Advanced Open Water Disappointment

[boulderjohn]

On the other, other hand...

All students are supposed to be taught how to do a proper weight check, and it is a skill that is repeated several times in both confined and open water. Yet a lot of divers either skip this step when they go out on their own or just overweight themselves so they know they can sink and not hold up the rest of the boat while they do a weight check. Party this might be due to how they were taught, but partly I think it is out of general laziness and lack of desire to really work on dive skills post-certification.

A few years ago a couple of us from various shops decided to head to a local dive spot for a day. One of the guys brought along a person the rest of us didn't know. He said he was an experienced diver, but we didn't really question it beyond that. The dive plan was an easy one, and he was buddied with the person who invited him. We start the dive and the guy is yo-yoing up and down the water column. He burned through an HP100 in about 30 minutes and gave his buddy the low on air signal and they ascended. The rest of us finished our dive. After, I asked what was up with that yo-yo. Well, turns out that he had rented a bag of weights from his shop and they gave him 30 lbs. total. So he put all 30 lbs. in his BCD without doing a weight check. He ended up being 18 lbs. overweighted. He knew he should have done a weight check but just didn't bother.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The problem is the conflict in the confined water sessions between the weight needed for teaching on the knees and doing a proper weight check. If a diver is properly weighted, it is very, very hard to teach skills on the knees. That creates a dilemma for the instructor when it comes time to do the weight check. I have seen first hand when called upon to assist a class first being led by someone else how such an instructor goes through the weight check by essentially telling the students to pay no attention to the manual's explanation and listen instead to his explanation.. An instructor I was assisting said the weight check was a ridiculous waste of time, since you can't properly teach a student if they have that little weight.

I could fill this page with anecdotes about it. I will only tell one.

The student came to me to do his open water checkout dives in cool, fresh water requiring a 7mm wetsuit. Knowing that he was going to do that, he did his pool sessions in a 7mm wetsuit so he could get the weighting dialed in properly. He made sure the instructor doing that understood his purpose. When he came to me, he said he absolutely knew that he needed 22 pounds to be properly weighted.

Looked at his small frame and thought "no way!" He insisted. I insisted on starting him with 18. He finally assented. By the time he had finished his class, he was diving happily with 10 pounds, and he talked about how exciting it was to feel how different he felt diving with that little weight compared to diving with what he had insisted he needed.

The point is that the weight check as taught to him by his pool instructor led him to believe he needed twice the weight he needed, and he would have gone out as certified diver with that belief if I had not intervened.

 

[boulderjohn]

When divers use online weighting sites like Dive Buddy, they will usually come up with two to three times as much weight as they should need.

 

[kerry e]

I just got done with my advanced open waters this weekend I wanted to share my thoughts. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much going into it but I wanted to get a few more training dives in before a trip coming up. I didn't really do the class for the card, I was hoping to just work on my skills some.

It wasn't off to a great start when I go there for our 5pm start but we didn't actually get started until closer to 6. We got into the classroom and there was some paperworked laid out for us. As we filled it out, the instructor announced to the class that this was his first advanced open water class he's taught. This wouldn't have bothered me normally, I think there are plenty of people that could be great instructors on thier first class. The issue was the attitue was more that we shouldn't expect much because it was his first.

Then he made a comment about "hoping" that nobody checked yes to the medical issues because we'd need a doctor to sign off. I felt there were two issues with this. One - Why not send these forms ahead of time so they can be filled out without wasting class time. Second - I felt like he was issuing a warning or even advising people to check no even if maybe they should check yes.

Once we had started all the classroom work it became pretty obvious that I wasn't going to get much out of it. He didn't even have the current course materials in front of him. Several times throughout the discussion he made comments about how his book (from when he was advanced certified in the 90s I think he said) was out of date. He basically ran through the section titles in each chapter then had us take turns reading and sharing our answers for the knowlege review. That would have been fine but he didn't have the answers anywhere. He just let us give the answers and would try and correct them if a student said the wrong ones. That said, there were several questions that the agreed upon answers weren't correct. Many of my classmates would change the answers they wrote down to what I'm almost certain were incorrect answers.

Once we wrapped up with the classroom work we headed to the dive site to do our first 3 dives: peak performance, navigation, and night. Again, right away I realized this wasn't going to be super helpful. On the peak performance he decided that we wouldn't do a weight check since it was our first dive and all of our tanks were full. We decended to the platform and all hovered for 60 seconds. Then we spent about 10 minutes swimming through hoops. Honestly that would have been fine if we would have gotten any advice or guidance during it. Any kind of take away, but we didn't.

Then after a short "surface interval" of us floating at the surface and discussing our navigation requirments (which we did for about 3 mintues on land), we decended again to take care of those skills. My buddy and I got through ours fine, but another couple weren't able to. They struggled on land with the simple navigation so there was no way they were ready for anything below the water. Both dives were really rushed, presumibly since we started almost an hour late and they were trying to cram "3" dives into the first night.

Time for the night dive. We all had to rush because dark was falling fast and the mosquitoes were terrible. After a super fast dive breifing we all decended and had a nice, albeit short, night dive. It was so short because a couple of the divers didn't swap tanks between dives because they had only used half. Our bottom time was a minimum just to reach the requirement. I know that because the instructor referenced this multiple times during the weekened.

The next morning we headed back out to the dive site for the deep dive and the search and recovery dive. He informed us that the platform was at about 80 so we'd go down there and do our skills. We'd go down in two groups at seperate times. The first group (not mine) went down and they didn't make it very long. One diver got cold at about 60' (probably about 45 degrees or so at that point). Another experienced a free flow so they aborted the dive. Everyone was fine, no issues or panicing from what I understand. That group took a break and our instructor brought me and my buddy down. We made it to the platform which was supposed to be at 80ish but was really at 96. I for sure noticed some narcosis but I was fine. My buddy however, was not. He was very clearly in a panic but the instructor helped him work through it without issue. We didn't stay down very long at all because of the other diver (with good reason) but we did make a safe accent and an extra long safety stop too. One of the other divers in the other group (the one with the free flow) was able to complete his deep dive.

The final dive was the seach and recovery. That was a fun dive and I got to play with a lift bag and some search patterns. Nothing really remarkable happened but this was proably the dive that I "learned" the most during the weekend (sadly).

After all that we went back to the shop to fill out paperwork for our certifications (execpt the two that didn't complete the deep dive).

Over all it was a pretty dissapointing experience. I was really hoping to work on trim and boyancy which was hard to do when we were kneeling all the time, except the 60 seconds required for the PPB dive. I was also excited to experience a deeper dive but it wasn't very enjoyable. Although I was comfortable and ok, it was frustraiting to plan a dive at 80' then find out it was actually 96'. Now, I know what some might be thinking. If you planned for 80 why did you go to 96. There is more to that story and the plan was changed at the last minute. I was personally comfortable with it. I felt like I had a good handle on it and was ok with the change. I knew before I even got wet that we'd be going to 96'. It was just odd to me that the instructor didn't know the platform was that deep until the guy diving a line down came back up and told us.

I also understand that I maybe should have spoken up during the weekend and expressed some of my concerns. And maybe you're right. I thought about it, I talked about it with my wife after our dives friday. But honestly, I felt like no matter what I said, it wouldn't change anything so I just tried to figure out how to get as much out of it as I could. Starting a fight with my instructor wasn't going to help, so I just asked questions and worked on my skills as I could.

After this weekend do I feel like I'm ready for a 100' dive because I'm and "advanced open water diver". Nope. I'll keep working on my skills, doing my research, and find a better instructor to take more training with. I may even redo my advance open water course all together. I actually am close with another organization so maybe I'll do that instead. Who knows.

I just wanted to share my experence with others. This is just a good example of why finding a good instructor/shop matters.

Yes it does. My instructor was OK but always seemed in a hurry to get things done. Deep dive - I think it was 80 feet - cold water we landed on top of a boat and he motioned for us to go back up. That was our deep dive for the Advanced. Keep diving and find good experienced buddies. I now have over 1200 dives and love love love it!

 

[The Chairman]

All students are supposed to be taught how to do a proper weight check,

Instructors can only teach what they know, and most feel a need to overweight so the student can adequately remain on their knees. Consequently, many students I have seen are taught to overweight themselves. Unless they take a cavern course, they don't know any different.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Instructors can only teach what they know, and most feel a need to overweight so the student can adequately remain on their knees. Consequently, many students I have seen are taught to overweight themselves. Unless they take a cavern course, they don't know any different.

Or if they take up vintage diving with no BC, then they get a crash course on what it means to be overweighted. No big airbag to elevator dive with.

 

[The Chairman]

Or if they take up vintage diving with no BC,

I first learned to dive without a BC... or a depth gauge... or an SPG.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I first learned to dive without a BC... or a depth gauge... or an SPG.

People these days don’t know how good they got it!

 

[BlueTrin]

Or if they take up vintage diving with no BC, then they gat a crash course on what it means to be overweighted. No big airbag to elevator dive with.

Is that you solution to fix the current issues?

“Let’s see who can come back up with 20kg of lead …” * *waves* *

Survival of the fittest …

 

[The Chairman]

Is that you solution to fix the current issues?

I wish that every instructor had to take a Cavern class just to learn proper weighting.

 

[Dan G]

I wish that every instructor had to take a Cavern class just to learn proper weighting.

A wise person who is on this thread once told me that we do not always know who to pick as our mentor(s). Or sometimes even get to pick our mentors. That we may learn bad habits without knowing it, because our mentors have those bad habits. I know for sure the same is true for K-12 teaching and I'd imagine the same is true for dive instruction.

A new instructor learns that the solution to a skills problem is more weight and that's what they do. Similarly, a new instructor doesn't want to make waves at the shop that just hired them and they do the same as the other, more senior, instructors. "Just give them more weight. We'll teach them how to properly weight when they get better at diving neutral."