Dive class - did you get your tank's worth?

[perdidochas]

With the economy of time, how many folks get their full tank of dive during your OW or AOW dive? And how many of you get the bare minimum - I mean 15 or 20 minute, then surfaced - so you can squeeze 2 dives out of 1 tank?

I remembered that we burned a tank for each dives when I did my OW and AOW. It seems like more dive instructor's now are pushed for time, perhaps it is a boat dive thing where you are limitted in time on the surface interval or is it simply trying to save time and money all together. When my son did his OW dives, it was a prompt 20 minutes, surface, and back down again, for a total of 40 minutes on day 1, and 40 minutes on day 2.

My belief is that the more time a diver spend under water, the more skills he will hone. 4 or 5 fifteen or twenty minute dives just doesn't do it in my book.

I was certified OW in 1982. We burned either all of our air (well until one buddy was down to 500 psi), or our dive time (at that time, we did certification dives to 80 ft).

 

[Sparhawk13401]

I was a little dissapointed we didn't dive longer.

I just finished my OW cert this weekend and the first three dives I came back with around 2000 each time. We dove Al80's. The last dive was the best/longest and I came back with 1200.

Of course the water temp was 46F and everyone other than our instructor was diving wet, so some people were freezing their arses off.

 

[wreckchick]

My certification dives were a solid 20 minutes each... in a quarry... 50 degree water below the thermocline, 65 degree air temperature and the second day it was cloudy and breezy. I don't care a bit that the dives weren't longer.

Now that I'm teaching, I try and give my students a minimum of 25-30 minutes of playtime on their check-out dives and reserve another 10 or so for skills.

New tank every dive. It's part of the requirements unless the instructors are having the students break down their gear and set it back up again on the same tank between dives, it's a PADI standards violation.

Rachel

 

[PvtStash]

I'm not clear on what you are posting here..... Are you saying he had you end the dive at 1100psi or are you saying you should have been allowed to use the tank @ 1100psi to start a training dive?

I have students bring four tanks for four dives. Some people finish a training dive with close to 2000psi, but they have to swap out tanks for the next dive as that is a required part of the training. I would never allow a student to begin a training dive with less than a 90% fill.

While I prefer students get as much BT on training dives as possible, BT is usually limited by the student with the highest SCR or the student with the least tolerance for cold. We could exit with one student @2100psi and another @ 800psi.

I'm saying that I'd hoped to be able to get More BT outta my tank since I still had a Good Deal left and that I think ending a dive at 1000/1100 in the scenario we were in, was a tad Overboard in the way of caution. (I would have liked to breath it down to 5-800) Starting tank pressures were 2200 and 2000.