Bob is not a GUE hater. As he has said, he sent me to take Fundies, and the last Fundies class that ran here in Seattle had a student in it who Bob has been mentoring for a long time.
Bob's objecting to knee-jerk recommendations. Everybody knows that, if you ask ScubaBoard what BC to buy, you'll have a dozen people telling you to get a backplate and wing before anybody even MENTIONS anything more mainstream. Everybody knows that, if you ask what class to take to improve your diving, half the answers you get will be, "Take Fundies!". It's true; I'm guilty of it myself.
When someone has a specific goal, the best way for them to get to that goal is to take a path that leads there. Sometimes we have people come on this board and ask about finding a good cave instructor . . . in sidemount. GUE is not that path. Sometimes people know they want to go CCR from the get-go; GUE is not that path.
The OP in this thread (who is almost certainly long gone -- he certainly hasn't posted here in forever) gave us very little detail about what he wanted to do, or how he wanted to do it. He did say he wanted to do it in Thailand. It seemed very likely, from his post, that he had no prior technical training. I think most people would agree that the most typical direction for going from a backmounted single tank recreational setup to a technical configurations and technical procedures, is to move to backmounted doubles. If you are going to do that, the configuration for a number of agencies differs only in detail. At that point, I will agree with the chorus, that GUE training is highly likely to be of high quality. Despite that, it really is important to work with an instructor you like and who likes working with you. I have one experience with GUE training where I made a bad choice of instructor, and although the person is beloved of many of his students, he did not work for me at all. There was a very extensively discussed Fundies class in Florida a couple of years ago, where the instructors, students, and venue choice led to pretty much a disaster of a class. It can happen; it can happen with any agency's class, if the stars are properly misaligned.
I do think that the recommendation of Gideon as an instructor was a good one. He is universally liked and well regarded. The GUE curriculum, and the way it's divided up, is reasonable, introducing the use of helium early on, and keeping the END low. However, there were significant problems with sending the OP that direction, and nobody seems to have paid much attention to that but me -- and I'm one of the GUE groupies who usually jumps on the bandwagon.
Bob gets irritated listening to the Greek chorus. I'm part of it, and sometimes even I think it's over the top.
