BP/W & Long Hose In a PADI IE Exam

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No CD yet. Still checking out options and Doing prep/research work for IDC. What I know from those that have taken the IE is candidates are on standard jacket BC setup. But then that's a limited view. Don't know if the norm has been broken and how it worked out (better or worse) that's why I'm asking.
Two of my dive buddies are taking their IDC right now, with the IE this weekend (starting tomorrow). Even though both dive bp/w setups, they are taking jacket BCs for the IE. The objective of the IE is to pass the IE. If that's not your primary objective for taking the IE, that's another discussion
 
Yup...getting a "GO at this station" is what matters.
What your wearing while doing it is just fluff.
 
Anyone who knows me knows that I do not ever demonstrate while kneeling, and I do not have students do any skills on the knees. I feel it is a mistake to do so. .

How do you teach basic skills like mask removal & replacement and BC removal & replacement to your brand new OW students. Are they learning these fundamental skills in mid water while neutrally buoyant?
 
How do you teach basic skills like mask removal & replacement and BC removal & replacement to your brand new OW students. Are they learning these fundamental skills in mid water while neutrally buoyant?

The most important thing about the basic skills is that the students perform them in a diving posture, which means in a horizontal position. The students lie on their stomachs for the first basic skill instructions, with just enough air in the BCDs that they lightly rise and fall as they inhale and exhale and their legs lightly touching the bottom. You do not want them in a 45° angle, which would defeat the purpose. Students are much more comfortable in this position than they are on the knees, and the skills are much easier for them to learn. Some people mistakenly get the idea that doing this takes more time, but it actually takes less time. It is also more accurate as a diving skill. Take mask clearing as an example. Students are told to tip their heads back when they do this. Why? The reason is that the bottom of the mask has to be the lowest point to allow the water to come out. This instruction, however, assumes that the student is horizontal and thus looking down to begin with. If the student is kneeling, the bottom of the mask is already at its lowest point, so tipping the head back is counterproductive, and students are more likely to succeed if they ignore this instruction and do it incorrectly. Accordingly, many instructors tell their kneeling students to look down before tipping their heads up. One way or another, students taught to clear masks on their knees are taught to do it incorrectly, and you will see them even hundreds of dives later going to a vertical body position in the water to clear their masks.

Equipment removal is a much later skill in the sequence, and by then the students have been doing all their skills, including mask removal and replacement, in mid water for quite some time. I demonstrate both the weight belt removal and replacement and the scuba unit and replacement in mid water, but I tell them they are free to maintain contact with the bottom or even be negatively buoyant if they are more comfortable. They all usually maintain neutral buoyancy, but usually only about half do the skills in mid water.

I have to teach my students in the shop's jacket BCDs, which limits my ability to trim them out. NetDoc uses different gear and is able to get students in better trim from the start. He has his students in mid water, horizontal from the very beginning. They are allowed to put a finger on the floor to maintain position. I have trouble going that far, so I have the legs lightly touching in CW #1. After that, skills are done in mid water.
 
So DEMED,
Are you suggesting that outside of a swimming pool with concrete bottom, that it is acceptable for any kind of class to be taught standing or kneeling on a "live bottom" ?
  1. I am assuming you would not endorse any "teaching" while kneeling on a "coral" bottom...correct?
  2. Is it ever permissible to kneel while teaching on a "muck" bottom, where a great deal of macro life is found, and where contact with the bottom causes massive silting? You are aware many of us do not believe there is any excuse for this....
  3. Are you suggesting it is acceptable to look for open sand patches to kneel on, and that kneeling is necessary for instruction....?
  4. Are you suggesting that it is not environmentally bad for hundreds of instructors to teach thousands of students that it is OK to kneel or stand on sandy bottoms?
  5. Are you suggesting that there is a benefit in having an instructor believe that it is appropriate to perform skills while kneeling, outside of first time attempts in a swimming pool?


On another note.....TSandM is one of the most sincere and nicest posters on SB, and you are being insulting to her personally in your last post to her...I think you may have been offended by Lynn's views on kneeling, but hers was NOT a personal attack on you...


danvolker,


i have a personal dislike for fundamentalists of any religion and for anything that lets beliefs interfere with rational thought.

frankly i have no idea what you are talking about for an abundant 4/5 of you post and for #5 i will just answer you that neither me or my instructors teach open water while kneeling. in general, Open Water Diver skills are introduced and taught in confined water or in confined water like conditions, not on coral reefs.

I do not understand what is the macro life on "muck" bottoms you are referring to - forms of life best suited for macro photography?

on another note, if TSandM embarrasses herself by showing to have absolutely no clue about what's talking about like in the case of post #155 in this thread, i feel compelled to call her on it regardless of what you think - if she feel insulted she might tell me in person since we meet often at the beach and more recently at the pool.

peace & love

---------- Post added February 21st, 2015 at 09:10 AM ----------

...
However, in defense of demed's statement, he did appear to be talking about early pool instruction, not open water dives in sensitive environment.
...


Boulderjohn,

i appreciate the support and for full disclosure I want to clarify that I was NOT referring to early OW instruction - my point was that the program being conducted in relation to post #155 was in-pool training for IDC Staff and AIs about skill demonstration techniques rather than teaching "skills". Position in the water, posture, eye contact, contact with assistants, use of hands, etc.

On a more general note,

sometimes the talibans of progressive techniques (and for sake of clarity i do NOT consider boulderjohn to be one of them) embarrass themselves while point the finger at "bad, bad, bad" instructors kneeling here or kneeling there - when they can't even notice that the CD in post #155 wasn't wearing scuba equipment at all for the whole evening because was not teaching or demonstrating skills. This to me says a lot about the reliability of certain comments about teaching techniques and hopefully i won't have to say more about it.

As we are sharing details about teaching here is my contribution: the other night, I witnessed a "progressive & buoyant" version of "Emergency weight drop" which has become "Radioactive weight drop" - the new skills is not briefed ahead of time and performed while students are perfectly buoyant in 5 feet of water at the surface with fully inflated BCDs; the instructor with no notice swims screaming at the puzzled students with a high pitched voice yelling "drop weights! drop weights!" like the lead is starting to decay in the weight pockets, and after some moments of hesitation, most of the terrorized students finally understand what the instructor wants and drop weights, the instructor then switches off the yelling and with a big smile proceeds to high five the even more confused students. Unfortunately i was not close enough to hear the debrief and explanation of when this particular skill is applicable in actual diving circumstances.

I close with the Question of the day: teaching frog kicks while laying flat on a table or the side of the pool: while is this more acceptable than teaching the same skill in water at the bottom of a pool?

Peace & Love
 
This thread has certainly gone downhill from its original post.

I was at the pool and watched the session mentioned by TSandM and her statement was absolutely incorrect. The Course Director had NOT "assumed the position" -- he was, as Demed describes, sans gear except for his slates. OTOH, most of the STUDENTS had "assumed the position" described by TSandM for no reason that I could tell other than that was what was expected of them. Could they have been hovering nicely and doing their thing? I don't know if they could have -- but they weren't. When underwater and demonstrating the various skills, they were on at least one knee.

I'll confess to being the maniac instructor who with no notice started screaming at the poor, floating students, yelling for them to dump their weight belts.

After reading one too many articles about people coming to the surface around here, floundering and then sinking back and drowning without dropping their weights, I tried a new approach to the weight drop -- try to stress them a bit (hence the yelling) and have them drop their weights. I have no idea if this will help them in the long run (to my knowledge no one of my students who has been subjected to this terror has been in such an emergent situation) but I can't help but think it couldn't hurt.

It does seem that NOT stressing students during emergency procedures might not be the best way -- so I'm trying this.

To modify Dive Training Magazines motto -- A Good Instructor Is Always Learning (and Evolving)
 
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How do you teach basic skills like mask removal & replacement and BC removal & replacement to your brand new OW students. Are they learning these fundamental skills in mid water while neutrally buoyant?


Both of these actions (mask R&R, and scuba unit R&R) are only 'fundamental skills' if seen in the context of when they might need to be done while actually diving. Once they are seen in that light, they are both basic self rescue techniques so of course they need to be able to be done neutral mid-water, because that's what and where divers are when actually diving.

When actually diving, needing to be negatively bouyant, or in contact with the bottom to do anything is being unable to perform basic self rescue. Also known as being unfit to be considered a certified diver, in my book. Both skills should be able to matter of factly performed mid water, neutrally buoyant, in motion. Like how divers are actually diving.

If instructors thought about what certification training is supposed to result in, rather than in how skills are to be taught/evaluated/demo'd in a given course, then most rationales for anything but mid-water neutrally buoyant 'skill' performance /demonstration/evaluation falls completely apart.

The first time other instructors see my class of eight open water divers all swimming around on top of their gear under water matter of factly, they tend to have two responses (Where's your control?, and How do you expect open water trainees to be able to do that?). Both responses come from those instructors projecting their own lack of confidence in their basic skills onto students.

In fact, in a 'workshop' I sat in on for a bunch of PADI shop instructors run by the PADI shop CD on how to work the new PADI OW course stuff into an OW course, I watched the CD just completely unable to perform any skill neutrally buoyant. He basically lost completely control of his scuba unit when he tried to do a swimming scuba unit R&R. And that is right in line with the 'skill' level of his OW students, and unfortunately enough even of his IE candidates. One of his IE candidates confided to the fellow candidates (one of whom I was translating for) that she hoped she was not given hovering as her skill in the IE since she knew she could not demo hovering.

Also known as why I only teach AOW to people who took OW from me, and why DM candidates have to complete my OW course as a students before we do anything else.

A few fellow Japanese instructors who have interned in my OW courses and seen what kind of divers come out of neutrally buoyanct mid-water courses, have taken it further, and even found that intro divers can do most skills hovering mid-water. One even noted that she jokingly did a scuba unit R&R swimming along and was amazed that the three intro divers just matter of factly joined in the fun.

It could be called high expectations. But it is really just basic competence expectation in the terms of the OW course as far as I am concerned. When we instrcutors don't program failure in by using/allowing negative buoyancy and bottom contact, then we don't force some instrcutor down the line to have to fix the errors we programmed into out divers.

---------- Post added March 2nd, 2015 at 11:09 AM ----------

After reading one too many articles about people coming to the surface around here, floundering and then sinking back and drowning without dropping their weights, I tried a new approach to the weight drop -- try to stress them a bit (hence the yelling) and have them drop their weights. I have no idea if this will help them in the long run (to my knowledge no one of my students who has been subjected to this terror has been in such an emergent situation) but I can't help but think it couldn't hurt.

It does seem that NOT stressing students during emergency procedures might not be the best way -- so I'm trying this.

To modify Dive Training Magazines motto -- A Good Instructor Is Always Learning (and Evolving)

But aren't they getting themselves into trouble by being sloppy with airway control, rather than failing to drop weights? If instructors made divers keep their airholes filled/covered anytime they are in the water then the flailing at the surface would not happen. That flailing and near drowning comes from the ingrained pattern of uncovering the airway once the head hits the surface, which comes from instructors failing to enforce proper in water behavior (which is: In water, mask always on, mouth always plugged with something till standing on the boat deck or dry land.)

I believe that TSandM and I have had some back and forth about this very issue. (Not to assume you share all beliefs with her, but I think this one is fair to assume.) To quote one such exchange:
TSandM:
requiring instructors in Puget Sound to insist that their students "protect their airways" is overkill.

It seems like you trying to prevent the end result of a chain of failures by trying to get students to react when they are already in a panicked state (drop weight belt when choking), instead of simply teaching simple methods (always protect your airway in the water) to not get into that situations to begin with.

I have made this point on numerous occasions, and from the various reactions each time, I think there are far, far too few people who have any experience with actual mortally panicked divers in the water. Choking divers panic because we as human beings are hard wired to react when in mortal danger. Panicked choking divers are so far from rational thought that it is silly to think that any training will be of any use to them.

Some Navy divers are trained to not panic when going unconscious underwater for operational security reasons, by having them repeated go unconscious underwater. No one else should be expected to not panic when choking, or react appropriately once panicked. Rather they should be trained to prevent choking and panicking. (Or be using enough excess bouyancy by a rescuer to get their head well clear of the water so that they cannot aspirate any more water, even after losing lung buoyancy from coughing.)
 
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Beano -- the "drop your weight belt emergently" is to keep the person on the surface -- period. No amount of "airway control" (snorkel or regulator) will keep you alive IF your tank is empty (or regulator malfunctioning) and you sink below the surface. The people who have died, to whom I referred, were on the surface but failed to inflate their BCDs and failed to drop their weights and slipped beneath the surface and drowned. Putting a snorkel into their mouths would have done nothing to save them.

It is not about keeping a safe airway but staying on the surface so that one can USE the open airway.

BTW, I tend to think your (and quite frankly, PADI's formal) insistence on keeping a snorkel in one's mouth while on the surface is a reflection of where one does one's training and diving. For example, most local instructors I know encourage divers to swim out on their backs with their tanks in the water and head back and in the water. This is the most comfortable position for swims with the heavy gear we use. I have yet to figure out how swimming on one's back, with one's head in the water makes using a snorkel useful or even possible.
 
BTW, I tend to think your (and quite frankly, PADI's formal) insistence on keeping a snorkel in one's mouth while on the surface is a reflection of where one does one's training and diving. For example, most local instructors I know encourage divers to swim out on their backs with their tanks in the water and head back and in the water. This is the most comfortable position for swims with the heavy gear we use. I have yet to figure out how swimming on one's back, with one's head in the water makes using a snorkel useful or even possible.

I don't think a snorkel should ever be anywhere near a scuba diver (on scuba) so I am certainly not talking about that. Move away from the anti-snorkel stance (since I certainly share it), and we have a point of discussion.

Interestingly enough, a TSandM quote on this matter comes right into play here as well

Beano, I find a lot of the things you say very difficult to swallow. But the biggest thing I have trouble with is that you seem to organize your whole diving life around the idea that every day you work, you are going to deal with completely out of control, panicked divers who are incapable of any sort of self-rescue.

It seems like somewhere between
1. when she said that to me, thinking that people never panicked and drowned or at least not to the degree that training and gear choices should be reconsidered
and
2. you started trying a new method to try and solve the panicking and drowning divers,

Some critical degree of awareness reached the discussion. Maybe there are better training and equipment choices we can make!

You recognize that people drown needless simply because their airway is not protected (in this case by not being well clear of the water.)

But you do see that there is room for improvement in training or equipment, which is a good thing. (You just have the mechanism for why negatively buoyant drowning happens backwards, to put it bluntly. This is not opinion. This is experience with panicking, negatively buoyant divers. Unfortuately.)

Beano -- the "drop your weight belt emergently" is to keep the person on the surface -- period. No amount of "airway control" (snorkel or regulator) will keep you alive IF your tank is empty (or regulator malfunctioning) and you sink below the surface. The people who have died, to whom I referred, were on the surface but failed to inflate their BCDs and failed to drop their weights and slipped beneath the surface and drowned. It is not about keeping a safe airway but staying on the surface so that one can USE the open airway.

I think you have some badly mistaken ideas about what is happening to these people. They are uncovering their airways, then swallowing water, then panicking and failing to do obvious things. It's the panic that kills them, not being negatively buoyant. It's easy to solve negative buoyancy when not panicking and choking. Little kids let go of heavy things to get to the surface. Divers (even experienced, trained divers) put death grips onto all kinds of **** when they are panicking. (This is not even addressing the sudden loss of buoyancy that a choking diver experiences due to empty lungs, which is the main reason why no one should ever uncover their airway in the ocean. Choking makes people negatively buoyant in and of itself.)

The real world way people act under stress and panic one of the reasons why the silly ways people practice for OOA skills cause more problems than they could solve because people tend to death grip each other into serious problems in real world OOA situations.

It's simply impossible to "solve" panic for the person experiencing it. It might be possible for a rescuer to intervene. But it is always easier to prevent problems in the first place, than to try and solve them, if that solving (and not rescue) were even of possible, which it is not.

Remove the cause of the panic (swallowing water) by insisting that the airway is never uncovered, and you give the diver the easy to solve problem (negative buoyancy) instead of trying the impossible to get a panicked person to do something useful.

On top of all that, though, is the problem that It might not be possible for a rescuer to intervene effectively.

The intervener will likely be left with few tools if they dive (and the victim dives) with the silly barely buoyant BCDs that is the other part of problem of surface deaths. If the BCD does not have the lift to get someone's entire head clear of the water with the weight system in place then the simple failure of the weight release system leaves the rescuer with no tools to help the panicking diver.
 
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