Diver Training: How much is enough?

[Thalassamania]

i THINK THE GOALS for many instructors have far exceeded the basic requirements of the training level. Without reading them for each course Let me say this. I read basic open water. That says the basic of basic skills. HOw not to panic, do a dive and surface with odds in favor of being alive. Exibit the most rudimentary bouyancy control (hovering not required). Understand and Engage in basic buddy concepts. How not to loose your gear in the water, the phisics involved.(boyle charles and the boys) , how to prevent silting ect. and finally how to do an emergency blow to the surface and survive. This gives them a license to learn/ perfect the most basic skills over time. Thorough understanding of limitations imposed on them by the level of training received and why.

I find your list a woeful pale shadow of what diving instruction used to be and I just don't buy the "basic" and "rudimentary" description of what even PADI describes as requiring "mastery." Just "how not to panic" requires the true mastery of a long suite of skills.

Then do 50 dives to master breathing, controlled buoyancy lost buddy Ocean environment diving, ect. This should allow them to confortably engage in no everhead diving in lakes of 50' depth of less.

We provide, as part of 12 to 20 training dives true mastery of breathing, controlled buoyancy, buddy diving, ocean diving, rescue, etc. We do not cover overhead diving, except where it is congruent with open water training. That qualifies a diver to 30 feet with a similarly capable buddy.

Then there is AOW. Demonstrate MASTERED ow skills. Introduction of skills relating to deeper divingg dive for them to master as they do thier next 50 or so dives as an AOW. Emergency blow no longer being an option

Why is CESA no longer an option? Works fine down to 190 ... never tried it deeper.

New skills such as more refined bouyancy control, theory of narcosis, more in depth dive planning skills. an intro but not cert in nitrox, basic rescue/ diver assist techniques submerged and surface. Intro and understanding what deco is. When they are done they should be able to go to 100-120 with as many of the limitations of OW have been lifted. With that there is an understanding why the remaining limitations are still in place.

Deco, NITROX, etc. should happen when a diver is ready for dives to 60 feet.

Each course should be slowly removing the amount of limitations imposed by the OW course. hard/soft overhead being some of the last lifted before crossing into a tech line of training.

Though we disagree about where in the sequence things go, we are more in agreement overall than not.

I read many comments that some students have excellent bouyancy as OW's ect. ect. I would not want to hard line say that, that is an indicator of spending to much time on a skill as i whole hartenly believe the inst has to teach the inportant skills to function in the local diving area. The emphasis of bouyancy control as an ow IS NOT SO IMPORTANT IN A QUARY AS IT IS IN A PRESERVE AREA.

Buoyancy control is a critical and life preserving skill in all environs.

Although many would not agree with my opinion but that is why I believe ocean boat trips should be limited to AOW and above. For those that are training OW and finish with skills superior to the min AOW requiremets should be given an AOW cert rather than the OW. Administrativily I dont know how that would work. I will say that any instructor that can teach good bouyancy in the same time as teaching mediocre bouyancy is an instructor that has the skills that i would want teaching me. The ow course is to me the most important course of any. Not from the skills aspect per-se but in establishing the understanding of what you dont know and lask skills for.

I think that boat trips should be restricted to people who can tie a one handed bowline with either hand while wearing gloves appropriate to the local environment ... but that nuts, right? At least it is until you're diving from a moured platform in a current, have a piece of gear in one hand, and someone throws you a line.

In my state (I may be mistaken somewhat) but you can get a licence to drive at 16 but acan not have passengers under 21 in the car till 17 or 18, i am not sure about interstate driving. This allows time to master skills before imposing your mistakes on others which by design are driving distractions. An OW ticket ,I think, should be somewhat the same. This would surely add some credibility to the AOW ticket. The idea of ZERO to DM in 60 dives ,,,, well.

Well, perhaps I see it differently because I learned how to drive on a track, taught by a pro, long before I ventured out on the street. As far as Zero to DM in 60, I can do it in twenty ... routinely, it's not that hard, the bar is not that high anymore, though the people management skills are extra.

 

[rjack321]

To carry the point to a ridiculous absurdity, it can be argued that a course that requires students to spend 100 hours in the classroom, 200 hours in the pool, and 300 hours in open water instruction will produce outstanding OW divers. Yes, it will.

Maybe, but no student is likely to excel or master much if their instructor-mentor is unskilled in the first place. 600 hours guarantees nothing.

 

[Thalassamania]

I agree with what you wrote, but my use of the phrase "short course" was different from yours. I was not referring to a course that is inadequate in length to get the job done for whatever might be the reason. I am talking about a short course in the sense that is being used in this thread--in contrast to a much longer course. In the sense I meant it, the instructor is teaching a class that while shorter than the kind of course being promoted by DCBC and Thalassamania, is still long enough to graduate safe and effective divers at the OW level.

There we may have a difference of opinion, I rather doubt that we see OW as being the same thing, you see for me entry level is the minimum demonstrable level of skill and knowledge that I would accept before permitting a diver to perform research under auspices to a depth not to exceed 30 feet with a similarly skilled and knowledgeable buddy.

To carry the point to a ridiculous absurdity, it can be argued that a course that requires students to spend 100 hours in the classroom, 200 hours in the pool, and 300 hours in open water instruction will produce outstanding OW divers. Yes, it will. In that case, though, I think even Thalassamania would argue that his "shorter course" (100 hours) is long enough.

My "short course" is what I have found is the minimum required to permit a diver to perform research under auspices to a depth not to exceed 30 feet with a similarly skilled and knowledgeable buddy. Hell ... I've spent well over 100 hours rehearsing a single task before going into the field to perform it.

 

[NAM001]

Thal

your comments have reinforced most everything i have said. 12-20 dives should never be required to obtain a basic level of OW skills. 3 ow dives should enable to do that. Yes cesa's have been done deeper In fact I believe the USS LA did some from 600 ft region a while back but that, like 190, is not reality or necessary for AOW. Brains and planning to avoid is necessary. I am sure that your ow course as you teach it will probably far excede most any AOW and deep course's most anyone will teach. And surely when see what others are doing with highers cert's with lesser skills they ignore the design limits of thier training. Though in your case probably it will have no concequense. Yes you probably could go zero to dm in very few dives. and in your local area i would not doubt you would have any problems performing at that level. I know of those who have got dm and never left the same fresh water hole while gettng it. But then again you have 12-20 dives for OW and you could do dm in 20. I have always agreed that traiing need to vary according to where they will be using the training. But then again i llook at OW as being equal to a driving learners permit to allow you to dive in real environments while mastering skiils in progress to getting an AOW that allows full use of the recreational limits. I suppose that i may be saying that instructors are deciding themselves that perhaps AOW or fundie skills should be the basic skills for OW and teach accordingly.

Just out of curiosity the 12-20 dives to get certified to 30' with a like buddy, where does that fit in with boat diving at sites where bottom depth is say 100 ft'. Should they be there or not.

I find your list a woeful pale shadow of what diving instruction used to be and I just don't buy the "basic" and "rudimentary" description of what even PADI describes as requiring "mastery." Just "how not to panic" requires the true mastery of a long suite of skills.
We provide, as part of 12 to 20 training dives true mastery of breathing, controlled buoyancy, buddy diving, ocean diving, rescue, etc. We do not cover overhead diving, except where it is congruent with open water training. That qualifies a diver to 30 feet with a similarly capable buddy.
Why is CESA no longer an option? Works fine down to 190 ... never tried it deeper.

Deco, NITROX, etc. should happen when a diver is ready for dives to 60 feet.

Though we disagree about where in the sequence things go, we are more in agreement overall than not.

Buoyancy control is a critical and life preserving skill in envorons.
I think that boat trips should be resticted to people who can tie a one handed bowline with either hand while wearing gloves appropriate to the local envoronment ... but that nuts, right? At least it is until your diving from a moured platform in a current, have a piece of gear in one hand and someone throws you a line.

Well, perhaps I see it differently because I learned how to drive on a track, taught by a pro, long before I ventured out on the street. As far as Zero to DM in 60, I can do it in twenty ... routinely, it's not that hard, the bar is not that high anymore, though the people management skills are extra.

 

[Diver0001]

OK, a little bit off topic, but so is most of this thread, so I don't feel too bad: is it really that those divers couldn't descend as a unit, or just that they didn't even try to do so (because the good vis meant they'd probably not lose their buddy even if they didn't stay too close)? I ask because I've never had any trouble staying close to my buddy on a descent (I struggled with descending smoothly at first -- used to alternate between sinking too quickly and not sinking at all) -- and I'm not very good, so I figure it can't be very hard. Of course, it might just be that the conditions I've dived in have all been good enough to make it easy.

There is a simple model that describes four basic phases of learning:

unaware/unable (you don't know what you don't know)
aware/unable (you know what you don't know)
aware/able (you know what you know)
unaware/able (you don't know what you know)

In a general sense the idea of "mastery" is supposed to kick a person from unaware/unable into aware/able.

What happens in practice some of the time is that they only go (and I blame poor instruction for this) from unaware/unable to aware/unable.

What I saw on the dive I described were divers who could control their *own* descent but were not doing so in tandem with a buddy.... so to my mind they had only mastered 1/2 of the equation.

To answer your question, my guess is that they never learned how to descend together with a buddy because they were never asked to master it (still aware/unable) or it simply wasn't a priority because they dove in conditions that made it largely a non-issue.

To me it stuck out because I dive/teach in a place where some days you can't even clearly see your own flippers, so descending like that would have meant losing your buddy.

R..

 

[xyrandomyx]

There is a simple model that describes four basic phases of learning:

unaware/unable (you don't know what you don't know)
aware/unable (you know what you don't know)
aware/able (you know what you know)
unaware/able (you don't know what you know)

In a general sense the idea of "mastery" is supposed to kick a person from unaware/unable into aware/able.

What happens in practice some of the time is that they only go (and I blame poor instruction for this) from unaware/unable to aware/unable.

What I saw on the dive I described were divers who could control their *own* descent but were not doing so in tandem with a buddy.... so to my mind they had only mastered 1/2 of the equation.

To answer your question, my guess is that they never learned how to descend together with a buddy because they were never asked to master it (still aware/unable) or it simply wasn't a priority because they dove in conditions that made it largely a non-issue.

To me it stuck out because I dive/teach in a place where some days you can't even clearly see your own flippers, so descending like that would have meant losing your buddy.

R..

My guess is that the conditions they learnt to dive in (or most often dive in) probably played at least some role. I can't really recall my OW instructor focusing that much on descents, but the visibility where I dive means I learnt to keep my buddy close from my first dive -- not very elegantly, but effectively enough. I don't dive when the visibility is so bad you can't see your fins, but it's poor enough that a buddy's going to disappear in a few moments if you're not paying attention and keeping them close.

EDIT: And I guess that means that perhaps people who teach in better visibility should actually pay more attention to that sort of thing? Because losing your buddy isn't the only reason you want to stay close together. It's no good if you can see them in trouble because of the lovely vis, but they're still too far away to help them out...

 

[-hh]

My guess is that the conditions they learnt to dive in (or most often dive in) probably played at least some role. I can't really recall my OW instructor focusing that much on descents, but the visibility where I dive means I learnt to keep my buddy close from my first dive -- not very elegantly, but effectively enough. I don't dive when the visibility is so bad you can't see your fins, but it's poor enough that a buddy's going to disappear in a few moments if you're not paying attention and keeping them close.

Such conditions are considered "Environment", and had been part of the discussions in this thread that silently disappeared last night, along with 14 other pages (~140 posts) from this thread.

In a nutshell, the conditions that divers have been learning in have probably changed over the years, in no small part because the motivations and demographics of diving has also changed over the decades - - what had predominantly been local coldwater diving (with its environmental challenges such as <20ft viz and 4ft seas) has evolved to now predominantly be the stereotypically benign "Warmwater Vacation Diver" where the same conditions would result in the diveboats being blown out in places like the FL Keys. Sure, diving in warm, gin-clear water is certainly more enjoyable, but an unintended consequence of it is that it also less demanding too, so a "passing grade" can be less critical of classical 'mastery' metrics, and divers who only experience such benign conditions can expect to see these relevant skills be lost through atrophy.

EDIT: And I guess that means that perhaps people who teach in better visibility should actually pay more attention to that sort of thing? Because losing your buddy isn't the only reason you want to stay close together. It's no good if you can see them in trouble because of the lovely vis, but they're still too far away to help them out...

Perhaps so, but not necessarily so: another viewpoint that can be taken is that with fewer special 'environmental' -centric concerns, the training class can also be made shorter because there's now less material to be taught. Right or wrong (and true or not), it is within the realm of what is possible because of how ambiguous the training standards are in certain areas.


-hh

 

[BDSC]

Such conditions are considered "Environment", and had been part of the discussions in this thread that silently disappeared last night, along with 14 other pages (~140 posts) from this thread. -hh

What is up with that? I noticed the same thing with no explanation.

 

[jar546]

SB had a problem out of their control and had to backup with data from a few days ago causing the loss of several days worth of posts

 

[The Chairman]

Yeppers... we lost a lot of great posts in all of the threads. Even lost a number of great threads!