Jenniferous:
I did PADI OW and Advanced courses in Malaysia this summer, joined the SubAqua club at university when I got back (to England) and they want me to take extra classes to 'convert' to BSAC sports diver before they'll let me dive with them. Hmph.
Now just to check, do most dive centres around the world recognise BSAC sports diver as being equvalent to PADI rescue diver? Cause that's what they're telling me but I'm not entirely convinced, since the PADI Resuce is a whole 3 day course and this BSAC thing can aparantly be accomplished after a few lectures and one day's diving.
Any opinions?
Thanks.
A few things. You will be permitted to dive with a BSAC club at your curruent PADI level with its limits. However, *IF* you want to continue your training under the BSAC syllabus you'll have to do a crossover to sport diver and go from there. This is due to the differences in the syllabus. BSAC sport has different tables to padi, some chartwork, more things on tides, more air planning and a main difference is padi dont teach mandatory decompression dives so youd have to cover all those theory lessons. Then you'd need the practical dives to cover the simulated decompression dive, DSMB deployment and a few others.
Padi rescue can be done in a few days and a full sport course takes roughly that time. The reason yours would be shorter is youre only covering the bits padi dont do as opposed to the full thing. The full course is 6 theory lessons, 1 multiple choice exam, 5 open water dives and 1 marshalling dry practical.
See the syllabus here:
http://www.bsac.org/technical/dtp/lssports.htm
To qualify you also need to have a minimum of 5 dives or 120 minutes since the previous qualification and 5 of 9 "dive conditions/types". These are Shelving Shore, Steep shore, dive using a shot line, low visibility dive, drift dive, small boat dive, large boat dive, wall dive, dive in protective clothing.
After qualification you can do dive progressions to get signed off for the 35m max depth.
Hopefully you can see from above why the course isnt shorter than padi rescue.
In short, you can dive as a PADI diver in a bsac club without crossing over. Its only if you want to continue training with BSAC you need to crossover as sport diver which involves covering the bits PADI hasnt taught (as mentioned above).
The only caveat with this is the clubs Diving Officer is the person with sole responsibility for safety and hes the one in court if it all goes wrong. Basically what he says goes - If he isnt happy with a divers abilities for a particular dive regardless of their qualfication he can stop them diving on a club dive. Its a good idea and fairly prudent for a DO to ask a new member (whether cross over or not) to do 1 or 2 dives with someone senior to ensure hes happy with their skills as its his head on the block.
Long post sorry but hope it answers the question. If you want any more detail feel free to reply here or PM - i can go into excruitiating detail on this as ive currently got the instructor manual in front of me brushing up on what im teaching this week.
