C1 vs T1 GUE

[jadairiii]

My tech instructor (and later best friend/dive buddy) always told me I should do Cave. Never listed. Did all my tech training the years later I took Cave 1. He was right!

You can get away with a lot of "sloppy" trim in Tech no matter who your instructor is, not in Cave. Even if you dont want to really do cave, you come out of Cave 1, Tech 1 will be a joke.

 

[chthonicly]

Which one you think is the best one to do in first. I’m located next to Alexandria Bay. For caves I need to travel. I know I kind of answer my question but curious to see people review on both course!

I mean, what are you interested in? Do which ever one first which more closely aligns with the kinda diving you love most.

I did C1 first because I'm mostly interested in shallow, decorated Mexican caves and I doubt that I will ever do T1 because I have very limited interest in deep salty water, despite it being what's near by where I live.

That being said, as everyone has noted, there's a fair amount of overlap. My C1 teammate did T1 first and he didn't have an issue with the failure drills.

 

[R.Chisholm]

My experience (Vancouver Island T1 course) is that the reel is primarily there as a tool to add task loading. It was explicitly billed as not a line-running workshop - we spent about 30 minutes on dry land messing about with the reel, and then for most of the skills dives, we tied off the reel to a cinder block at 10m and ran the line out into the sand. While we were running the reel out, some bubbles would undoubtedly appear, and then we'd have to deal with the failures while also not getting wrapped up in the line.

In reality, we were taught enough about using a reel that if you descended a shot line in poor viz and couldn't find the wreck, you could handle tying off the reel and run a line over the sand while looking for your target. There was zero practice of running a line through any kind of complex environment, and I think we only practiced a secondary tie-off or a final tie-off once each.

I'm not sure learning to use a reel in a T1 course should be considered as pure task loading. On a T1 dive to the wreck of the Argo the operator suggested running a reel if we wanted to dive both parts of the wreck & if no fixed line was present (as it happens - there was)

His reasoning - the parts are too far apart to be seen & he'd much prefer divers to return on the shot line tied to the first half of the wreck and ascend there - rather in the middle of the ocean using a DSMB due to the number of commercial fishing boats in the vicinity. Trying to navigate back to the shot line using a compass would have risked loosing the wreck if there had been any current at depth.