Advanced Open Water Disappointment

[VikingDives]

I think the best analogy that I've found is scuba diving vs. private piloting. The casualty rate is about the same - say 4 deaths per 100,000 activity hours. Now I'm generalizing, so don't be pedantic kids...

Here's where the problem lies: A mediocre private pilot learns to fly and get from place to place in a mediocre manner. That is acceptable, and maybe not smooth or beautiful, but the mission is accomplished and short of killing themselves, they've done no harm. Contrast this with the mediocre scuba diver: they harm the environment by kicking coral or the bottom... The last two weekends I've been diving the viz has been absolute crap. Not because of weather or anything natural, but because of sh!t divers and sh!t instructors rototilling the bottom of a hole that typically has 60+ feet of visibility. I was teaching in 10 foot viz thanks to them.

I can forgive the divers. They don't know what they don't know, but their a$$hat instructors? They need to get in the sea with an extra 20 lbs of unditchable weight. They are the ones who are perpetuating the mess that scuba is right now. The mess that says that only 1 in 10 students will ever return for advanced training, so we must extract every dollar we can from them at first contact. It Is Complete Bull$hit.

Teach your students properly and they'll repay you in spades. If they like to dive, they will buy stuff. If they trust what you're teaching, they'll take another course, and write you a 5-star review. If the dive industry started to treat new people coming in less like sheep to be fleeced and a little more like future friends and buddies, everyone from the student to the old, white, male who grew up in the 60's, CEO of <insert dive manufacturer here> would benefit.

Do we need government regulation? I'm not sure, but I see that the industry is hobbled by the ancients, who haven't updated their worldviews, and conversely, I see the world of aviation (in the US) as an example of how government and industry can collaborate to make something a better thing. Look at accident rates in aviation in the 1950s and tell me that things haven't gotten better.

</rant>

 

[boulderjohn]

If you read scubaboard it is made very clear that there is a massive problem in scuba.
Just read this thread about how AOW is falling apart and the scuba world as we know it is having a nuclear meltdown!

If I read ScubaBoard I can run into 15-20 people saying the same thing over and over and over and over, with no facts to back them up. Sorry, that doesn't cut it for evidence. I can find more people telling me the earth is flat.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I think the best analogy that I've found is scuba diving vs. private piloting. The casualty rate is about the same - say 4 deaths per 100,000 activity hours. Now I'm generalizing, so don't be pedantic kids...

Here's where the problem lies: A mediocre private pilot learns to fly and get from place to place in a mediocre manner. That is acceptable, and maybe not smooth or beautiful, but the mission is accomplished and short of killing themselves, they've done no harm. Contrast this with the mediocre scuba diver: they harm the environment by kicking coral or the bottom... The last two weekends I've been diving the viz has been absolute crap. Not because of weather or anything natural, but because of sh!t divers and sh!t instructors rototilling the bottom of a hole that typically has 60+ feet of visibility. I was teaching in 10 foot viz thanks to them.

I can forgive the divers. They don't know what they don't know, but their a$$hat instructors? They need to get in the sea with an extra 20 lbs of unditchable weight. They are the ones who are perpetuating the mess that scuba is right now. The mess that says that only 1 in 10 students will ever return for advanced training, so we must extract every dollar we can from them at first contact. It Is Complete Bull$hit.

Teach your students properly and they'll repay you in spades. If they like to dive, they will buy stuff. If they trust what you're teaching, they'll take another course, and write you a 5-star review. If the dive industry started to treat new people coming in less like sheep to be fleeced and a little more like future friends and buddies, everyone from the student to the old, white, male who grew up in the 60's, CEO of <insert dive manufacturer here> would benefit.

Do we need government regulation? I'm not sure, but I see that the industry is hobbled by the ancients, who haven't updated their worldviews, and conversely, I see the world of aviation (in the US) as an example of how government and industry can collaborate to make something a better thing. Look at accident rates in aviation in the 1950s and tell me that things haven't gotten better.

</rant>

Poor pilots can crash into houses killing themselves and people on the ground. They can also fly in conditions beyond their skill level and kill themselves and their passengers or people on the ground. Plane crashes can start wildfires. What would aviation be like if there was no government oversight? What would the condition of the planes devolve to if they weren’t subject to inspections? So yeah, in aviation we need a government watch dog.

Diving is extremely small in contrast to other activities. If diving was a lot bigger, like a hundred or a thousand times bigger, so would be the accident rate because it would just follow the same percentage. More divers, more accidents. At that point I think they would begin to look at it as potentially needing some sort of oversight just based on the visible increase in accidents and the fatality rate. But because it’s so small and niche it flies under the radar.
The only government regulation I’ve seen in diving is the city ordinance in Laguna Beach that you have to have a buddy and a snorkel. That law originated in 1962-63.
Point Lobos also has a rule that you have to have a buddy but I don’t know if there is an infraction code or if that’s just smoke.
In some locations you have to have a dive flag but I don’t know if you can get cited or if it’s just smoke.
The only reason scuba has gotten to the low that it’s at now is because nobody cares enough to fix it. Why would they? If you make it too hard you’d lose too many paying customers and it would also take too much time. It’s found it’s happy balance. No matter how much we bitch about it here on SB, out in the real world it’s a different story. It will never change so get used to it.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

If I read ScubaBoard I can run into 15-20 people saying the same thing over and over and over and over, with no facts to back them up. Sorry, that doesn't cut it for evidence. I can find more people telling me the earth is flat.

Are you telling me that scubaboard is not bible and the truth about everything scuba?
I’m devastated!

 

[Forbin's Descent]

Teach your students properly and they'll repay you in spades. If they like to dive, they will buy stuff.

Yep my dude could have made thousands more off me with all the money I've spent. I would have loved to have a local dive shop to support.

 

[Forbin's Descent]

If I read ScubaBoard I can run into 15-20 people saying the same thing over and over and over and over, with no facts to back them up. Sorry, that doesn't cut it for evidence. I can find more people telling me the earth is flat.

Is it the same people? I am new saying the same thing. OP is new saying the same thing. And it's not just SB. I run into it everywhere. Hell, even you had a bad experience 20 years ago. It just goes on and on.

 

[Forbin's Descent]

. I am more impressed by what I see on dive boats and at resorts around the world; not perfection, but pretty good, in general. There are the truly terrrible, of course, but they are in the definite minority.

I am horrified by what I see on dive boats. It is a testament to how safe the equipment is.

 

[The Chairman]

I have stayed out of this thread for a few reasons. Mostly, I'm struck with the axiom that you get what you pay for. Sure, there are some horrible divers and instructors out there. Scuba instruction is priced to be more of a baby sitting service rather than truly instructional. How many times have you seen a flight instructor with more than one student in the cockpit? The prospective pilot spends 40 hours with said instructor at $60/hour. We'd have far better divers in a heartbeat if you paid Scuba Instructors like that.

I remember driving out to the Speigel Grove with an AOW student. We went over different strategies in regard to entering/exiting, staying close to your buddy, navigation tips and so on. There was a guy sitting just behind us, and at one point he asked what the class was. I told him and then he indicated that his AOW instructor hadn't taught him anything. In that regard, for many, AOW is merely a chance to spend a bit more time near an instructor. For many instructors it's nothing but a babysitting service.

 

[Forbin's Descent]

How is this a 47 page thread?

Just when I thought I was out, They pull me back in hahahahaha

 

[Angelo Farina]

I wrote this story somewhere not long ago--maybe earlier in this lengthy thread.

A teacher where I worked decided too many students were working too many hours in part time jobs, and she thought that might be a reason for the number of chronically failing students. She convinced school leadership to embark on an ambitious campaign to do whatever it took to cut down on part time jobs to improve student performance. The first step was to get the data, so the school did an exhaustive survey so they could correlate student work hours with academic performance.

The results were staggering, but not as expected. Work hours did indeed correlate with student performance. In general, the more hours worked, the better the student was doing. The students chronically failing classes weren't doing part time jobs, either. The perceived problem did not exist; the system was working well.

So to all who want to impose a massive and highly expensive system on scuba to solve its problems, how do you know the problem exists to the point that it is necessary? Well over a million certifications are completed every year world-wide. Of course there will be some problems, but do those problems exist to the point that we need to make such huge changes to the system?

An external examiner coming from a competing diving school is nothing new.
We had this system working perfectly, ensuring that only students fully compliant with requirements were certified, between 1955 and 1995.
And the additional cost was small, just travel expenses for a 50-100 km round trip and a lunch at a restaurant.
Say 100 eur.
For a class of 10 students, paying 150 or 200 eur for their course, the marginal cost of an external indipendent examiner is just 10 euros. Quite worth the effect, in my opinion..