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For those who have never done it.... Instructing from a platform in low visibility is challenging. The instructor is in the middle, and he or she moves from student to student as they perform skills. Outside the platform, the rest of the students are watched by an assistant or assistants...

An instructor is responsible for the safety of everyone on a dive, including people on the dive who are on the dive but are not students. Those "tagalongs" count for the student/teacher ratio. If a non-student on the dive has an emergency, the instructor would be expected to attend to it. In a...

This is something the computers would definitely show.

Different computers do things differently. They don't automatically synch, though. I don't particularly care about the data on my dives, so I have not uploaded mine to an account in years. However, f you were to take my computers after a dive, even long after a dive, you could get all the...

Wondering what dive computers can tell you? Here is a hypothetical example of what they could show. 1. The computers of everyone on the dive will show the beginning of the dive, since they all descended together. This will be true even if the computers were not accurately set to the time of...

Try to avoid putting it in there in the first place. Water usually enters the BCD through frequent ineffective attempts to dump air. What causes that? Becoming neutrally buoyant requires some air in the BCD bladder, and that air volume will be affected by changes in pressure as you change...

Hasn't helped me.

A small digression.... Over the past few years, I have toyed with various scuba-themed social media. In almost all others, a good question like this would have been followed by a host of replies ranging from very good to pure nonsense, with no real way to know the good stuff from the nonsense...

The WRSTC does not specify a method of donating in an OOA emergency. Individual agencies may have individual policies, but there is no general rec diving instruction on this. PADI has no specific policy, so it is up to the instructor.

That is what I do, but I do it a specific way. I have XS scuba weight pockets that hold up to 5 pounds. I have never needed that much, so that is plenty. I use a single tank adaptor, but what I do would work if you have permanently mounted cam bands. I thread them in opposite directions, so...

I'm not sure what you mean by trying to squeeze 3 minutes off a deco schedule.

Up through the 90s, everyone was using tables, and those were very conservative. That was, in fact, the impetus for the PADI RDP. The Navy tables were very conservative, with no ability to do multi-level diving and with extremely long surface intervals. The scientist who led the RDP research...

I thought I would make a couple of observations on the week of diving I just completed. I was with a dive operation that used HP 117s, and everyone I dived with that week was using those cylinders. I was using an aluminum backplate, and I had never used that kind of cylinder before. It took me...

So at what point in their diving lives do you think divers should be allowed to start thinking?

My discussion with PADI was triggered by a very fine DM briefing before a dive on a large wreck. In that briefing, he said there were several swim-throughs (wheel house) for "those with appropriate certification." When he was done, I called him over and asked what the appropriate certification...

...and don't you dare swim under the anchor chain--it's an overhead environment, after all.

My discussions with PADI went beyond what I described earlier. When I said that the language in the wreck course (and others) was unclear, they asked me to suggest other language. I did, and they said they would use it when courses are rewritten. Not long after that, they wrote an article about...

Disconnecting an inflator hose to prevent runaway BCD inflation is a required skill for OW divers in all WRSTC agencies, and it has been since before I became a diver back in the last millennium. Students are also required to demonstrate inflating the BCD orally. For PADI, they have to do it...

PADI made the same change, adding a surface weight drop to OW training about a dozen years ago. What bothers me about this is that they did not do anything to address an issue indicated by that information. In a standard weight check done at the beginning of the dive, the diver should be able...

That is likely because the situation in which a fatality caused by failure to ditch weight is so very rare. I did the accident analysis of which you speak. A dozen or so years ago, I went through a couple years of DAN fatality reports to identify cases in which dropping lead would have made a...