The doctor told me she "looked up" the requirements. Hmmm.
She should be familiar with the AAUS requirements, though, as she sees a good portion of the divers that take this class. Any university employee that takes this class have the U pay for the physical if they go through the Alaska Occupational Health clinic, which is where I went. So the doctors there should know the drill. However, I don't think the class has been offered more than 10 or 15 years, so it could be that I'm the first person with this disability to come thru the program. I think it's safe to say that there probably aren't as many divers up here as there are in FL or CA!
Ok, I'm going to try and recreate my previous post that I accidentally deleted.
I'm taking the AAUS course at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and I signed up so that I could learn proper sampling techniques for my research in the Caribbean where I used to live. With this course we get the AAUS cert, the sci diver cert, membership to the UAF scientific diving research program, and a couple other PADI certs if we want them (drysuit). We are required to have (or to take before the OW dives if we don't already have) our OW cert, CPR, FA, and DAN 02. I figured aside from the drysuit and sampling, there wouldn't be much for me to do since I've got the other certs. However, I'm getting more out of it than I thought I would - we haven't even talked about sampling yet and we're 5 weeks in.
There are about 18 students in the course (all different levels - some are doing their OW cert simultaneously, and some are very experienced DMs. I'm a rescue diver with only 100 dives or so (all in the warm Caribbean), but I fall somewhere in the advanced category of this class in terms of experience). There are 2 instructors - 1 with the university and 1 with the LDS, and there's a TA for the course, too. They are all really great and very knowledgeable. There just aren't enough of them! We meet once a week from 7-9pm in a community pool. We only have 3 lanes of pool, so it's really crowded, as you can imagine. It's a neat course, but it could be better with better resources.
After this week, we have one more pool session, then we head down to the ocean over spring break (the U has a lab that we stay at where other classes will be conducting research) and we do our OW dives. We do 3-4 dives a day for 7 days (all night dives are optional), and there's a written exam, though I haven't heard any more on that or what's on it since the first class. No study material has been handed out. From what I understand, we dive dive dive dive dive, and then once we've passed our skills and the exam, we can spend the last couple days assisting the researchers. Those that need more work get it, but they don't get to assist researchers, which is the really cool practical experience part we're all looking forward to. So far, this course focuses a great deal on honing diving skills, and for me, there are a few new ones to learn and master.
Unlike TX A&M, our requirements are just what's in the AAUS manual. Nothing extra has been added, except the necessary extras for AK diving, and I think the teachers had their own variations of the exercises (9. Demonstrate watermanship ability, which is acceptable to the instructor. this one gives instructors a good deal of leeway to mix things up).
The first thing I wanted to comment on, though, was the swim eval since everyone's talking about it: the 25m u/w no breath swim was HARD for me, and I swim every day and practice yoga every day. I am not out of shape. I know how to breathe, and I still found this extremely difficult. So no one should feel bad about it. I think if you're not from a swim team background and don't know a coach and how to train for this, it's really hard. I wish that I had seen Thalassamania's instructions on how to prepare for it before I did mine! We did our swim eval on our second week of the class, and we were told about it the first week (the only classroom week), so I practiced like crazy on my own. The class had no practice time they just have you jump in and do your skills, and I never was able to make it the whole pool length until the actual night of the class. I guess adrenalin helped because I miraculously made it across. I had tried everything in my week of practice from hyperventilating to just taking a really big breath, and nothing worked until that night. The lifeguards at the university pool where I swim were useless -when I'd ask how to train for it or if there was a trick, they'd say stuff like, "Just hold your breath." Duh! Luckily, we were allowed to kick off. Without a good kick, I might not have made it. Another skill I hadn't done before was surface dive and retrieval of a 10lb weight from the bottom of the deep end (12 ft, I think) wearing MSF. I figured it would be easy, and the retrieval was, but surfacing with the weight wasn't in the cards for me! It was too heavy, and it kept dragging me down! Finally I managed to lift it over my head and above the water, though my head was still underwater. I had the snorkel on, and with the tip up, I tried to inflate my lungs enough to bring my head up, but no go. I guess it was enough for a pass b/c I wasn't asked to repeat the skill. I normally dive with 4-6 lbs - so I guess this was just beyond what my inflated lungs could hold. Hmmm...maybe this has something to do with why the 25yds was so difficult. Tiny lungs? But they did a chest xray for my physical, and my lungs are fine, and I scored very high on the elasticity portion of the spirometry test (not as high on the content), so I'm not sure what's up with that! I guess they are just freakishly small. Anyway, that was hard and something new, and I was feeling good about accomplishing new skills.
There were some new diving skills we practiced the 3rd week - new to me, I mean. Stuff we didn't do in my PADI rescue diver course: no mask buddy-breathing for about 3 minutes. I've done buddy breathing, and I've done mask removal, but not simultaneously. I thought it was great to practice. I had asked the instructor before how do you know when to pass the reg if you can't open your eyes u/w and see when your buddy needs it, and she said to just practice with masks on, and when we looked comfortable that she would tells us to remove our masks. She said you just have to be Zen she was right! It was difficult at first until my buddy and I got into a rhythm. We will repeat these skills in our open water dives, and I can imagine that this will be much trickier in OW than in the pool, especially in AK with sea lions zipping about. Yikes! One skill, which they called "ditch & don" was new to me as well. We removed all of our gear, swam to the halfway mark of the pool, swam back, grabbing for the reg first thing to take a breath, and then put the gear back on. People with weight belts were allowed to leave them on, people with integrated weights ditched the weights, too. The other stuff was repeated from my rescue diver course, but it was much more difficult b/c of the drysuit. Removing my weight pockets and putting them back in was much harder with lobster mitts. Removing my inflator hose and reconnecting was nearly impossible and took an embarrassingly long time. So for those of us like me coming from warm water-only diving backgrounds, there is a whole new element added to this course, and I'll be getting my drysuit cert as well. I am really uncomfortable in the drysuit so far and hope to feel more comfortable by the time we get to the OW. Last week was all about drysuit diving, so that was good practice for me. Tomorrow night we do rescue drills, so I'm sure there will be a lot of towing involved. We'll probably all overheat as that pool is about 80% humidity, and the drysuit feels like a sauna! To get the best practice, I want to wear what I'm going to be wearing under my drysuit in the OW dives, but it's just too hot at the indoor pool I can't. Therefore, I anticipate a whole variety of buoyancy issues with air pockets between the layers forming. It also doesn't help that I'm on my 3rd drysuit tomorrow as the last 2 didn't fit (all borrowed from shop). Not a lot of time to get comfortable in the gear. Nothing is perfect, though.
My biggest critique with the course would be student/teacher ratio. I'm sure 10/1 sounds great to the university dept heads, but anyone who has taken a diving course could probably agree that 10 students is pretty big. I've never taken a diving course with more than 4 other students. With just 2 hrs a week in our tiny section of the pool and so many people trying to learn the skills, there isn't a lot of time for Q&A. Because I'm a rescue diver, I get buddied up with brand new divers, but I'm not particularly comfortable with that as I'd rather be with a more experienced drysuit diver. I am a bit anxious about cold water diving, about the potential aggression of sea lions (I've heard horror stories), and of having numb extremities. I wish the OW were at the end of the semester, and there was more practice time before we hit the 33F water of Kasitsna Bay.
What are the time frames for this course at other schools?
She should be familiar with the AAUS requirements, though, as she sees a good portion of the divers that take this class. Any university employee that takes this class have the U pay for the physical if they go through the Alaska Occupational Health clinic, which is where I went. So the doctors there should know the drill. However, I don't think the class has been offered more than 10 or 15 years, so it could be that I'm the first person with this disability to come thru the program. I think it's safe to say that there probably aren't as many divers up here as there are in FL or CA!
Ok, I'm going to try and recreate my previous post that I accidentally deleted.
I'm taking the AAUS course at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and I signed up so that I could learn proper sampling techniques for my research in the Caribbean where I used to live. With this course we get the AAUS cert, the sci diver cert, membership to the UAF scientific diving research program, and a couple other PADI certs if we want them (drysuit). We are required to have (or to take before the OW dives if we don't already have) our OW cert, CPR, FA, and DAN 02. I figured aside from the drysuit and sampling, there wouldn't be much for me to do since I've got the other certs. However, I'm getting more out of it than I thought I would - we haven't even talked about sampling yet and we're 5 weeks in.
There are about 18 students in the course (all different levels - some are doing their OW cert simultaneously, and some are very experienced DMs. I'm a rescue diver with only 100 dives or so (all in the warm Caribbean), but I fall somewhere in the advanced category of this class in terms of experience). There are 2 instructors - 1 with the university and 1 with the LDS, and there's a TA for the course, too. They are all really great and very knowledgeable. There just aren't enough of them! We meet once a week from 7-9pm in a community pool. We only have 3 lanes of pool, so it's really crowded, as you can imagine. It's a neat course, but it could be better with better resources.
After this week, we have one more pool session, then we head down to the ocean over spring break (the U has a lab that we stay at where other classes will be conducting research) and we do our OW dives. We do 3-4 dives a day for 7 days (all night dives are optional), and there's a written exam, though I haven't heard any more on that or what's on it since the first class. No study material has been handed out. From what I understand, we dive dive dive dive dive, and then once we've passed our skills and the exam, we can spend the last couple days assisting the researchers. Those that need more work get it, but they don't get to assist researchers, which is the really cool practical experience part we're all looking forward to. So far, this course focuses a great deal on honing diving skills, and for me, there are a few new ones to learn and master.
Unlike TX A&M, our requirements are just what's in the AAUS manual. Nothing extra has been added, except the necessary extras for AK diving, and I think the teachers had their own variations of the exercises (9. Demonstrate watermanship ability, which is acceptable to the instructor. this one gives instructors a good deal of leeway to mix things up).
The first thing I wanted to comment on, though, was the swim eval since everyone's talking about it: the 25m u/w no breath swim was HARD for me, and I swim every day and practice yoga every day. I am not out of shape. I know how to breathe, and I still found this extremely difficult. So no one should feel bad about it. I think if you're not from a swim team background and don't know a coach and how to train for this, it's really hard. I wish that I had seen Thalassamania's instructions on how to prepare for it before I did mine! We did our swim eval on our second week of the class, and we were told about it the first week (the only classroom week), so I practiced like crazy on my own. The class had no practice time they just have you jump in and do your skills, and I never was able to make it the whole pool length until the actual night of the class. I guess adrenalin helped because I miraculously made it across. I had tried everything in my week of practice from hyperventilating to just taking a really big breath, and nothing worked until that night. The lifeguards at the university pool where I swim were useless -when I'd ask how to train for it or if there was a trick, they'd say stuff like, "Just hold your breath." Duh! Luckily, we were allowed to kick off. Without a good kick, I might not have made it. Another skill I hadn't done before was surface dive and retrieval of a 10lb weight from the bottom of the deep end (12 ft, I think) wearing MSF. I figured it would be easy, and the retrieval was, but surfacing with the weight wasn't in the cards for me! It was too heavy, and it kept dragging me down! Finally I managed to lift it over my head and above the water, though my head was still underwater. I had the snorkel on, and with the tip up, I tried to inflate my lungs enough to bring my head up, but no go. I guess it was enough for a pass b/c I wasn't asked to repeat the skill. I normally dive with 4-6 lbs - so I guess this was just beyond what my inflated lungs could hold. Hmmm...maybe this has something to do with why the 25yds was so difficult. Tiny lungs? But they did a chest xray for my physical, and my lungs are fine, and I scored very high on the elasticity portion of the spirometry test (not as high on the content), so I'm not sure what's up with that! I guess they are just freakishly small. Anyway, that was hard and something new, and I was feeling good about accomplishing new skills.
There were some new diving skills we practiced the 3rd week - new to me, I mean. Stuff we didn't do in my PADI rescue diver course: no mask buddy-breathing for about 3 minutes. I've done buddy breathing, and I've done mask removal, but not simultaneously. I thought it was great to practice. I had asked the instructor before how do you know when to pass the reg if you can't open your eyes u/w and see when your buddy needs it, and she said to just practice with masks on, and when we looked comfortable that she would tells us to remove our masks. She said you just have to be Zen she was right! It was difficult at first until my buddy and I got into a rhythm. We will repeat these skills in our open water dives, and I can imagine that this will be much trickier in OW than in the pool, especially in AK with sea lions zipping about. Yikes! One skill, which they called "ditch & don" was new to me as well. We removed all of our gear, swam to the halfway mark of the pool, swam back, grabbing for the reg first thing to take a breath, and then put the gear back on. People with weight belts were allowed to leave them on, people with integrated weights ditched the weights, too. The other stuff was repeated from my rescue diver course, but it was much more difficult b/c of the drysuit. Removing my weight pockets and putting them back in was much harder with lobster mitts. Removing my inflator hose and reconnecting was nearly impossible and took an embarrassingly long time. So for those of us like me coming from warm water-only diving backgrounds, there is a whole new element added to this course, and I'll be getting my drysuit cert as well. I am really uncomfortable in the drysuit so far and hope to feel more comfortable by the time we get to the OW. Last week was all about drysuit diving, so that was good practice for me. Tomorrow night we do rescue drills, so I'm sure there will be a lot of towing involved. We'll probably all overheat as that pool is about 80% humidity, and the drysuit feels like a sauna! To get the best practice, I want to wear what I'm going to be wearing under my drysuit in the OW dives, but it's just too hot at the indoor pool I can't. Therefore, I anticipate a whole variety of buoyancy issues with air pockets between the layers forming. It also doesn't help that I'm on my 3rd drysuit tomorrow as the last 2 didn't fit (all borrowed from shop). Not a lot of time to get comfortable in the gear. Nothing is perfect, though.
My biggest critique with the course would be student/teacher ratio. I'm sure 10/1 sounds great to the university dept heads, but anyone who has taken a diving course could probably agree that 10 students is pretty big. I've never taken a diving course with more than 4 other students. With just 2 hrs a week in our tiny section of the pool and so many people trying to learn the skills, there isn't a lot of time for Q&A. Because I'm a rescue diver, I get buddied up with brand new divers, but I'm not particularly comfortable with that as I'd rather be with a more experienced drysuit diver. I am a bit anxious about cold water diving, about the potential aggression of sea lions (I've heard horror stories), and of having numb extremities. I wish the OW were at the end of the semester, and there was more practice time before we hit the 33F water of Kasitsna Bay.
What are the time frames for this course at other schools?
). 33 degrees, hmm, the coldest I've been in was 39, and that was diving in a wetsuit, diving dry you should be fine.
. So I couldn't give you an exact total.
