted on the bottom....and it doesn't help you figure out trim at all because you can't swim forward while completely vertical. I wish we had practiced all our skills (mask removal and replace, regulator retrieval, air sharing, ascents, descents, etc) in a horizontal position, since that's where you want to be most of the time.

One of my biggest complaints is that all the instructors and DM's were decked out in the same gear....which included jacket BC's, split fins, and "standard" length hoses. I wish we had been exposed to different types of gear and configurations, and then been able to pick what we wanted based on our diving goals, rather than based on it being the only thing you've ever seen. That was definitely a "lesson learned the hard way"....bought all the wrong gear (for my diving) the first time around, and had to try to sell and buy new gear within a couple months.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

I was certified before DIR was even a command on Windows DOS, let alone a dive term. My OW instructor (Naui) was extremely thorough and taught above and beyond what was covered in our book. He even showed us how to eat a Snickers bar underwater. The one skill I learned soon after getting my C-card was entering the water carrying my fins. It is SO much easier than the backwards shuffle taught then.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

Gas management. Specifically SAC rates, and how to find them. It took me getting referred here to get that info. I make sure my students don't get screwed the same way.