Beginners doing GUE fundamentals?

[Antonios (Holy Diver)]

Well, to be fair when I did it, really only the last day was the evaluation. It sort of felt like, you have a week to bond as a team, try various skills in isolation, ask questions, potentially make mistakes which your instructor should notice and critique. The real question is, by the end of the week, can you and your team get your act together enough to plan and execute one perfect dive which, by the way is a lot like the dives you'd be doing with GUE teams, if you passed. Some things, the instructor can correct within the week; for example if you were carrying the SMB in the wrong pocket, they can tell you and you can say, "oh, I didn't know that" and move it to the correct pocket. But there are other things that, realistically, no instructor is going to be able to fix in a week. One example is task loading. If you have deployed your SMB hundreds of times the same way, correctly, then you can probably do it in your sleep and so it isn't really task loading if you have to do that while doing three other things. Ditto for valve drills. If you have been doing them on every dive for years, then you aren't task loaded but someone with less experience would be task loaded if given the exact same tasks. It's not realistic to build that muscle memory in 4 days. The best your instructor can do is see that you don't have it, and point out exactly what you need to go practice. But the instructor cannot build the muscle memory for you, nor can they train it into you in a week.

That's also my experience. It was my first time in a drysuit, so I was really overwhelmed trying to nail my buoyancy. There was not any real possibility for me to pass without a lot of practice dives.

 

[ChrisMBC]

Yeah, with T1 for example, the way I’ve had it explained to me (which also aligns with my experience) is that when you show up for the course, you should have the capacity to do all the Fundies skills (valve drill, SMB deployment, S drill) while holding a midwater stop on a line. If you can’t do that (which is not an easy thing to do!) then there’s not enough time to fix that in class.

I think @estresao does highlight a gap in the GUE training process currently, where it’s very hard to get the reps in between courses if you don’t have an active local GUE community (or the means to travel and participate in projects, I guess). I’m very lucky to have an extremely active GUE community, so finding time and teammates to practice ascents and skills before T1 was easy. Without that, I don’t know how I’d have progressed from Fundies to T1.

 

[SpeedyJ]

While the classes can often feel like only an evaluation in the moment, when I look back, there is always a surprising amount I learned regardless of outcome.

I'd also say that with technical dive training there needs to be a mindset shift on how classes fit into your total development. Instructors are often very happy to take on coaching engagements on a per-day basis focusing on your deficiencies. This can be far more beneficial than just signing up for the next class.