In defense of Casual Divers

[Diver Dennis]

Dr Bryson, head of the Diving Diseases Research Centre in Plymouth, said: "People want to be advanced divers. They want that certificate and they are willing to pay for it. We have people presently in diving who feel they are advanced but have no experience whatsoever. The diving community needs to be totally re-educated."

Dr Bryson said British training bodies had had to streamline their courses to compete with PADI, which has trained about 400,000 Britons and carries out more than half the world's training. He said: "PADI have brought that reduction in training down and they claim they have done it with valid data and that there are very very few problems. Other UK-based diving groups which had longer training regimes have had to come into line.

Focusing on the PADI training regime, Dr Bryson said: "I do not believe that someone with eight dives should be classified as an advanced diver. That is madness, end of conversation."

In fact PADI says the minimum number of sessions a diver must complete before they get an "advanced open water certificate" is nine. Mark Caney, a vice-president of PADI, said the system was tried and tested."We have a lot of data about the efficacy of our system and the vast majority are out there diving quite happily.

"But accidents do occur. In nearly every case there is at least one instance where a main diving rule was flouted and that is nearly always the cause of the accident."

You can read the entire article here... http://tenfootstop.blogspot.com/2006/08/expert-warns-that-scuba-crash-courses.html

 

[MikeFerrara]

:jump013::multi: :wave-smil :multi: :jump013:

:luxhello: :luxhello: :luxhello: :luxhello:​

And just like with religion, sometimes those who preach are just crackpot idealogues.

True but other times they are just called crackpot idealogues by those who are selling something.

 

[Fritz*the*Cat]

True but other times they are just called crackpot idealogues by those who are selling something.

i followed it to here, but
i think i missed something.
whose selling what here?

 

[MikeFerrara]

It seems to me that if she would have shown previous signs of panic on her OW checkouts.

Maybe but we don't have any real reason to believe that she did or that her instructor did anything that violated standards. Is it easier to believe that an instructor would knowingly violate standards than it is to believe that the standards are inadequate?

BTW, I had a student who did many dives with and that I certified OW and AOW . During her rescue class she completely freaked while doing a simple air share. My teaching may have been garbage in those days but I never violated standards in any way and based on what I knew then, I had no reason to believe that she would ever freak like that. She was the second diver that I saw panic and the first who was my student. It was a rude awakening. When a person panics like that, there is no humanity left in them. They completely become a wild animal that will do anything except think in order to get to what they want...in her case she wanted to be out of the water.

She eventually took an intro to cave class and paniced (though it was passive panic) on the pothole line in peacock springs. The instructor brought her out and she was eventually certified but as far as I know she hasn't been in the water since. After her panic incident in the cave she was very quiet the rest of the week like she was for the rest of the day after her panic in her rescue class.

Lets call a spade a spade here. By what I taught her and what I didn't teach her, I set her up for it. the agency who taught me, set me up for it.

She was a great customer and I thought she was a friend. My actions and attitudes, though well intentioned and completely within standards and consistant with everything I had been taught and knew at the time, almost got her killed and definately scared the bageebers out of her.

30 feet deep? I did my CESA deeper that 30 feet.

PADI requires the ESA to be done from between 20 and 30 ft.

I have my doubts that my SSI instructor would certify someone who was so uncomfortable. Can't you just refuse to certify people and ask them to return with next class? Don't people ever fail open water?

Is comfort measureable? The performance requirements are defined in the training standards...at least in some agencies. A student either meets them or they don't. Why would an instructor refuse to certify a student who meets the performance requirements as defined in the training standards?

Maybe your instructor has experience and can excersize judgement beyond what is required by standards. Many do but that's not a requirement of all agencies either and we have no reason to expect it.

 

[TheRedHead]

Maybe your instructor has experience and can excersize judgement beyond what is required by standards. Many do but that's not a requirement of all agencies either and we have no reason to expect it.

I think my instructor and basic dive education were pretty good compared to what I have read about here. I know for a fact that people at our LDS do get recycled to the next class and some have failed to be certified. But I am under the impression, and I'm not familiar with PADI, that instructors have the option of not issuing a c-card. Why isn't the discretion of the instructor used more often?

Yes, I think comfort is measurable at least subjectively. If you are obviously struggling to do something, you are not comfortable.

 

[Arete]

Hmm, I would have previously considered myself a vacation diver. I dove around once or twice a year, rented all my gear etc etc etc. I always wanted to dive more but as a student I simply didn't have the means.
Now I find myself working in a marine oriented genetics lab and expected to dive on a regular basis. I have a set of gear in transit from scubatoys as I type, and intend to get far more involved in the sport in the near future.

Lurking, reading and absorbing the information and opinions here over the last month or so has made me aware of countless things I would otherwise have been ignorant to, and I'm already sure I am a much better diver than I was previously. The few dives I've done recently with my University DSO and my supervisor have really shown me how diving can be done in comparison to the general divers on a vacation boat.

I can see the points made about divers like me and I can now understand the reasons those points are being made. Looking back, if I was one of you guys I would not want to have been insta-buddies on a dive boat with myself at all, and recognise better some of the good/bad/terrible buddies I've had in the past.

Anyway, I'm on my way from one catergory to the other it seems

 

[MikeFerrara]

I think my instructor and basic dive education were pretty good compared to what I have read about here. I know for a fact that people at our LDS do get recycled to the next class and some have failed to be certified. But I am under the impression, and I'm not familiar with PADI, that instructors have the option of not issuing a c-card. Why isn't the discretion of the instructor used more often?

Yes, I think comfort is measurable at least subjectively. If you are obviously struggling to do something, you are not comfortable.

I can't speak for all agencies but...

Panic is a response to stress (feeling helpless). If you don't ask any one to do anything that stresses them much, they are unlikely to panic.

I don't know how to explain this to some one who hasn't taught diving but there are many divers who may have some trouble learning a skill (for instance) but don't appear to be near panic. Let me just ask a question. If I just have students perform simple skills while kneeling and take a few short guided tours in OW where they don't really have to do anything, how confident can I be that they aren't likely to panic in any number of situations that happen all the time in real diving?

In my students case, she was handed a reg upside down. She went to breath and got some whater. She didn't have enough air in her lungs to clear the reg and she flipped before she could ever think of using the purge or even turning the reg over.

She had obviously shared air before and practiced reg clearing both with and without using the purge but an upside down reg was something that took her off guard. What if she had a leaky reg housing or diaghram?

If I had any reason to doubt her ability to perform to performance requirements I certainly would have given her more time either in that class or the next but she never had a problem doing what she was required to do. At the time, I had little reason to doubt the adequacy of the standards (well I did but I hadn't put it all together yet) and I wouldn't have known what to do differently if I had.

If for no other reason than for the sake of discussion, assume that I knew what I was doing based on the standards. After all it's PADI who said that I could teach their class. She didn't freak in the OW class or the AOW class. It happened in the rescue class. It's not like she was sucked in by a cave monster or some other new and interesting problem that no diver would have reason to expect. She was handed an upsidedown reg...a problem that's built into that octo pinned to the torso crap. I agree that there were skill issues and I think that I'd see a case like hers comming today but not because of anything that's required by the agency or built into the training standards.

Current standards don't just certify poorly skilled divers but they also certify poorly skilled instructors.

 

[TSandM]

I don't think that because someone ends up panicking in a given situation, you can necessarily say that their original instructor failed to recognize a problem.

On my third open water dive, my instructor and I began a descent. We got separated, and I (who was still doing all her descents on her back) ended up lying on my tank on the bottom of the bay, all alone. I didn't panic at all; I had been taught a procedure for buddy separation, and I used it, and made a controlled green water ascent. My guess is that my instructor was very surprised and pleased at how completely calm I was about the whole thing.

A couple of weeks ago, I ended up near panic from midwater disorientation.

The difference is that a) I have a lot of training in controlling panic in other settings, and b) I have a LOT of training in diving now, and as a result, I have enough brain working underwater to be able to think even when something is going rather disconcertingly wrong. I also have over 160 dives now, something that PADI's active diver (12 dives per year) would take more than ten YEARS to accumulate.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there was nothing in my original certification that would have warned my instructor that, a year later, I would have a near panic episode. You can argue that I should have been taught better procedures for clearing my mask, or for coping with lack of vision in midwater, and maybe some of that is true. But the core of the concern and the criticism of the casual diver is that, if you dive long enough, you find out that things DO go wrong at times. Equipment DOES fail; the environment WILL stress you. And the casual diver is many times poorly prepared to cope with anything that does not go as it ought, and the maladaptive responses we can come up with when we are unhappy underwater can be lethal.

If a thread full of doomsday predictions makes a few divers think about getting better, or further training, to avoid such events, it is well worthwhile, I think.

 

[Diver Dennis]

I also have over 160 dives now, something that PADI's active diver (12 dives per year) would take more than ten YEARS to accumulate.

Not only the total number of dives Lynne, it's the number of dives a year. How long have you been diving? Around a year? You have far more experience than someone with 300 dives over 20 years in my opinion and it is fresh in your mind. People have to dive regularly to keep skills up to an acceptable level.

Not to mention the drive you have to continually improve.

 

[pakman]

HowieDean, first of all thanks for starting this thread...


It took a while to read between the lines and realize that like-minded people are here and that its ok to ignore all the eltist preaching to find them And yes you are right. I know a handful of divers who read the board for while and decide they don't want to sift through the preaching to find the gems.

:yelclap:

Jarrett, the silent majority is still here in SB... just not as vocal as [ahem, cough...] others...