Dive Training and Prerequites

[divebuddydale]

Hi All.

I am starting this thread to ask a question. Seeing that the recent death in Long Sault looks to be a diver that went right from OW ot Adv OW. Do you think there should be a time limit / dive minimum between taking courses. Here are the standards for ACUC, NAUI and PADI on going from OW to ADVANCED.


ACUC --> Must have ACUC open Water certification or equivalent and a MINIMUM of 20 dives. (Age depends on the countries legislation and / or parental consent)

NAUI --> NAUI OW or Equivalent and be at least 15 years old.

PADI --> PADI OW or Equivalent and be at least 15 years old.

I personally think that no one should take advanced with just the OW checkout dives under his/her belt. Get a few dives in and get used to the environment. Then after 20 - 40 dives get the additional cert. Lets face it, 20 dives is only about 5 weeks of doing 2 dives on Saturday and 2 on sunday.

What are your thoughts??

Dale

 

[eagleray2003]

I maybe wrong here but I beleive I have heard that under Padi standards the instructor can always turn down a student that they assess to be not suitable for the course or open water training segment. I also think if an instructor has not seen the student's skill level, they must have the student perform a skill circuit prior to accepting them into a course.
I maybe wrong in my above statement I am not an instructor but possibly some of the pros out there can give us there views.

 

[divebuddydale]

eagleray2003 once bubbled...
I maybe wrong here but I beleive I have heard that under Padi standards the instructor can always turn down a student that they assess to be not suitable for the course or open water training segment. I also think if an instructor has not seen the student's skill level, they must have the student perform a skill circuit prior to accepting them into a course.
I maybe wrong in my above statement I am not an instructor but possibly some of the pros out there can give us there views.

Not sure about that, maybe someone can fill us in. I heard that the individual that lost his life last week, Trained OW at one LDS and then went to another LDS to do his ADVANCED.

Dale

 

[Butch103]

.....as I get older and deeper into my diver education.

I initially thought it should be based on the comfort of the individual. But as time goes on, I believe more that the AOW student should have a min of 10-20 dives. The number would be based on the time needed to do the dives and also the variety of the dives. Not ten or twenty dives dives all in the same mudhole. Now I do understand teh difficulty in achieving a variety of dives, as most charters require AOW card for many of their dive sites.

Very hard to come up with the "perfect" answer............

 

[Bubble Boy]

divebuddydale once bubbled...
Hi All.

I am starting this thread to ask a question. Seeing that the recent death in Long Sault looks to be a diver that went right from OW ot Adv OW. Do you think there should be a time limit / dive minimum between taking courses. Here are the standards for ACUC, NAUI and PADI on going from OW to ADVANCED.


ACUC --> Must have ACUC open Water certification or equivalent and a MINIMUM of 20 dives. (Age depends on the countries legislation and / or parental consent)

NAUI --> NAUI OW or Equivalent and be at least 15 years old.

PADI --> PADI OW or Equivalent and be at least 15 years old.

I personally think that no one should take advanced with just the OW checkout dives under his/her belt. Get a few dives in and get used to the environment. Then after 20 - 40 dives get the additional cert. Lets face it, 20 dives is only about 5 weeks of doing 2 dives on Saturday and 2 on sunday.

What are your thoughts??

Dale

I think you may wish to re-read the standards and or the bulletins put out by the agencies. For instance, to obtain an ACUC advanced card you must already have been certified in two specialties (this is not reflected in your statement).

Questions (there are many more) you might want to ask could be:
1) Should an instructor have to dive a site to become familiar with it before taking a student there?
2) Should brand new instructors be allowed to teach advanced courses? (ie should they be just open water instructors for the first year)....this would apply to cases in some technical agencies as well, where you can be certified as a deco-techniques instructor without having ever certified an open water diver.
3) Should instructors taking a student on an advanced course take the student into a confined pool session first to evaluate the skills?
4) was the equipment properly maintained and was the air good?
5) should facilities that have fatalities have their teaching status suspended until such time as a their agency makes a ruling?

There are many more questions and I do not mean to express any wrong doings but these are some more appropriate questions.

 

[Butch103]

Bubble Boy once bubbled...

I think you may wish to re-read the standards and or the bulletins put out by the agencies. For instance, to obtain an ACUC advanced card you must already have been certified in two specialties (this is not reflected in your statement).

Questions (there are many more) you might want to ask could be:
1) Should an instructor have to dive a site to become familiar with it before taking a student there?
2) Should brand new instructors be allowed to teach advanced courses? (ie should they be just open water instructors for the first year)....this would apply to cases in some technical agencies as well, where you can be certified as a deco-techniques instructor without having ever certified an open water diver.
3) Should instructors taking a student on an advanced course take the student into a confined pool session first to evaluate the skills?
4) was the equipment properly maintained and was the air good?
5) should facilities that have fatalities have their teaching status suspended until such time as a their agency makes a ruling?

There are many more questions and I do not mean to express any wrong doings but these are some more appropriate questions.

...I think you have made some very valid points in your 5 questions.....particularily #s 2,3 & 5....

 

[divebuddydale]

Bubble Boy once bubbled...

I think you may wish to re-read the standards and or the bulletins put out by the agencies. For instance, to obtain an ACUC advanced card you must already have been certified in two specialties (this is not reflected in your statement).

Questions (there are many more) you might want to ask could be:

Actually .. on www.acuc.es.. it does not state that you need 2 specialties. When I took my Advanced, about a year ago now, they were thinking of making so you needed rescue diver first, but not sure what happened there.

as for the "Questions I might want to ask" I do not want to focus on any particular accident even though the Long Sault one is fresh in our mind, all the points you made are valid, but are focussed on the instructor, (which I think should be done as well) but I want to focus on the student.

Dale

 

[j-valve]

Mabey it's not the Advanced cert that's the problem...

J

 

[SneakyB'tard]

Good thought J Valve

In my opinion (cheap and worthless) I feel that the onus is upon the diver and the instructor. A good diver knows their limitations by either experience or common sense.

Unfortunaltly a new diver, still fresh and gung ho after the check outs, is not experienced enough to exercise common sense in regards to their diving abilities and limitations. Most instructors in the OW phase will sugar coat any faults and oversights that a diver has - as long as they meet the minimum standard to pass and their faults are not on the critical list of agency protocols.

As for the instructors, they must exercise good judgment and almost a sixth sense for students. I have seen this in many first class instructors and they have the ability to see through ones false bravado and assess the true abilities of a diver. If an istructor is either over worked, mislead or under-educated they will miss the warnig signs such as a slim log book, wild stories of numerous dives to 30 feet at the cert pond or simply the date on the C card.

I do have the opinion that certification agencies need to have firm protocols on their prerequisites. If a diver is certified OW and AOW in 2 weeks, odds are something wasn't followed. If a dive accident occurs a facility must assess their full operation before resuming with diver education.

So long story short, it may not be just the course but the combination of the student and the instructor and agency involved.

 

[Doppler]

Some very good points already brought up here... my two cents worth... precisely what it's worth.

I do teach... they don't let me near open water students anymore... just technical programs and basic skills development. And it's not uncommon to have people tell you all kinds of non-sense about their abilities and their experience... I have the luxury of being an independant and being able to command a high-enough price that a "pre-dive" checkout skills dive is not a luxury but required! But that's not the case generally in the Scuba teaching market.

The easy way is to make this pre-dive checkout a hard-and-fast rule but you know what, people would still fall though the cracks and we'd still have horrible accidents like the one in Long Sault, because this market is driven by price...

Diving is a bloody expensive pastime... I can think of about two dozen friends each of whom has more than $20 grand tied up in equipment. A top-of-the-line drysuit retails at $3500 for god's sake! Yet, over the years, the marketing thrust of the bigger certifying agencies has been to fill the top-end of the sales funnel by making entry-level courses cheap. Trouble is, the consumer get's a distorted sense of value and now, many instructors and shops sell on price.

Now, that leads to another, related issue. There a tempting incentive to offer classes that are less than completely thorough... people get certified OW who frankly should be failed. I am sure we have all seen it. I get taken to task sometimes for being "too strict," and I know if I worked for a store instead of for myself, there'd be pressure applied for me to lighten up.

And so we come to what in my opinion is the core fault... the market may have made diving too accessible, and we have allowed the market to drive standards... and we're going to keep seeing people pay with their health, well-being and perhaps their life.

Sorry to be a downer

Doppler