diver gadget:
Thanks again for the info there guys. I looked at the GUE site on the Cave 1 stuff. It looks like a great course but I might have problems convincing the wife who will be coming with me to take the course that we are going to spend the whole week in a course. I have read that the cavern course is more like the discover scuba course for caves, but If we go down and both really like the cavern course we can com back and take the cave 1 course with GUE.
The cavern class is the course that builds the foundations for diving in overhead environments. If you have the idea that THIS IS NOTHING MORE THEN A DISCOVER SCUBA OR GLOIFIED AOW CLASS THEN YOU HAVE THE WRONG IDEA. Any instructor that gave you that impression has not provided you a good service.
It is in the cavern class that many divers learn to improve their diving. Some have no intent to carry on to full cave and some do. Many of the instructors teach for more than one agency. When selecting a Cave Diving Instructor I would suggest that you look at the instructor and not the agency. The agencies are NACD, NSS_CDS, IANTD, TDI, GUE. When it gets down to it the caves do not care what agency you learned from and they don't care what instructor you had. The skills learned in cave diving are not so you can enter the cave, any unprepared person can do that. The skills are there to give you a better chance to exit the cave alive.
Dive Gadget my writing this is not that you appear to be all GUE it is to advise you that you need to be wise in selecting your cave instructor. GUE has fine instructors and I have enjoyed talking with a few of them. Consider this:
Scuba divers must understand and acknowledge that no amount of preparation and training can fully eliminate the risks inherent to scuba diving. Select your instruction wisely
This is particularly important for any diver seeking a form of more advanced levels of diving such as cave diving.
There are instructors out there who believe that the cavern class should be one of the more demanding of the levels of cave training. There are those that treat it as though it were just a gloified AOW class. Your foundational skill set will develop best if you are really held to a high standard at the cavern level. If your cavern class is limited in what skills are taught it may be incomplete training. It has been proven that it doesn't take much for a cavern diver to make a wrong turn and discover they are now in the cave after a series of compounding situations. With this I say again with a slight adjustment:
Scuba divers wanting to become cave divers must understand and acknowledge that no amount of preparation and training can fully eliminate the all the risks inherent to scuba diving caves. Select your instruction wisely
Diver Gadget Good Luck in your desire to become a cave diver
It's Peacock 1 to Waterhole and back.
