DIR- GUE Cave 1 course report

[helodriver87]

I have heard people say Fundies is the hardest course.

Fundies and CCR1. Which is just fundies on a loop. Those classes are straight boot camps and make the others seem easy by comparison.

Students won't actually learn and retain the information when they are very stressed and tired.

This is true, but these long days also function as a sort of stress and exhaustion inoculation. It's similar to why military training involves little sleep, lots of stressors, and continual criticism and remedial training. It's one thing to be able to do a valve shutdown in the cavern at Blue Grotto after a good night's sleep. It's another to be able to do it at the end of a long dive, when other issues have already maxed out your brain bandwidth, and you're struggling to stay on your A game. That's when mistakes happen, so when you put people in those extra stressful situations, you reinforce the training and make it more ingrained. Stress, exhaustion, and excessive task loading enhance learning up to a certain point. Which is why it's important to make sure you aren't doing too much and to back off a bit when necessary.

 

[crofrog]

I allot some time for packing gear in the car and, of course, travel time to the dive site.

I know I'm bumping an older thread, but this is a good thing to think about. Your ability to get into and out of the water efficiently makes a big difference in how "stressed" and time-crunched the class is.

I have a truck with a tonneau cover and when we get down there we put everything together and make sure it's all good and then it just stays built the rest of the time. Only the light canisters, dry suits and underlayers come in at night everything else stays in the truck. We try and find AirBNBs in quiet rural areas so we don't need to haul **** in and out a bunch. To get fills we just pop the right post off and fill in the back of the truck. This easily saves an hour plus each day.

Then we have a system for when we get to the dive site, rigs come up and go on the bench, get secured by the necklace so they can't fall over, dry suits on and we're ready to be in the water. We're to the point now where from parking the truck to getting in the water is about 15 minutes and that's not rushed.