tonyc:
This has been some really interesting reading, and I appreciate everybody's input. Just to clarify, I was not looking for some free info over the newsgroup. I can't wait to be able to take DIR-F, but I think I first need to save enough to complete my hogarthian/DIR kit- I'm getting there. I Just started diving in mid July of this year.
Call me a crusty old curmudgeon, but IMO, you're going way too fast for my personal comfort.
Granted, anyone will get some benefit out of a DIR-F course, but this same truism applies to all training courses. I'd be inclined to say that you'll get more out of the course if you wait another 2-3 years and another 100 dives to really get to know the basics of yourself, air, etc, and their interactions before getting into the derivatives. What you really need right now is a friend who will mentor you on the basics of diving, knowing and understanding buoyancy control, weighting, etc...get 80% of the way to someone's personal definition of "perfect". Keep in mind that a good diver transcends the equipment that he happens to be wearing, and that being "Tek" is not necessarily some universal goal that all divers must strive to achieve.
I say this particularly because anyone can learn a tremendous amount about diving and DCS theory for under $100...the price of a couple of good books. One recommended read - although they're now a bit dated, is pretty much anything from author John Lippman. If you're lucky, snag a copy of this out-of-print book, "Deeper into Diving".
A monkey could be taught to use tables in a square profile dive...
True, but quite embarassingly, a very large percentage of DM's and Instructors failed to do it properly at DEMA several years ago. Hate to say it, but none of the traditional Rec Agency's prerequisites for any of their Professional certification levels require even a High School Diploma (let alone any College Degree), from DM to the very top. I've known some Instructors who are literal high school drop-outs, and unfortunately, that lack of background sometimes shows.
Now this isn't to say that there aren't some smart people teaching diving - it simply says that the Agency Standards don't require it.
For example, if you review the
formal education credentials of GUE's currently listed 32 instructors, while you'll find several with College degrees, there's not a single person listed in the entire organization has a Degree in Education from any College (Accredited or not).
BTW, I don't mean to pick on GUE with this illustration - its merely convenient because they're available online. IMO PADI is significantly worse, because they represent their Course Director training as the equivalent of a full College Graduate Degree!
... but the theory behind it, the "WHY" is apparently not so easy. I think it's pretty obvious that until DIR-F, I should be relying on my suunto for multilevel dives such as the ones I did this weekend. I felt very safe.
And even after your DIR-F class. If your objective is to gain insight into deco theory, I'd personally be very cynical of the GUE DIR-F class: I'm not sure how much this particular class teaches, and if it teaches their "sum to 120 rule", this is IMO the smallest possible refinement of the old 1960's adage of "Can't get bent on a single tank", and adds nothing to the student's understanding of historical or contemporary deco theory.
A knowledgable consumer, when subjected to a "Sales Pitches" about one deco model versus another, is aware that
all published dive deco models are empirically based, not deterministic, and are known to contain stochastic elements of uncertainty. All of them have inserted conservatism somewhere to manage risk...its just a question of where, and being able to find it.
(with a Suunto)...after my third dive, I called it quits because I said to myself, "I'm probably full of nitrogen."
The Suunto is very (some would say downright rediculously) conservative, particularly once it goes into Deco...I have one and I've seen it take ~30 minutes to clear a stop that other models would have cleared in 5-10 minutes.
Be aware that a problem that has manifested itself is that as the industry has grown is that the manufacturers have become extremely liability-adverse, so their M-values have shrunk in an attempt to reduce risk. This has resulted in very conservative dive computers, and the Suunto is an unfortunately a prime example: it is extremely conservative versus the industry's predecessors, with the historical poster child of liberalism being the ORCA/EIT dive computers.
-hh and departurediver: your comments were just what I was looking for, Thank you both. -hh your explanation was very helpful and you can bet I'll be reading that over to help my understanding.
My pleasure. As I said above, find a couple of good books for <$100 and read through them at your own pace. You can do this before venturing into a classroom to try to learn whatever it is that that Agency is trying to promote on a fixed classroom schedule, and you'll end up getting a lot more out of your training investment.
Personally, I enjoy the theory, and it is always a good thing for those who need to apply it, but that's a simplistic 'Motherhood' statement that applies to everything, not just diving. We need to recognize that we can go (and have gone) a long ways without really needing to know all too much.
In saying this, I'm not trying to advocate or defend "blind faith" elements, but what I'm saying is that there's also a great degree of pragmatism and the key is to resist training in absolute rules - everything from this to inverted profiles are really just "Very Good Standard Practices to be Followed Until You Learn More". Pragmatically, there's a lot that you can do and enjoy without having to understand all of its complexities, just like we can take on the responsibility of driving a car without knowing what the theoretically ideal Inductance value is for an Ignition Coil.
-hh
). For our max depth, those dives were much longer than I have dived before. Of course, with my air consumption and the usual steel 80, I'm not sure I'd ever hit the no stop limit. 
