TL;DR: Fundies is useful and recommended, Mahmoud Esmat is a great instructor, Scuba Seekers in Dahab is helpful and very tech/DIR friendly.
Background: I entered fundies with around 100 dives under my belt, the vast majority of those in a backplate and wing configuration. I had taken a course around 10 years ago that covered buoyancy and trim, propulsion, nitrox and twinset that was quasi-modeled on Fundies. Deployments, family, duty assignment location and other factors have limited my diving but I’ve tried to get at least a few dives in every year to keep the rust at bay. Two recent close calls drove me to seek higher quality training – I had an out of air scare due to a dive shop cranking down my isolator and I hadn’t done good pre-dive checks in my group because we had different gear configurations (I had backmount, buddy was sidemount). I should have caught it, but didn’t. My second was when I got narc’d during a deep air dive: my buddy wasn’t aware of my position and didn’t notice when I raised my depth to resolve the problem – I lost track of him in the coral canyons and we finished the dive separately. The two issues reinforced in my mind I needed to do better…
Rather than cover what the course consists of, I’ll cover my impressions of the way the course was conducted, cues that helped me I didn’t expect, my specific struggles and changes I made, my thoughts on the dive shop, and my thoughts on the instructor.
Impressions: I came in with a pretty strong foundation, I think, in the theory and process-oriented skills but struggled with buoyancy and breathing during task loading – in other words I knew how to do things but struggled to actually do them. I made huge strides towards fixing those shortcomings during this course. Fundies was a great class to prepare me for future tech training through GUE, highlighted weaknesses I need to continue to improve upon, and built a lot of confidence in my skills as a diver. It was a great investment in my diving. The lagoon in Dahab is a great place to conduct the training, and the course progression is logical and deliberate. The days are long to allow detailed review of the dives and deliberate dive planning. The dry drills were great rehearsals, and the homework was beneficial. Overall I was very pleased.
Cues that helped me: I’m a big fan of video training, and have used it in the past for other hobbies and professional training to improve safety and performance – I’m also a big fan of mirror work for training. The classroom didn’t have a wall of mirrors, but we did have nice sunlight that cast a great shadow – I found using the shadows on the ground a useful aid for me in correcting errors with my form for finning during dry-drills. I recommended to Mahmoud that a mirror in the classroom may be very useful for this, but for me the shadows were enough – they helped me see what my legs were actually doing, not what I thought they were doing. That helped me start to achieve the degree of ankle mobility I needed to execute an efficient frog kick and improve my backwards kick. They still need work, but they’re improving. It was a small thing for me, but if you’re working on your kicks, any real-time feedback is useful for figuring out how to move your body the way you want.
Specific struggles: I struggled with my breathing – I’d breathe in quickly, and out slowly, which naturally caused me to constantly be adjusting my BCD to compensate and never feeling truly stable or adjusted. Mahmoud gave me several drills, both dry and in the water, to work on this. They worked fantastic, and after several task-loading iterations I was significantly better at maintaining a smooth breathing cycle. I still have room to improve, but it’s no longer the major issue it was when I began. The drills also helped me avoid breathing in water through my nose during mask removal and the no-mask swim. Still not my favorite drill, but I no longer dread replacing my mask. Small change, huge impact!
Changes I made/ am making: I showed up with a 3mm shorty wetsuit – this is what I’d been diving in Horghada just a month prior – the temps in Dahab are around 3℃ cooler than Horghada, and while I survived the dives, I was experiencing pretty significant signs of the cold, including struggling with basic finning techniques by the end of the dive due to intense shivering. I switched to a rental 5mm suit for the next two days with a pair of highland pocket shorts and this was a better fit. I have a drysuit, but haven’t dove it recently and opted to set myself up for success by taking the class in a more familiar configuration. I’m planning a drysuit primer in the future before advancing to tech-1 to shore up my skills in that configuration. I also switched (on the first dive) from my OMS slipstream fins to a pair of Jet fins, initially in XL, then in XXL. The slipstreams were way too floaty and caused major trim issues – it was the first thing that Mahmoud changed in my setup – I think I’d previously been compensating for this with additional weight and swimming to maintain trim – this was a great adjustment and enabled me to maintain a solid trim position for all 6 dives. I made the normal minor gear changes and adjustments to my backplate and webbing as well as adjusted some hose routing. Mahmoud noticed that I was struggling to drain the remainder of the air from my wing (Halcyon Explorer), and on day 4 we switched wings – I used his Evolve and he used my Explorer – I didn’t notice a change in trim or balance (nor was it evident on video), but it did make it easier to dump air in a controlled fashion, especially for the final 3-meter stops and controlled ascents at the end of dives. I returned Mahmoud’s wing, but I’m getting ready to order an Evolve-40 (I already have an Evolve-60 for my steel tanks). I think the difficulty in dumping air may have been a proximate cause of being overweighted in the past as I felt floaty at the end of dives. Mahmoud noticing (and pointing out in video) how much air I had remaining in the Explorer at 3-meters really drove home the point for me. We tried some other techniques to dump better, but the gear adjustment was by far the smoothest for me - I don't like coming out of trim to dump air, and this change let me stay neutral during my ascent.
The Dive Shop: Scuba Seekers is awesome! The shop is well organized, efficient, well stocked, friendly, and very tech friendly. They have properly configured doubles in steel and aluminum, deco setups, stages, rebreathers… you name it. As far as I can tell they are the only GUE shop in Egypt, maybe in all of Africa. They had plenty of tourists doing recreational dives as well, but even their “fun dives” were being DM’d by divers who seemed to have a strong interest in diving safety, and were often (always?) equipped with a DIR single-tank setup. It was good to see that having a few GUE instructors wasn’t just filling some niche for the shop, but seemed to be indicative of how they approached safety. The shop's training director, Sameh Sokar, is a GUE instructor through Tech-1 and was well respected at the shop - his influence is obvious in the quality of staff employed there (and he's also a super friendly guy!). The shop also coordinated my transportation from Cairo to Dahab and back (there are specific restrictions on travel through the Sinai and military checkpoints that need to be pre-coordinated, additionally you can’t drive a 4wd vehicle from Cairo into the Sinai, so this was a big help since I couldn’t use my normal driver), and helped me coordinate a room at a local house that was less than a minute walk from the shop. I was there to dive, so a room in a shared house was fine by me, kept costs low, and was very convenient!
The instructor: Mahmoud Esmat was fantastic! I live in Egypt (Cairo), but don’t speak Arabic and had some concerns about language barriers – those concerns were entirely unwarranted! I also had some concerns about Mahmoud’s willingness to provide candid constructive feedback: in my experience there is a cultural reluctance to provide constructive feedback or criticism in Egypt, but again, that was an entirely unwarranted concern. Mahmoud was great at identifying faults and areas that needed improvement and pairing those with recommendations on how to correct the problem, root cause assessments, and candid feedback. In the water he was exactly what one would expect from a GUE instructor – every movement was presentation grade, every demonstration was clear and he highlighted details that made tasks easier (place this finger here, turn your hand upside down for a better angle, etc.). He was friendly, patient, knowledgeable, clearly passionate, and a great instructor – I’m very impressed with his skills in the water, and how he demonstrated and translated the skills to his students. I know that not all great divers can effectively translate skills to others as instructors: Mahmoud is not one of those divers. My class was, I imagine, more demanding than others: we had a mixed class – I was in doubles attempting a tech pass and my partner was in a single tank configuration going for a recreational pass – Mahmoud did a great job managing the demands and course goals for us both very effectively. He never lost site of the holistic approach to safety that drew me to GUE and that reinforced that I made a good decision baselining myself with Fundies for future training.
Overall I’m very happy with the course, the outcome, the shop, and the instructor. Fundies has a reputation as a demanding course for a reason, and I’m glad I took the class when and where I did.
If you're considering a vacation to Dahab for diving the blue hole and are looking at moving into GUE, consider booking a class with Mahmoud while you're there.
Background: I entered fundies with around 100 dives under my belt, the vast majority of those in a backplate and wing configuration. I had taken a course around 10 years ago that covered buoyancy and trim, propulsion, nitrox and twinset that was quasi-modeled on Fundies. Deployments, family, duty assignment location and other factors have limited my diving but I’ve tried to get at least a few dives in every year to keep the rust at bay. Two recent close calls drove me to seek higher quality training – I had an out of air scare due to a dive shop cranking down my isolator and I hadn’t done good pre-dive checks in my group because we had different gear configurations (I had backmount, buddy was sidemount). I should have caught it, but didn’t. My second was when I got narc’d during a deep air dive: my buddy wasn’t aware of my position and didn’t notice when I raised my depth to resolve the problem – I lost track of him in the coral canyons and we finished the dive separately. The two issues reinforced in my mind I needed to do better…
Rather than cover what the course consists of, I’ll cover my impressions of the way the course was conducted, cues that helped me I didn’t expect, my specific struggles and changes I made, my thoughts on the dive shop, and my thoughts on the instructor.
Impressions: I came in with a pretty strong foundation, I think, in the theory and process-oriented skills but struggled with buoyancy and breathing during task loading – in other words I knew how to do things but struggled to actually do them. I made huge strides towards fixing those shortcomings during this course. Fundies was a great class to prepare me for future tech training through GUE, highlighted weaknesses I need to continue to improve upon, and built a lot of confidence in my skills as a diver. It was a great investment in my diving. The lagoon in Dahab is a great place to conduct the training, and the course progression is logical and deliberate. The days are long to allow detailed review of the dives and deliberate dive planning. The dry drills were great rehearsals, and the homework was beneficial. Overall I was very pleased.
Cues that helped me: I’m a big fan of video training, and have used it in the past for other hobbies and professional training to improve safety and performance – I’m also a big fan of mirror work for training. The classroom didn’t have a wall of mirrors, but we did have nice sunlight that cast a great shadow – I found using the shadows on the ground a useful aid for me in correcting errors with my form for finning during dry-drills. I recommended to Mahmoud that a mirror in the classroom may be very useful for this, but for me the shadows were enough – they helped me see what my legs were actually doing, not what I thought they were doing. That helped me start to achieve the degree of ankle mobility I needed to execute an efficient frog kick and improve my backwards kick. They still need work, but they’re improving. It was a small thing for me, but if you’re working on your kicks, any real-time feedback is useful for figuring out how to move your body the way you want.
Specific struggles: I struggled with my breathing – I’d breathe in quickly, and out slowly, which naturally caused me to constantly be adjusting my BCD to compensate and never feeling truly stable or adjusted. Mahmoud gave me several drills, both dry and in the water, to work on this. They worked fantastic, and after several task-loading iterations I was significantly better at maintaining a smooth breathing cycle. I still have room to improve, but it’s no longer the major issue it was when I began. The drills also helped me avoid breathing in water through my nose during mask removal and the no-mask swim. Still not my favorite drill, but I no longer dread replacing my mask. Small change, huge impact!
Changes I made/ am making: I showed up with a 3mm shorty wetsuit – this is what I’d been diving in Horghada just a month prior – the temps in Dahab are around 3℃ cooler than Horghada, and while I survived the dives, I was experiencing pretty significant signs of the cold, including struggling with basic finning techniques by the end of the dive due to intense shivering. I switched to a rental 5mm suit for the next two days with a pair of highland pocket shorts and this was a better fit. I have a drysuit, but haven’t dove it recently and opted to set myself up for success by taking the class in a more familiar configuration. I’m planning a drysuit primer in the future before advancing to tech-1 to shore up my skills in that configuration. I also switched (on the first dive) from my OMS slipstream fins to a pair of Jet fins, initially in XL, then in XXL. The slipstreams were way too floaty and caused major trim issues – it was the first thing that Mahmoud changed in my setup – I think I’d previously been compensating for this with additional weight and swimming to maintain trim – this was a great adjustment and enabled me to maintain a solid trim position for all 6 dives. I made the normal minor gear changes and adjustments to my backplate and webbing as well as adjusted some hose routing. Mahmoud noticed that I was struggling to drain the remainder of the air from my wing (Halcyon Explorer), and on day 4 we switched wings – I used his Evolve and he used my Explorer – I didn’t notice a change in trim or balance (nor was it evident on video), but it did make it easier to dump air in a controlled fashion, especially for the final 3-meter stops and controlled ascents at the end of dives. I returned Mahmoud’s wing, but I’m getting ready to order an Evolve-40 (I already have an Evolve-60 for my steel tanks). I think the difficulty in dumping air may have been a proximate cause of being overweighted in the past as I felt floaty at the end of dives. Mahmoud noticing (and pointing out in video) how much air I had remaining in the Explorer at 3-meters really drove home the point for me. We tried some other techniques to dump better, but the gear adjustment was by far the smoothest for me - I don't like coming out of trim to dump air, and this change let me stay neutral during my ascent.
The Dive Shop: Scuba Seekers is awesome! The shop is well organized, efficient, well stocked, friendly, and very tech friendly. They have properly configured doubles in steel and aluminum, deco setups, stages, rebreathers… you name it. As far as I can tell they are the only GUE shop in Egypt, maybe in all of Africa. They had plenty of tourists doing recreational dives as well, but even their “fun dives” were being DM’d by divers who seemed to have a strong interest in diving safety, and were often (always?) equipped with a DIR single-tank setup. It was good to see that having a few GUE instructors wasn’t just filling some niche for the shop, but seemed to be indicative of how they approached safety. The shop's training director, Sameh Sokar, is a GUE instructor through Tech-1 and was well respected at the shop - his influence is obvious in the quality of staff employed there (and he's also a super friendly guy!). The shop also coordinated my transportation from Cairo to Dahab and back (there are specific restrictions on travel through the Sinai and military checkpoints that need to be pre-coordinated, additionally you can’t drive a 4wd vehicle from Cairo into the Sinai, so this was a big help since I couldn’t use my normal driver), and helped me coordinate a room at a local house that was less than a minute walk from the shop. I was there to dive, so a room in a shared house was fine by me, kept costs low, and was very convenient!
The instructor: Mahmoud Esmat was fantastic! I live in Egypt (Cairo), but don’t speak Arabic and had some concerns about language barriers – those concerns were entirely unwarranted! I also had some concerns about Mahmoud’s willingness to provide candid constructive feedback: in my experience there is a cultural reluctance to provide constructive feedback or criticism in Egypt, but again, that was an entirely unwarranted concern. Mahmoud was great at identifying faults and areas that needed improvement and pairing those with recommendations on how to correct the problem, root cause assessments, and candid feedback. In the water he was exactly what one would expect from a GUE instructor – every movement was presentation grade, every demonstration was clear and he highlighted details that made tasks easier (place this finger here, turn your hand upside down for a better angle, etc.). He was friendly, patient, knowledgeable, clearly passionate, and a great instructor – I’m very impressed with his skills in the water, and how he demonstrated and translated the skills to his students. I know that not all great divers can effectively translate skills to others as instructors: Mahmoud is not one of those divers. My class was, I imagine, more demanding than others: we had a mixed class – I was in doubles attempting a tech pass and my partner was in a single tank configuration going for a recreational pass – Mahmoud did a great job managing the demands and course goals for us both very effectively. He never lost site of the holistic approach to safety that drew me to GUE and that reinforced that I made a good decision baselining myself with Fundies for future training.
Overall I’m very happy with the course, the outcome, the shop, and the instructor. Fundies has a reputation as a demanding course for a reason, and I’m glad I took the class when and where I did.
If you're considering a vacation to Dahab for diving the blue hole and are looking at moving into GUE, consider booking a class with Mahmoud while you're there.
