Cave certs explained....

[karstdvr]

LOL......

Kelly, you'll have to see my "cave police" UV-26 when you're down next. Blue nose and tail cone, 3 sets of blue and red strobes.....

Safe diving,

Rich

Is it equipped with a taser?

 

[karstdvr]

There are too many people teaching for too many agencies with too many different standards. The numbers of cave instructors, cave cert. agencies and different leveled cave certs all need to be reduced.

Ben
Indirectly you can blame the nonprofit agencies,because if they hadn't been so successful in making cave diving safer,then you wouldn't have had the commerialization of cave diving. But not to fret,everything is self correcting. As we see more wear and tear on the caves we'll probably see more carrying capacities enacted. Also,with dimishing water quality,the prophecy made about 15 years will come true-there will always be caves,just not divable.

 

[InkDiver]

The most important skill as a cave diver is to think on your feet, I just talked to InkDiver yesterday on his way back from his intro class (he beat me to taking the class) and he said this was stressed over and over and over, more than anything else. He mentioned his instructor asked what would YOU do in _______ situation.

To be clear. I was not coming back from my Intro Class, I was finishing the first of three very long days. What was stressed was that you have to understand the standards, and know the skills like they are second nature so that you CAN think on your feet (hopefully more like hovering with good trim than on your feet.) That doesn't mean that you just throw the standards away and do whatever you want. It means you learn them so that they can help guide you when all hell breaks loose. They were developed based on incredible amounts of accident analysis.

As far as the comment about people not knowing or paying attention to how many cu.ft. that have available and sticking to that, I totally disagree. On every one of our dives, we did gas matching and that involved knowing our turn pressures as well as our useable and reserve gas.

One other point. With some LP tanks with a cave fill, you would have even more than a 130. If you doubled that and then dive to 1/3, depending on your depth, you could very possibly end up with some deco obligation. At least the NACD Intro standard is No Deco (that is the only one I am familiar with and the only one I can speak to.) Personally, I'm not ready to prepare for Deco on top of the Cave dive. 1/6 makes perfect sense to me. I need more training and more understanding of deco procedures before I am ready for 1/3's.

One of the other things we went over a lot in class was to not only watch our gas, but also our deco potential. We calculated our times available to exit the cave without deco obligations. Even on 1/6's you can come close if you are not AWARE of your environment (equipment, gas, time, flow, depth, etc etc etc.)

Anyhow, I am NOT an expert, just a newly certified Intro Cave diver, who is excited to be able to dive the beauty and splendor of the caves. I want to keep diving them, so I'm going to follow the standards AND think on my "feet".

 

[OneBrightGator]

Thanks for that Kelly, really warms the heart

 

[dl348]

I think it stems from not wanting cavern and intro cave divers making deep penetrations into the cave because they had all that gas. I believe that is what was discussed when this came up during training.

Personally, I didn't spend much time at intro, and there is no apprentice level in PSAI, so I went from cavern to full cave, and now I don't have to worry about it. But I started out using twin 108s in cavern and then I used twin 130s for intro to full cave. I did my twin set training as part of my cavern dives. There was some pool work on top of the actual dives, and it took a little longer because there were more dives, but it was worth it to have the doubles training with my cave training.

If a diver has the training, and is capable, I don't have a problem with someone diving in doubles. But I don't make the rules.

PSAI DOES have an Apprentice level as per their website.