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Looking for high standards in an instructor has been mentioned. I think it's important to keep in mind that there are two sides to the coin of "having high standards". One, is of course, to assess students against these standards, but the other side is the ability to teach to those standards...

Looks like they be damned if they suspend him, and the same if they don't. IANTD has already been under the gun for not suspending instructors who did really stupid things outside a formal teaching context, like pulling jumps on a lost cave diver, leading or contributing to her death. And in...

I would think of AN/DP training as an investment in your safety. You are already doing dives that are getting into the territory of that training, so you want to have all the knowledge and skills to do them as safely as possible. And, the training is a one-time expense, the diving later is just...

I feel rushed when I plan my dive with an ascent rate of 30ft/min. I like to slow it down to about 20 ft/min. As an example, when I do a dive to 120ft., and have my first stop at 40ft., it makes subjectively a difference for me whether I try to hit that stop after three minutes, or after four. I...

I know it's mostly semantics, but what I found most useful to delineate technical from recreational diving is to look at what your and your team's plans are for when things go sideways. In recreational diving, plan B is your buddy, and plan C is the surface. In technical diving, plan B is your...

No they can't. Someone will turn the left-handed valve the wrong way. I dive sidemount, and I had captains turning my air off on that valve when they "checked" before I was to splash.

Stupid question, perhaps: Are there situations where you would have an unbreathable gas on your necklace as part of a properly planned dive? (The described dive is definitely not one!) But how is this handled, for instance, when you dive hypoxic mixes and are on your travel gas during decent...

I hear you. I still can't imagine why they charge that much for it. Except, maybe, because they can? I have been toying a bit with coding a cave diving tool, and a small art of this I looked at the source code for the deco algorithms of subsurface. And once you have Buhlmann in place...

Sure, happy to answer this, from my personal perspective. Individual experiences may be differnet, though. Generally, I have no problems on dive boats or in mostly straight dive clubs. A friendly bunch where sexual orientation doesn't matter, 99% of the time. Better than high school locker rooms...

Not so much dedicated dive ops, but there are gay dive groups or clubs who then contact dive or charter ops and ask then if they are cool with a gay group. Usually the answer is yes you're welcome, but if there is any hemming and hewing or equivocation, they move on.

Single-tank backmount seems unbalanced to me. I feel like I'm rolling to one side. Two tanks - that's where sidemount excels. Perfectly balanced, it just feels very easy to dive once trim is dialed in. More bottles, and I'm not so sure any more. One deco or stage bottle makes me slightly...

Agreed - get the refund. You won't seriously have to think about deco algorithms and models until you're quite into deco diving. And given that you're just staring out, l venture to guess that that's a few years out. By then, the consensus may very well have totally shifted away from VPM...

And the moderators can take care of that. I'm actually impressed with the quality of the moderation on Scubaboard. Plenty of good and often heated discussion. But a mod steps in when it's over the line.

Lake Huron is blown out again. I was booked on a charter to dive the Glenorchy and Goliath out of Harbor Beach tomorrow, but the forecast is 8-12 ft. waves, with the occasional 15-footer. So Gilboa quarry it is instead. *sigh*.

I have already chimed in in how valuable this course was for in terms of mindset and methods. Where I'm having the most difficulties, though, is finding buddies for dives at that level. Most who take AN/DP seem to move on quickly to normoxic trimix and don't appear to be too interested in doing...

I was for a long time wondering the same as the OP, as I live in Michigan and dive mostly wrecks here, as well as the caves of Michigan. Then, after bumping up against the NDL too often, I finally took AN/DP here locally, and it was very much worth it. The biggest benefit for me was that it's...

I guess the take-home message is ANALYZE YOUR TANK. Every time. Even if it has no sticker on it, don't assume it's just air.

Nitrox. And diving well above the MOD for the mix. But following the deco profile the "air" computer gave me, while staying well within the NDL of the accurately set Nitrox computer.

Here's is what I did to figure out what my computer does when it goes into deco, before I was deco trained: I used a second, backup computer, as primary for the dive, on Nitrox. And set my usual primary computer to air. It went into deco fairly quickly, and on ascent I did whatever I took make...

I'm all in favor of this. If you don't like the forum, just don't go there. Having said that, I suspect that there is not a whole lot to talk about. Most of what I post or read here on scubaboard is on the technical side of things. But there are likely a few issues that would pop up in such a...