My AN/DP/Helitrox course

[rjack321]

but thats my point - if youve signed up to do a course to do a decompression dive shouldn't you have the basic skills sorted ? - unless its for the instructors benefit (or environment considerations) i'ill concede maybe tank set up and manipulation would be advantageous in a pool

For my cave courses (even full cave) we were doing basic skills in 5-6ft of water before every dive. The cenote was only 8-10ft deep in that area. Even if it had been deeper, we were expected to have demonstration quality skills in the shallowest water plausible - where it is most difficult to avoid taking a deep breath as part of your S-drill and corking. All of my tech courses required similar skill demonstrations in ~20ft of water, over multiple days.

I don't get the anti-pool, "aren't you proficient already?" position here.​

 

[CptTightPants21]

but thats my point - if youve signed up to do a course to do a decompression dive shouldn't you have the basic skills sorted ? - unless its for the instructors benefit (or environment considerations) i'ill concede maybe tank set up and manipulation would be advantageous in a pool

These are actually two slightly different arguments. One is having a certain fundamental skill level before starting a class and the other is doing beginner basic skills in a pool.

We already covered that I would consider doing a valve drill in 6 ft of water off of shore, on a platform, or in a pool essentially the same. This is not an endorsement that 4/5 of class should be done in a pool with only 1 or 2 real dives at the end just to check a box, but an acknowledgement that nearly all tech classes have initial shallow training/demonstration dives and it is ok for these to be done in a pool. Maintaining depth for valve drill and gas share in 5ft of water is the important part not the body of water you happen to be in. For hypoxic trimix, people are not doing bottle rotations for the first time at 200ft, they are doing them at 20' and probably something with a hard bottom.

The other point is skills down before class. Every good diver eventually takes the class that requires a lot of practice and preparation and is the class that really teaches them how to dive. GUE has fundies, but outside of the GUE ecosystem other divers will use cavern/intro or an/dp as the class that shows them how to dive. Marie is doing it over several months with 10 certification dives on top of all the person practice time she can put in.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

I must be reading your note wrong.

If a CW session(s) can be accomplished in a real body of water, why wouldn’t an instructor take his students there?

I’m proud my CW sessions were in salt water.

I’m not against a pool session but if real water is available, I say ‘crack on’.

The key is that the definition of confined water needs to be met: pool like conditions in terms of depth, clarity, and calmness. Note that temperature is not there (a good thing). I have found that the contrast from a pool to the cold, dark Puget Sound with much bulkier exposure protection has been a significant stress factor for many students. I had a student that had a fear of childhood of the dark water. Unfortunately, no one elected to tell me this (so I now ask about any such concerns), including her father who took the class with her. Needless to say, she freaked out when we were to descend down the line for OW1 and I was glad I had 2 DMs as I lost one who towed her back to shore.

There are some shops in the area that do use protected cove areas in the Puget Sound. I think in terms of calmness and clarity, this is really pushing it. There are some locations in the larger lakes at certain parts of the year that meet the definition of clarity. But that's between them and their agency. There are some parks along Lake Washington that are absolutely perfect on non-windy days, but only September through March.

When I open my dive op in Greece, the confined water we use will be protected coves. The islands are not small, so I can always find a shallow, protected cove on the leeward side of the island. Clarity, check. Calmness, check. Depth, check.

Real water is nice, but it needs to meet the criteria. I can imagine your experience in the Red Sea was a perfect transition to the conditions for the open water. I'm guessing your confined water was a place where you could stand and if you kept walking out, you'd get over your head, and that it was protected and/or there just wasn't any wind. Double thumbs up.

 

[Jcp2]

I must be reading your note wrong.

If a CW session(s) can be accomplished in a real body of water, why wouldn’t an instructor take his students there?

I’m proud my CW sessions were in salt water.

I’m not against a pool session but if real water is available, I say ‘crack on’.

The OP is going to be diving in fresh water, so salt water not important. Also, because it’s winter in the Midwest with ice and snow and wind and waves, the CW sessions cannot be accomplished in “real water” until later in the year.

 

[RainPilot]

The biggest benefit of a pool IME (not CW, an actual pool) is it speeds up skills acquisition. Students have a fixed amount of mental bandwidth. My objective as an instructor is to maximise that bandwidth toward learning the new skills.

in a “real water” scenario a certain amount of bandwidth will go toward distractions. Fish, rocks, reaper signs etc etc etc. I do all my training in the pool, like I do all my flight training in a simulator. The real thing is there to demonstrate that you have acquired the skills and can utilise them in the real world.

of course there are one or two skills that can’t realistically be done in a pool but it’s fewer than one would think.

Even in OW, all the hard stuff happens shallow. If you can do everything needed to achieve a gas switch and deco hang shallower than 20’ with a reasonable level of snafu thrown in, the bottom portion of the dive doesn’t hold a lot of challenges. Of course travel gases and stages change things up a bit but that’s outside the scope of a helitrox course.

 

[ChuckP]

On a typical year, she’d have to add an ice diving class if she wanted true open water practice lol.

it’s great to work on comfort stuff in a pool - d ring locations, clipping bottles, mask swaps, anything and everything. Ten hours in a pool may only take two hours off a class but the comfort level can be way up there.

As for shooting smb’s in a pool, we’re gonna try that with my son - he’s all worried about it but to me it’s all hand motions, you could almost practice it on a couch - we’ll see how it goes.

 

[lermontov]

These are actually two slightly different arguments. One is having a certain fundamental skill level before starting a class and the other is doing beginner basic skills in a pool.

We already covered that I would consider doing a valve drill in 6 ft of water off of shore, on a platform, or in a pool essentially the same. This is not an endorsement that 4/5 of class should be done in a pool with only 1 or 2 real dives at the end just to check a box, but an acknowledgement that nearly all tech classes have initial shallow training/demonstration dives and it is ok for these to be done in a pool. Maintaining depth for valve drill and gas share in 5ft of water is the important part not the body of water you happen to be in. For hypoxic trimix, people are not doing bottle rotations for the first time at 200ft, they are doing them at 20' and probably something with a hard bottom.

The other point is skills down before class. Every good diver eventually takes the class that requires a lot of practice and preparation and is the class that really teaches them how to dive. GUE has fundies, but outside of the GUE ecosystem other divers will use cavern/intro or an/dp as the class that shows them how to dive. Marie is doing it over several months with 10 certification dives on top of all the person practice time she can put in.

ok I concede maybe pool work has a place

 

[CptTightPants21]

ok I concede maybe pool work has a place

This can't possibly be correct! Aren't we supposed to have a fight that nitpicks the most minute detail and lasts for the next 20 pages?

 

[lermontov]

This can't possibly be correct! Aren't we supposed to have a fight that nitpicks the most minute detail and lasts for the next 20 pages?

well i could stick the boot in and say the cert card should have 'pool trained' stamped on it

 

[Marie13]

“Real water” is freshwater here - in the big lake out yonder that might throw up 23ft waves tomorrow. In comparison, the storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald is said to have had 25-30ft waves.

Class checkout dives on the Great Lakes are uncommon. The only place I know that regularly does them is Diver’s Den in Tobermory , which does them in a shallow, sheltered harbor (40ft deep at most) that has really neat old wooden tugboat wrecks. And that’s for OW classes.