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Excellent points. I was that guy with MSD as soon as I finished my 50th dive (instructor wanted to give it to me prior to that but I wanted to follow the rules). I've always said PADI MSD would at least hold a little more weight if only certain specialties fit the requirement. But this is yet another post verifying that it is just a title, very little more.
I think my NAUI classmate who washed out in the dive phase of our Master Diver training would disagree with your assessment that "they're all basically a handout." He's a good diver but there were no participation trophies that day.
Is it possible that your Deep, U/W Nav, Night, Wreck, and S&R were simply single dives as part of an AOW course? If you had the full specialties in those topics, you would have had 4,3,2,4,and 4 dives each (respectively).Your PADI record (available to instructors like me) only shows AOW in 1982 and Rescue in 1984. Ice is not mentioned, nor OW. Was your OW class with PADI?
Did you get these at PADI? I would reach out to them. Maybe they can issue replacement cards. Not sure how good their record keeping was though in the 80s. Unfortunately they charge a fee if I'm not mistaken.
Hi. If this was PADI, just scan all you have and send an email to PADI explaining. They are able to verify some records and if not they may add the achivements for you into PADI database. I went through the same process some time ago for my specialities I got back in 84-86. PADI reviewed it and fixed for me.
There is enough info in his SB profile that I was able to find his PADI records; I sent that info to him. He did NOT do those specialties; he apparently did one dive each as part of his AOW. I explained how he could look at his logbook and verify my conclusion. He has not responded, because I guess it did not agree with his memory.
I talked to my old instructor, I guess I didn't receive the memo, he told me they where trying to kill several birds with one stone, by putting in extra activities into our dives to get certified in the different specialty courses, but after the fact Padi told them that for advance open water they were aloud to do multiple tasks on one dive to qualify for AOW, but for the specialty dives each dive had to be a task for each one of the specialty qualification, for instance search and recovery there are so many task that had to be done, and even though some of the task that had to be done may of been apart of another specialty did not qualify for that specific specialty like navigation, even though you needed to know navigation skills for search and recovery that didn't qualify you for the navigation skill, you could though take multiple specialty courses but they had to have there own dives. So you were right, the dives I did even though we did more dives and tasks then needed for AOW just made me a better AOW diver. The things I did after my AOW and then Rescue Diver can't be taken away from my experiences just made me a better diver with over 250 dives.
