chrisch
Contributor
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2. You are too uptight with your own principal.
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There is no "principle" here. I keep reading that people are upset they have lost some of their diving holiday to undertake a check out dive which appears to me to be largely to let the guide sort out who to guide and who to let dive on their own.
One of the really nice things about SB is you get people from all over the world. Where I live there are (more or less) no guided dives. So I am interested in this as - to me - it is a curiosity. I dive mostly at the weekend and book a couple of spaces on a boat for me and my buddy. You turn up, pay the skipper and make the dive. Afterwards put the kit in the car, drive home and have a beer. All the other people on the boat do the same thing. In the summer we do much the same thing in France or we dive the caves there. You book a boat, turn up, pay, dive, go home. The caves you turn up, dive, go home. If you pick one of the popular caves (e.g Ressel CaveAtlas.com » Cave Diving » France » Emergence Du Ressel) then there might be other divers, mostly you are on your own. The caves are in the middle of nowhere, no entrance fee, no log book checks, no C Card required.
A few years back we go the chance to dive in Portugal as the wife was on a course (for work). I found a dive centre on the Internet, booked two spaces on the boat, turned up, dived and then went back to the hotel for a beer.
So please forgive me if I am curious as to what a "check out" dive actually is and what a "guided" dive is. I am curious why (in some parts of the world) such things are deemed necessary. I have never been asked for my log book to show recent diving. What is being described sounds like some sort of equivalent of the big groups of tourists I see being herded round city centres with a guide telling them some made up nonsense about the ancient monuments which turn out to be a library or a public toilet. I am curious why folk do it. That is all.