Is certification necessary for shallow water diving?

[boulderjohn]

The race is not always to the swift, not the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet.
--origin disputed

Are there any instructors who do a really crappy job of teaching? Of course!
Are there some untrained, uncertified divers who can prepare you for basic diving? Of course!

So on the basis of those two points, do you skip certified instructors and go instead with a random friend who promises to show you all you really need to know? For some people, the answer is "Of course!"

 

[thbcthomas]

"Is certification necessary for shallow water diving?" The answer is no.

"Is a parachute necessary to jump out of a perfectly good airplane". The answer is also no.

Is either a certification or a parachute a good idea for either of those above activities? Yes.

PS.... The great thing about scuba diving and skydiving is that if things go wrong, you have the entire rest of your life to figure it all out.

​

Seriously, that is the analogy we are going to use? Jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and diving without a certification card. There are plenty of divers on here that were diving before they had a certification card, and lived to tell about it. I am not sure of any on the board that jumped out of a plane without a parachute and are here to tell us about it.

 

[BoltSnap]

There are plenty of divers on here that were diving before they had a certification card, and lived to tell about it.

And there are MANY uncertified divers who perished while diving or due to diving and never lived to tell about it. There are many more who suffered severe and serious injuries that will be with them for the rest of their lives because they only had partial knowledge of diving but they thought they knew it all. These guys thought they knew it all and could manage it all but they died or got seriously injured in the process. Eventually it caught up with them.


My cousin died 4 days ago diving and doing things he wasn't qualified to do. He has been doing it for many years but it finally caught up with him and died. His body was recovered from a 70 meter depth. He is survived by his elderly mother, my mother's first cousin, his wife and three little daughters.

 

[Belzelbub]

Certification is not necessary to dive. A certification card is merely a means to show that a certain level of training has been satisfactorily completed. Training is really the key to keeping safe.

An untrained diver can absolutely do a dive in shallow water and live to tell about it. Their odds on a successful outcome increase with training. The training is more about teaching the diver some rules of physics that can’t be ignored (don’t hold your breath) and also giving the diver some skills to cope with some problems that may arise (mask/regulator recovery, air sharing, etc.)

How much training is needed will depend on the diver and the dive. It’s not one size fits all. Personally, for me, I’m not taking anyone diving off my boat that isn’t certified. Too much can go wrong, leaving me open to potential legal issues. Plus, I’m not wanting to babysit an untrained diver. I will, and have, taken newer divers out for easier dives to ease them into it, but they’ve all been trained and had the background knowledge so I didn’t have to check them every second.

 

[boulderjohn]

When I was certified back in the last millennium, a number of required skills were skipped. I didn't realize it until I was working on my DM and had to learn how to demonstrate those skipped skills. I went back to my original log book and saw that I had not noticed that the instructor had signed off that I had successfully completed skills that in reality I had never attempted.

That was when I realized why dive operators could get away with such behavior and why you don't need to be professionally certified. Most of what happens in scuba instruction is teaching you what to do when things go wrong. After that, the next biggest part of the course is improving basic diving skills.

So you can be a bit of a clumsy diver at first with minimal training, but you will be OK as long as things don't go wrong.

 

[NW Dive Dawg]

Seriously, that is the analogy we are going to use? Jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and diving without a certification card. There are plenty of divers on here that were diving before they had a certification card, and lived to tell about it. I am not sure of any on the board that jumped out of a plane without a parachute and are here to tell us about it.

"We" are not using that analogy. I am the only one that used it. The point is the word "necessary"...

It's not a good idea to dive without a cert.....and definitely a stupid flipp'n idea to jump from a plane without a chute..... But neither a cert or a chute is necessary!

 

[thbcthomas]

Certification is not necessary to dive. A certification card is merely a means to show that a certain level of training has been satisfactorily completed. Training is really the key to keeping safe.

An untrained diver can absolutely do a dive in shallow water and live to tell about it. Their odds on a successful outcome increase with training. The training is more about teaching the diver some rules of physics that can’t be ignored (don’t hold your breath) and also giving the diver some skills to cope with some problems that may arise (mask/regulator recovery, air sharing, etc.)

How much training is needed will depend on the diver and the dive. It’s not one size fits all. Personally, for me, I’m not taking anyone diving off my boat that isn’t certified. Too much can go wrong, leaving me open to potential legal issues. Plus, I’m not wanting to babysit an untrained diver. I will, and have, taken newer divers out for easier dives to ease them into it, but they’ve all been trained and had the background knowledge so I didn’t have to check them every second.

@Belzelbub thanks for the well thought out and well written response. You mention teaching the diver some rules of physics that can't be ignored (don't hold your breath) and also mask /regulator recovery. My issue is, that is basically all a person learns in some open water courses. That info can only be learned in a certification course?

I was at a dive site in Cozumel and there were some newly certified divers that needed help getting the bc and reg setup properly. Certification standards need to be higher.

 

[boulderjohn]

@Belzelbub thanks for the well thought out and well written response. You mention teaching the diver some rules of physics that can't be ignored (don't hold your breath) and also mask /regulator recovery. My issue is, that is basically all a person learns in some open water courses.

As I said above, all you need to know to dive is learned in the first few minutes of a course. If that is all a course teaches, the instructor needs to be reported.

 

[Bob DBF]

I was at a dive site in Cozumel and there were some newly certified divers that needed help getting the bc and reg setup properly. Certification standards need to be higher.

The published standards are high enough, Standards Downloads - WRSTC , but there is no quality control in place to insure instructors actually follow those standards. Students have no idea what they should be taught, it's hard for then to make a judgment and complain, so nothing happens until there is an accident in training, and maybe not even then.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

The published standards are high enough, Standards Downloads - WRSTC , but there is no quality control in place to insure instructors actually follow those standards. Students have no idea what they should be taught, it's hard for then to make a judgment and complain, so nothing happens until there is an accident in training, and maybe not even then.

Strange that I didn’t see NAUI listed in the RSTC list of agencies.??