Aren't "100" Dives enough!?!

[Superlyte27]

........however many are, IMHO, worthless.

Drysuit is necessary training, although there's not enough material there to make an entire course. It should be included with the purchase of the suit.

Night diving - covered adequately in any decent advanced class there's no need for a night diving specialty.

Peak Performancy Buoyancy - teach it properly in the OW class.

Mulitlevel Diver - cover it in advanced.

Deep Diver - to not exceed 130 ft? Give me a break, this is another portion of the advanced class. If they were really talking about deep diving, I'd agree with it being a legitimate class.

Equipment Specialist - doesn't cover anything that shouldn't have been covered in OW.

Underwater Navigator - should be covered in OW & expanded in advanced.

Drift Diver - a 15 minute lecture that should be included in OW.

Altitude Diver - depending on the course location, this should be covered in either OW or advanced.

Boat Diver - this one is ridiculous. If you can't dive from a boat, you should have ANY c-card.

That's 10 different specialties that I believe have no reason to exist as separate specialties. I believe 10 qualifies as "many."

There are some specialties that require enough special training that they require their own class. Photography, Search & Recovery, Rescue, Wreck, Cavern, Ice, Cave & Nitrox immediately come to mind. I'm sure there are others.

I'm not "anti any other training agency other than YMCA." I AM pro YMCA, but there are other excellent agencies as well. CMAS, NAUI, BSAC & LA County immediately come to mind. BTW, YMCA is far from perfect. I'm not terribly familiar with many of the other agencies, but am interested in seeing standards from any of them.

Walter

agree completely regarding specialties.

 

[Superlyte27]

HOLY CRAP!!! I really need to start reading thread dates before I contribute. What useless dribble at this point.

 

[DevonDiver]

holy crap!!! I really need to start reading thread dates before i contribute. What useless dribble at this point.

lmao

 

[victorzamora]

HOLY CRAP!!! I thought that said Jan 4, 2012 on the OP!!!

One concern I have here (after only reading 2 pages...sorry) is QUALITY of dives and the quality of the diver....much more so than quantity of dives. One of my room mates has under a dozen dives under his belt, but looks like a pro in the water. My fiancee and I took a trip to Roatan, and there was a guy there looking to get DM certified with "over 200 dives" and he looked like an OW student.

I myself am a fairly experienced diver with approximately 250 dives (most of which were in clear, blue, warm waters). I have dealt with OOA, dropped lead/runaway buoyancy issues, free-flowing equipment, loss of other gear, injuries, narcosis, night, nav, etc. I sip air as well as or better than the majority of dive masters, I have VERY good buoyancy control, and I have the level-headed attitude one needs when it comes to dangerous situations. However, I have very little experience with a lot of dive regimes. I would still feel uncomfortable teaching a class.

Another thing about being/choosing an instructor is the instructor needs to teach to what the student will be diving in, not what's around. I love my LDS (volunteered there for 40 hours or so and looking to volunteer (maybe work) there some more). However, they didn't teach ANY boat diving techniques, they missed a lot of stuff that I would call fairly crucial to the diving that I do. When we got to Roatan, my fiancee had NO idea how to dive off of a boat. Remember that what you dive isn't what your students will dive.

Now, back to the 100-dive minimum. I believe that few divers are actually good enough to teach after only 100 dives, and I think PADI is being very loose with that number. Remember, the student can only learn what the instructor teaches. So an instructor that is only a decent diver (even the best instructors can't convey 100% of their knowledge) will just turn out substandard divers under PADI's fairly loose curriculum.

 

[victorzamora]

BTW, the OP hasn't posted for 10 years, 1 month, and 6 days (Jan 14, 2001).

 

[Dive Bug Bit Me]

Now, back to the 100-dive minimum. I believe that few divers are actually good enough to teach after only 100 dives, and I think PADI is being very loose with that number. Remember, the student can only learn what the instructor teaches. So an instructor that is only a decent diver (even the best instructors can't convey 100% of their knowledge) will just turn out substandard divers under PADI's fairly loose curriculum.

Maybe I am 11 years to late in responding to the OP, but I was diving back then.

I once worked out that someone in the team had a minor irritation once in every eight dives that I have been on (its part of why I keep a log book). These include regulator failure, SPG popping off leaving a hose with just bubbles, mask knocked off, light failure, tank slips out the back of a BCD, someone panics, lost weight belt, lost buddy, etc.

I guess that an instructor with 100 dives has probably done 20 training dives, leaving 80 dives where he might be unsupervised. Wildly assuming that my irritation ratio applied to all, this means he has only dealt with an irritation underwater 10 times (and lets be honest, irritations seem to happen to me less in wide open warm caribean water than in murky New York water). In this case 10 irritations are the total of his experience. The rest is sipping air and looking at fish.

I listed 8 seperate irritations above. There are easily another dozen. Unless the instructor is incredibly unlucky, at 100 dives he just has not dealth with enough problem situations underwater yet.

 

[Colliam7]

BTW, the OP hasn't posted for 10 years, 1 month, and 6 days (Jan 14, 2001).

And, since we periodically lament the high turnover in divers, what about the high turnover in ScubaBoard posters?

Of the 15 people that contributed 47 posts in the original thread:

Four (4) are still current, including one (1) who posted in the original discussion and in the resurrection (proving that Walter has staying power)
Two (2) posted as recently as 2011, but neither in the past 5 months
One (1) last posted in 2008
Eight (8) haven't posted in at least 6 years, in some cases over 10

Is this a phenomenon of 'post and run'? Or, does SB poster participation reflect the overall state of longevity in diving?

Maybe I am 11 years to late in responding to the OP, but I was diving back then.

Yeah, but, you weren't a member back then, so we won't deduct points from you post score.

 

[Thalassamania]

I don't know why everyone is denigrating training dives. The purpose of a training dive is to accelerate the learning process.

If your training dives are nothing more than look/sees with a few skills thrown in, whilst the student is protected from having anything go wrong ... well ... that's not a training dive in my book. Training dives should offer serious problems and situations while the student is protected, by staff, from ending up injured or dead, but not from straying way down a wrong path as a controlled learning experience. One good training dive is, I feel, worth somewhere between ten and a hundred "experience" dives, at least it is for divers that are competent enough to have the extra capacity beyond simple survival to learn.

 

[ScubaToneDog]

Is this a phenomenon of 'post and run'? Or, does SB poster participation reflect the overall state of longevity in diving?

I think its more of a low attention span thing. I tend to do that. I read and post in the winter months. Once spring hits I am off and out and the last thing on my mind is Scuba Board.

 

[TMHeimer]

HOLY CRAP!!! I thought that said Jan 4, 2012 on the OP!!!


Now, back to the 100-dive minimum. I believe that few divers are actually good enough to teach after only 100 dives, and I think PADI is being very loose with that number. Remember, the student can only learn what the instructor teaches. So an instructor that is only a decent diver (even the best instructors can't convey 100% of their knowledge) will just turn out substandard divers under PADI's fairly loose curriculum.

Agree to a point. A better more experienced diver probably makes for a better instructor. But not always, as teaching is a skill. Some people are just naturally better at it than others. And some work hard at it to improve. So I would assume you can easily have a less experienced diver being a better teacher than a more experienced one. But I think the real difference here in diving is that there would be much less chance of a serious accident or fatality if the instructor is a more experienced diver--especially during the checkout dives. That all important safety factor really has nothing to do with teaching skills.