Is certification necessary for shallow water diving?

[CuzzA]

An article posted last month that addresses the issue.

Buddy Diving: Legal Liabilities

If your dive buddy gets hurt or dies, could you be found liable in a court of law? In a word, yes.

www.scubadiving.com

 

[boulderjohn]

I think a reason for certification is a desire for the dive operations providing diving services to have some sort of indication that they aren't going to get sued for giving an unqualified customer the means to get killed. You can argue that giving each customer a personal test would do a better job, but think how impractical that would be.

At a diving conference I attended, a speaker gave an early example of this. He was on a boat in Australia in the late 1960s, preparing for a week of serious diving, but the captain insisted that no one could dive without a certification card. He explained that his father had taught him to dive when he was only 7 years old, and he had completed thousands of dives over the years. Nope. The captain would not let him dive. Finally, the rest of the crew convinced the captain to allow this one exception. As soon as he was back in the USA, he went to the local PADI office and got certified.

His name is Jean-Michel Cousteau, the second human to breathe from a regulator.

 

[Pavao]

I am not here to say it is not necessary to get certified, but I would like to have a discussion and hear other people’s opinions. Do you believe that from a safety stand point, it is necessary to get certified if you plan to stay in the 40 foot range? I know, “No shop will rent or sell you gear!”

My oldest son was certified at age 14, and the shop allowed me to be in the pool with him to observe. Needless to say I not was super thrilled at the extent of his training. No real work on buoyancy, just kneel on the bottom and clear your mask, remove your primary and grab your octo, take your buddies octo for out of air practice, etc… At that point I knew I was not comfortable with him doing deepish dives. I did take him to a pool we had access to, and we worked on his buoyancy, and after a minute his buoyancy was better than mine. Because I was not comfortable with his training, we have stuck to Blue Heron bridge and Lauderdale by the sea. In those very easy dives, he did great. Also the book work was not very through, mostly at home computer stuff. Dive tables were briefly looked over, and as we were looking over them with the instructor, I realized how little I remembered about them after my certification 20 years prior. The instructor did say something along the line of “Just get a computer and you won’t need to know the tables.” This shop is no longer open today. I feel as if I wasted money on his certification.

Part of the reason I ask is because I have friends that have shown interest in diving. I have allowed them to use my back up gear and we swam around in a pool. They did great, no problems at all. One friend and I went to a small private lake and swam around. He asked me, “Why should I spend $1,000 on certification when you have all the gear I need? Plus the computer tells me everything I need to know.”

Sorry for the late night ramblings, I am on some pain medications.

What I read from this is, your son had such poor quality of training that it made you uncomfortable letting him do deepish dives.
Because he had such poor quality of training, you therefore concluded that no training at all is needed to do shallow dives.

A famous diver wrote an article once, where he wanted to make the case that solo tech diving is safer than buddy tech diving, the reason being that buddies are careless and can run out of air (one example) and put him at danger.

It's a flawed thinking, replace the defective aspect of the equation, not eliminate it. It's true some buddies are more of a liability than an asset, but the problem isn't the buddy system, it's the quality (of training) of that specific buddy.

When your SPG breaks, you don't just reason that SPGs are dangerous and useless, removing it from your gear, you just replace it with a working one.


Sorry if this has already been pointed out, I did not read the thread.

 

[heftysmurf]

@scubadada Why is it ok to take my son diving in forgiving environments, but not a friend that is a United States Marine? Just because my son has his certification?

Again, i am not saying people should not get certified. I am also not loading up people to take them diving. I am just curious.

I mean, I was in the Navy but I didn't just get given a USCG 100 ton license.

I'm relatively new at diving BUT, I have had, in my opinion, excellent training. I'm also one of those that caught the bug and I'm all for learning just for the sake of learning, and to be a good buddy for my wife when she gets certified this summer.

Your son received the fundamentals of OW, the same that you received, the same that I received. I didn't go out the following day and say, "Boom..perfect!" No, I go on class dives with the shop when they're teaching others and I continue to practice my skills. Chill beach dive where an instructor has their class and you get carry the flag = forgiving environment. You and your son can work together having the fundamentals of what to do. Your friend who's in the Corps hasn't received that foundational training. They don't teach that in boot camp. Just which flavor crayons to avoid!

 

[OMyMyOHellYes]

@thbcthomas
Just skip the training. Diving without an ISO 24801-2 certification is not against the law.

And I agree, paying $1000 for certification (and course materials, gear rental, instruction) is wasted money. Spending that money on a wheelchair in case you end up like @BoltSnap has illustrated, is a much better (and tangible) investment.

The really good thing about diving without that ISO certification, is that you won't be afraid of what you don't know. Diving without worries! No knowledge of pressure change, or why the shallow depths are actually the most dangerous parts of a dive.

And if the brown stuff hits the fan..... blame Mother Nature, hold her liable and sue her in court for restoring the balance.
Maybe sue Darwin as well, in case he handed out an award.

Snark aside -

Education is education. Certification is certification. They are different. Wise people do not confuse the two.

In flying and shooting and scuba, I've gained far more education from going with crusty, experienced pilots and shooters and divers than anything learned from a wet-behind-the-ears snot-nosed instructor.

 

[Miyaru]

Snark aside -

Education is education. Certification is certification. They are different. Wise people do not confuse the two.

In flying and shooting and scuba, I've gained far more education from going with crusty, experienced pilots and shooters and divers than anything learned from a wet-behind-the-ears snot-nosed instructor.

Wet behind the ears, snot-nosed ..... that's quite often the situation, right after leaving the water. Guilty as charged!

 

[OMyMyOHellYes]

"C-cards? We don't need no stinkin C-cards"

Just buy some gear off Craigslist making sure the tank you bought is full, watch the first season of Sea Hunt, go and dive. If you cant learn everything you need to know from Mike Nelson, then watch Robert Shaw in The Deep.

No No NO. You don't watch The Deep for Robert Shaw. you watch The Deep for a 1977 Jacqueline Bissette and related flotation/buoyancy devices. A lot of buoyancy technique to absorb. Might require stopping playback and rewatching.

 

[Bob DBF]

I think a reason for certification is a desire for the dive operations providing diving services to have some sort of indication that they aren't going to get sued for giving an unqualified customer the means to get killed. You can argue that giving each customer a personal test would do a better job, but think how impractical that would be.

By giving each customer a personal test, you do not remove the liability for their ability from you. With a c-card, the liability for their training and ability rests on another.

 

[Seaweed Doc]

Several random thoughts:

1. Who taught you to drive is not really the appropriate analogy. It's who examined your driving knowledge and skill and licensed you to drive that matters. In the case of Open Water Diver training, the training and examination are done by the same person, generally. It's the agency that issues the "license" however. As an aside, PADI instructors are trained to be instructors by one person, but examined by an agency employee. You can argue whether that agency employee examination is rigorous enough, but I think the separation between training and examination is a good thing. With drivers' licenses, you're trained by one person, but examined and licensed by somebody else. At least where I live.

2. I'm confused by the "my son didn't get educated on buoyancy control" notion (my words, not a direct quote) and "is it necessary to be certified to dive to 40'?" It's that top 40' where buoyancy control is most critical. I was working with a pair of Advanced students over the weekend, and we did "peak performance buoyancy" as one of the dives. One of them clued in very quickly and wanted to know what depth they'd do the skills. (He joked that he'd like to do them at 60' rather than 10'.)

3. Regarding the USMC buddy. Have you never known a marine to do something stupid? I'm reminded of a guy that delivered a new refrigerator to our house decades ago. He saw my cylinders as he brought it through the garage and we started chatting about diving. I mentioned I was a marine biologist. He responded with "oh wow, we have something in common. I was a marine." All I could say was "yes you were." ( I've known some marines that I'd entrust my kids to, and have, but this just wasn't one of them. Spare a moment to think of my friend who's dying of ALS, and was an amazing, compassionate and dedicated PTA volunteer, even after his kids were out of school....)

4. On failure rate: Some would argue that a high failure rate implies bad instruction. I'm not that person, but a high failure rate alone tells you nothing. I'd also note that outside of instructors themselves, I'm not sure who really is tracking the data on failure rate. In my experience, in any group of 8 students a fraction will fail. Some thoughts on why:

a. Student anxiety in the water, often combined with inability to control airways and an unwillingness to try and learn.

b. Poor instruction: I failed more early as an instructor than I do now, but I've also become better at teaching skills that never challenged me but do challenge my students. I might be able to do it one way, but for them it's critical to do it just a bit differently. I imagine there are instructors out there that will wash their hands of a student who fails initially. I tend to keep working with them until they pass, as long as they want to keep trying. (But I'm also doing this as a side gig, not trying to make money.)

c. Inability to swim. This is most common reason for me to pull somebody aside and say "look, you need to get a lot more comfortable in the water before we go on."

d. Lack of commitment. I've had folks fall ill for the second day of open water dives, and despite repeated attempts on my part to re-book them they never seem to be available. (And this isn't a phobia thing, it's a "learning to dive is not a high priority" thing.

e. Inability to learn a skill and a tight timeline. "I'm going to Hawaii in a couple weeks and want to learn to dive so I can go out with my daughter." Great, but after 4 OW dives you're not ready.

I suppose this also questions what is failure? This isn't like a class where if you fail you have to re-take the whole thing again (though some do). Has a student "failed" if they don't get all the skills and competences in the standard course, but make up deficiencies later?

 

[Bob DBF]

Who taught you to drive is not really the appropriate analogy. It's who examined your driving knowledge and skill and licensed you to drive that matters.

Although you are correct, a drivers licence gives one the legal ability to drive on public roads, while a c-card is not a licence, and is not legally necessary to scuba dive.