DIR controversy?

[Vayu]

But it's also true that there are very ugly political and interpersonal issues within GUE and its affiliates, and they DO involve GUE personnel, and they DO get aired in public, and that DOES affect people's perception of the organization and its members.

Thats true. It happens with alot of agencies. It doesn't really concern divers seeking new training with them. Throughout my experience, I never heard a negative comment concerning external agencies or equipment manufacturers. The only reason I have been extrapolating is because when my posts get quoted into the political posts, it makes it seem like I am an active part of that debate. I am not siding with anyone. All I want to do is dive safely.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I don't really follow any of that stuff. Neither of the two people mentioned above are GUE instructors.

Um ... one of those two people was not only a GUE instructor, he was the GUE Director of Training (in other words, he was the one who determined who else was gonna be a GUE instructor ... and who personally trained several current GUE instructors) for several years.

I'm not interested in politics here, I'm talking about diving.

I'm not talking about politics ... I'm talking about business.

In fact, the only people I hear talking about politics are on the internet. It is not a part of GUE policy to trash other divers and it is not ingrained in the curriculum, despite popular belief.

Unfortunately, some of the most vocal Internet trash-talkers are the ones who invented both DIR and GUE. It is not ingrained in the curriculum ... but it IS ingrained in the culture. I wish it weren't. If someone would take GI3's keyboard away from him ... and that of some of his most ardent sycophants ... most of the "controversy" would cease to exist.

That isn't a criticism ... it's simply a recognition of what is ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MikeFerrara]

What I meant was that I haven´t been OOA and had to ask a "typical recdiver" (whoever that is) for air. Until I do, I won´t comment on the "typical divers" ability to respond...I practice OOA on every dive (wth regular buddies) but I don´t see what that has to do with the discussion at hand.


If PADI OW he´s supposed to pull out his octo (or I will) and then I start breathing from it. If that happens or not depends on the divers involved.

If you get wet with a "buddy" without knowing where his octo is, then IMO that´s YOUR fault. If you let your buddy drag YOUR octo thru the sand then, again, that is YOUR problem.

The system isn´t to blame for the individuals incompetence. I know my OW instructor told me to practice everything I learned regularly, didn´t yours? If you choose not to, then the blame is yours not the instructors or the agency...

You feel DIR is better than other systems but how many drills did you during your courses and how many afterwards? where did you gain proficiency in the drills? what stopped you from drilling with your octo after your ow course? certainly not your agency or your instructor..."only you can breath for you and only you can think for you"...some recognition of individual responsibility would be nice...

Is a DIR diver who doesen´t follow "dir protocol" any better of? Differentiate between system and individual and we may have a productive discussion...


No it isn´t...

Lets look at a couple of things. A system, and it's application. ok?...I'm on a dive at a local site just hovering arounf watching what's going on. I see a class kneeling on the bottom taking turns doing skills. Some of the students have octos dangling and I notice so do some of the staff. I see them move off to begine the tour portion of the training dive...octos and consols dangling, fins stiring the bottom, divers bouncing off the bottom and it's a mess with all of them following the instructor in a pack never being asked to demonstrate that they can function with their buddy. Even though this is their last training dive and they're minutes from being certified, I can clearly see that none of them can do a controled ascent without a line and have never attempted any of the so-called skills that they've been taught when they weren't plastered to the bottom. I saw them descend and it could more accurately be described as raining students. They did all manage to find their buddy and the instructor after bouncing off the bottom though so that's good and only some of them are going to be complaining about their ears on into next week.

For the sake of arguement, lets say that having an octo secured in the golded triangle on a short hose will work just fine if practiced. The above divers aren't prepared to impliment that system, even if you could call it a system...or do they have air 2's? Either way, I know I don't want to have to try to share air with one of the above divers diring an ascent nor do I want to have to trust them to notice that I need gas because they just haven't been required to do so diring training under real dive conditions.

So, there's two things here. There's what you do, and then there's how well you do it. How well you are required to do it during training is indicative of how well you are likely to be abl;e to do it right out of the gate.

Lets go further though. The golded triangle is visable when a diver is vertical as when kneeling but most of it is completely out of site when a diver is in a horizontal diving position. It's a good thing they don't instruct divers on trim because you would never see even a "properly" secured octo. There is certainly a good way and a not so good way to hand a backup reg off to a diver so that it doesn't free flow and just give the OOA diver a face full of bubbles but the above divers weren't taught nor did they practice those techniques...which goes double if it happens on a descnt or ascent when they are rarely together or alert to their buddy.

There are body positioning and finning techniques that easily enable a diver to move along without bouncing off the bottom and making the mess but it wasn't taught to them in this "system".

Are there non-DIR divers who can do all of the above? Of course there are but who would I be quicker to put my money on? Almost any "system" can be made to work if it's tested and mistake proofed at each level so that all the pieces fit together and function.

From both casual observation and the number of divers that I have administered skill preassessments to when they came to me for con-ed it's more than clear that if we call the mainstream a "system" at all, it isn't being applied very well. I have money that says that if we gather non-DIR rec divers at random and test basic skills for the purpose of determining the capability of the "system" that it's going to fair rather poorly. While we can certainly argue that there's more than one way that will work and even prove it, I'd also argue that the mainstream rec training is doing it wrong and demonstrably so.

Whether we look at buoyancy control, finning technique, buddy procedures, gas management, emergency procedures...you pick it, GUE is doing it far better than most. There really isn't even much of a comparison and it's not even close.

The sad fact is that you can go to a local site here and see two distinct groups. One bouncing off the bottom apparantly strugleing and another calm, in control and having a blast. One group is in BP/wings, long hoses and the works and the other is in all sorts of pretty colored gimicky DEMA show intrduced junk. Who do you think is really having more fun with their diving? I know, it's not that way where you dive...but I've dived around a bit and I pretty much see the same thing everywhere.

Once you move beyond a recreational diving setting...say to the florida caves, you'll see lots of divers using all sorts of different equipment configurations and procedures including solo and sidemount and they can all control their position in the water very precisely and effectively use whatever system they are using which demonstrates some of my earlier points. There is always more than one way but if your way demonstrably doesn't measure up then it's not time to talk too loud. I have a bunch of resort video that I wish was digital so I could post and share it. We might even be able to label it as a representative cross section of typical, mainstream taught rec divers. Unfortunately, it doesn't speak well for the non-DIR side.

Now for the disclaimer...I'm not GUE trained and I make no claimes to being a DIR diver. I have, however, been around both a good deal, in and out of he water and that's my take on it. As a former instructor, I can't go along with what any of the rec agencies are doing (or not doing). For several reasons GUE doesn't really suit me either. At the same time, ig MHK or BCS catches me rototiling the bottom or not knowing where my buddy is or whatever, I'll stand still for the flogging and display a measure of wisdom by accepting the instruction.

 

[MikeFerrara]

Unfortunately, some of the most vocal Internet trash-talkers are the ones who invented both DIR and GUE. It is not ingrained in the curriculum ... but it IS ingrained in the culture. I wish it weren't. If someone would take GI3's keyboard away from him ... and that of some of his most ardent sycophants ... most of the "controversy" would cease to exist.

That isn't a criticism ... it's simply a recognition of what is ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I don't know...if we disregard the lemmings and then disregard GI3 who though he was/in connected with DIR really hasen't been part of GUE, you start to run a bit lower on trash talkers. Then, of course there are the non-DIR trash talkers...and of course the internet is the internet.

To the credit of the real DIR folks I've met, I've had MANY hours of great diving and dive discussion with them and there was no controversy at all. I even ran into JJ in a cave while I was wearing a diverite light and I ran into BCS while I was wearing a whites dry suit with their version of rock boots. LOL my wife even had a backup light with a switch and an allegedly over driven bulb!

 

[Thalassamania]

Perfect.

 

[minnesota01r6]

MikeFerrara

Do you think your observations have anything to do with the divers themselves? The DIR diver by definition has more training and experience than a basic OW certified diver has. The DIR diver has chosen to make about a $400 investment above and beyond OW certification. This does not include all the gear they had to buy.

I'll grant that the average OW student just wants to go down and see the pretty fish. They have little to no knowledge about diving, they just want to do the minimum to get by and go swimming at 40fsw a couple times a year.

Your argument is the same as saying that someone who has a driver's license is not as good a driver as someone who has taken a skip barber racing school. BOTH drivers have their drivers license (and the minimum training needed to acquire one), but one driver has sought out MORE training, and spent more time and money investing in their driving. They should know how to corner, brake, and accelerate better than the "average" driver who only has their driver's license.

Take this a step further - the people who CHOOSE to take more training do so because they want to be BETTER at that sport. People who are complacent with their training will not try to better themselves with or without training.

A DIR trained diver could reject all the principles of DIR, drag an SPG & octo over a reef, and then inflate his wing and do a bouyant ascent from 100' - but I would not say that it was DIR that made him a bad diver - he wasn't following the DIR guidelines. Same thing goes for PADI or any other agency.

It is not the system that makes the diver, it is the diver's embracing of the system that makes a competent diver.

 

[Thalassamania]

The thing that makes DIR, or for that matter a science diving team who are doing it correctly in a different way (does that make us DICs? But that's yet another story that I'll tell later) is that there is a system.

What is lacking in the RecCom is any real system or focused philosophy. All the RecAgencies try to be all embracing. That eliminates any significant systemization. For example: the golden triangle is not a system, it was a “least common denominator” solution that tried to embrace AIR-IIs, Octopuses, Safe Seconds, Auxiliary Second Stages, Spare Airs, Pony Bottles, etc. at an RSTC meeting many years ago.

To my mind the biggest contribution that DIR has made, to date, is to point out the lack of any unifying system.

 

[H2Andy]

every time somene says "golden triangle" i think "serious doobage"

 

[TSandM]

Oh, I really don't want to get into an agency-comparison battle, but let me offer my personal experience.

I got a lot of continued training from my original agency and instructors. I did AOW, and the deep specialty, and most of the nav specialty, and the buoyancy specialty . . . and at the end of all of it, I wasn't all that different a diver than I was before I took the specialties, nor did I have any particularly useful new tools to improve my diving.

I took Fundies, and at the end of Fundies, I wasn't a particularly different diver than I was before (I've posted that). But now I had the tools to change the way I was diving. AND I had seen "the bar" -- I'd seen what you can accomplish, if you work at it. And I've worked at it, and I'm now a VERY different diver than I was six months ago.

It's too simplistic to say that a diver who has taken Fundies may be a better diver simply by virtue of having sought out further training. The training there is really quite different, and the standards are different, and the amount of information you walk away with at the end of the class is huge.

There are instructors in a lot of places, I'm sure, who teach classes with meat in them and hold students to standards. I'm actually seeing that spreading in our area, which is very cool. But you can predict with a GUE class that you will have a well-trained instructor who walks the walk -- they are required to do at least 25 dives a year (I think I have that right) at a level above where they instruct, and training dives don't count. Despite the differences in details that show up when we talk about the class, you know you will get a core curriculum that includes gas management and some basic decompression, and a lot of stuff on how to position yourself and propel yourself through the water efficiently and without disturbing your environment. All those things will be there.

Even the diver who wants to improve may make little or no progress if he can't find somebody to help him do so. And I agree with Mike Ferrara that GUE is doing an extremely good job of presenting a class which helps the motivated diver get better.

 

[Thalassamania]

Wrong drug grasshopper.