haze diver
Registered
My regular dive buddy and I recently completed an advaned open water class taught by Bob Bailey, better know here as NWGrateful Diver. I wanted to take a moment to relate my experience with the course and instructor.
In short, I found the class to be a lot of fun and an outstanding value. Bob is a great instructor who loves to dive and teach safe diving and it shows in the class and in the water.
Bob takes a skills based approach as opposed to the more common experience based approach to advanced open water. You need to demonstrate the skills taught in the class, not just show up for all the required dives. If you need to work on skills, Bob schedules more dives as neccesary until youve got them down. Buddy skills were emphasized and taken to a whole new level in the dive exercises. Bob also teaches gas management, which is not something usually found in advanced open water classes.
To start with, there were around eight hours of classroom instruction broken into three interactive sessions. Bob encouraged both questions and sharing of dive experiences along the way, making the classes interactive and a relevant. The custom reading material for the class is very good. We learned better buddy skills, navigation, dive planning and execution, hand signals, light signals, and much more, For gas management, we learned how to calculate SAC rates and RMV, which we then used to plan for our deep dive. This included calculating rock bottom time taking our buddys numbers into account. Before we splashed for our training dives, we had completed all of the classroom stuff and were ready to apply what we had learned.
The diving portion of the class was great. Seeing Bob in his constant horizontal hover inspired confidence and reinforced what we had been taught about improved bouyancy and trim control. The midwater navigation dive is difficult the first time, especially if your buddy skills are not perfect. One buddy has a compass and a set of headings, while the other buddy uses his depth gauge and timer. The idea is to navigate the course in midwater with no visual references while maintaining bouyancy, heading and time per leg. We tried this dive at the beginning of the class and didnt do nearly as well as we would have liked. My buddy and I learned that we needed to improve our communications, stay closer and to deal better with bouyancy when task loaded. The next dive was a bottom navigation course involving finding flags, which kind of reminded me of a geo-caching exercise where each flag gave the course to the next. Bob then had us do a dive to measure resting and working SAC and RMV. For the deep dive in the class, we planned using our SAC and RMV as well as our buddies to figure out expected gas consumption and rock bottom time. The deep dive was very nice as our newly improved bouyancy and buddy skills payed off in a controlled and relaxing dive. We were then able to compare our planned gas consumption with our actual gas consumption. After the deep dive, we executed a couple of dives for search and recovery using different search techniques, including shooting a lift bag to bring something up from the bottom once we had found it. Then on a weekday, we went on to the night dive. The visibility for the night dive wasnt great, but again our improved buddy skills paid off and the dive went well. After each of these dives, we would stop and discuss what went well, what we could improve upon. Bob would always ask us how we felt about the skills and each dive and if we wanted to work on anything more. After we had completed these dives, Bob wanted to see us do the midwater navigation dive again and my buddy and I wanted another crack at it. So last weekend we splashed at Alki cove 3 and gave it another go. This time things went much better, we were able to maintain our bouyancy within a couple of feet over the whole exercise, our buddy communication skills were dramatically better than the last time we had tried, it was a great affirmation of what we had learned over the course of this class.
My buddy and I agree that we are much improved individual divers as well as better dive buddies as a result of Bobs AOW course.
Thanks Bob!
In short, I found the class to be a lot of fun and an outstanding value. Bob is a great instructor who loves to dive and teach safe diving and it shows in the class and in the water.
Bob takes a skills based approach as opposed to the more common experience based approach to advanced open water. You need to demonstrate the skills taught in the class, not just show up for all the required dives. If you need to work on skills, Bob schedules more dives as neccesary until youve got them down. Buddy skills were emphasized and taken to a whole new level in the dive exercises. Bob also teaches gas management, which is not something usually found in advanced open water classes.
To start with, there were around eight hours of classroom instruction broken into three interactive sessions. Bob encouraged both questions and sharing of dive experiences along the way, making the classes interactive and a relevant. The custom reading material for the class is very good. We learned better buddy skills, navigation, dive planning and execution, hand signals, light signals, and much more, For gas management, we learned how to calculate SAC rates and RMV, which we then used to plan for our deep dive. This included calculating rock bottom time taking our buddys numbers into account. Before we splashed for our training dives, we had completed all of the classroom stuff and were ready to apply what we had learned.
The diving portion of the class was great. Seeing Bob in his constant horizontal hover inspired confidence and reinforced what we had been taught about improved bouyancy and trim control. The midwater navigation dive is difficult the first time, especially if your buddy skills are not perfect. One buddy has a compass and a set of headings, while the other buddy uses his depth gauge and timer. The idea is to navigate the course in midwater with no visual references while maintaining bouyancy, heading and time per leg. We tried this dive at the beginning of the class and didnt do nearly as well as we would have liked. My buddy and I learned that we needed to improve our communications, stay closer and to deal better with bouyancy when task loaded. The next dive was a bottom navigation course involving finding flags, which kind of reminded me of a geo-caching exercise where each flag gave the course to the next. Bob then had us do a dive to measure resting and working SAC and RMV. For the deep dive in the class, we planned using our SAC and RMV as well as our buddies to figure out expected gas consumption and rock bottom time. The deep dive was very nice as our newly improved bouyancy and buddy skills payed off in a controlled and relaxing dive. We were then able to compare our planned gas consumption with our actual gas consumption. After the deep dive, we executed a couple of dives for search and recovery using different search techniques, including shooting a lift bag to bring something up from the bottom once we had found it. Then on a weekday, we went on to the night dive. The visibility for the night dive wasnt great, but again our improved buddy skills paid off and the dive went well. After each of these dives, we would stop and discuss what went well, what we could improve upon. Bob would always ask us how we felt about the skills and each dive and if we wanted to work on anything more. After we had completed these dives, Bob wanted to see us do the midwater navigation dive again and my buddy and I wanted another crack at it. So last weekend we splashed at Alki cove 3 and gave it another go. This time things went much better, we were able to maintain our bouyancy within a couple of feet over the whole exercise, our buddy communication skills were dramatically better than the last time we had tried, it was a great affirmation of what we had learned over the course of this class.
My buddy and I agree that we are much improved individual divers as well as better dive buddies as a result of Bobs AOW course.
Thanks Bob!
