Best practices of GUE versus other dive programs ?

[EireDiver606]

I will probably have 100 hours of practice in doubles and drysuit by the time I get that tech pass.

Good things come to those who wait. You’ll get it.

 

[Thalassamania]

Wow! Geez! I'm getting old. I cannot believe that I forgot this had already successfully been done!

Marcus Werneck, the director of PDIC Brasil, and my brother from another mother, was a GUE tech and cave IT at the time. He spent a fortune creating OW, AOW, specialty, wreck diving and trimix manuals for PDIC Brasil. They were beautiful, full-color, and featured play be play photos and precision illustrations of teamwork. Rodrigo Thome was the key to these amazing publications which also had deep stop tables and a myriad of bells and whistles. They didn't skimp. They challenged most PADI manuals (the produced that many manuals and courses) in quality design and tackled similar subject matter but with a DIR twist. Unfortunately, they were written in Portugese so I only got the $2.00 tour when I had Team Brasil interpret sections that interested me. Marcus wanted PDIC to make him the international training director and export all of this to PDIC globally. PDIC HQ didn't share Marcus' vision. A heated exchange in a hotel room at DEMA (I was present and in support of Marcus) found PDIC throwing Marcus out of the organization. They basically committed agency suicide after that and sold the agency to Tom Leaird of SEI. Today, PDIC exists, but it has been relegated to an SEI twin. Marcus was the point of the spear and he would have beaten both GUE and UTD to the punch on a well-developed recreational path. It's a shame. PDIC could have been an industry leader in the very subject matter about which the OP sought opinions. Marcus changed careers and became highly successful in the financial/wealth management world. The president of PDIC, Frank Murphy, found Marcus working in a dive shop in Brasil as a teen and took him under his wing. Unfortunately, Frank had passed away and Doris and Mel didn't understand the extraordinary effort he put into taking an agency from a 1950's mentality and propelling it into the current century ahead of all the rest concerning recreational diver training. It was DIR for the masses where the standards allowed divers to begin to develop themselves, skill by skill, level by level, taking them on a far less stressful training journey toward tech perfection.

While it was a success from a development standpoint, it failed to launch because PDIC killed it. He had already proved the concept in Brasil. His recreational divers were awesome. I miss Marcus and the PDIC that we knew together and could have known.


Translation of text accompanying the video: Marcus Werneck is a recognized professional instructor in the recreational and technical diving sectors. He was the first to prepare and publish a wide range of didactic material in Portuguese for the training of recreational divers. He is responsible for the training of many instructors currently in business.

Please tell Marcus that you're no a real diving authority unless you've stood on principle and been, as a result, thrown out of the organization.

 

[rjack321]

You mean GUE Fundies was Andrew's creation? How was GUE training structured before Andrew came on board?

You signed up for Cave1 or Tech1 and the failure rate was sky high....

 

[Alexandros]

Although this practice is not limited to GUE, i think it would be great if all OW and AOW training programs had video recording of the trainees.

It's pretty simple nowadays (with all these action cameras available) and I'd say it greatly enhances the training procedure.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Although this practice is not limited to GUE, i think it would be great if all OW and AOW training programs had video recording of the trainees.

It's pretty simple nowadays (with all these action cameras available) and I'd say it greatly enhances the training procedure.

RAID allows for it. I think SNSI allows for mask mounted cameras. I believe pretty much everyone else stays away from it due to some training deaths where an instructor was preoccupied with a camera. I have no information on those incidents. I would guess that the instructor was looking through a viewfinder and thus was unable to see anything else.

I see zero issue with mask mounted cameras, but other agencies will disagree. The only arguments I’ve heard were FUD: “instructors will be distracted by taking videos of sea life to make a good video for their students and not pay enough attention to their students.” I think that’s BS.

I don’t see an issue with hand mounted cameras either. You just point it at a student and you still have all eyes on your students and can react to anything just as quickly as your hands are empty.

 

[Alexandros]

yeah, it's better there is a dedicated diver shooting the videos, not the instructor. That's how it went with my Fundamentals class anyway.

 

[Marie13]

Maybe video isn’t really needed for OW, but for more specialized training, such as SM, it would be damned handy. I made sure to take my camera first time out diving after SM class.

 

[Ayisha]

yeah, it's better there is a dedicated diver shooting the videos, not the instructor. That's how it went with my Fundamentals class anyway.

That's what I've seen as well.

 

[Ayisha]

You're not kidding! I have GUE Tech 1 and GUE Tech 2 C-cards, but I still don't have a Fundies card. True story!

Back in 2014, Bob Sherwood told a group of us that someone could theoretically go straight to Tech 1 with an evaluation, but they had better be exceptional. He said many people tried, but he only exempted (I believe he said) one person in all these years. I had already met you the year before, but he never mentioned you by name. Now I know that person was you.