Is it fair to bring all new gear to my AOW class?

[CT-Rich]

Some shops and public pools will have times available to dick around with your new toys and do things like a weight check. You might call around to find out your options.

I think writing additional materials on to the SDI standards is a great added value feature, but would be concerned if an instructor was declining to give the certification for SDI based on something other than the SDI standards. Giving additional instructional time to make someone a better diver is a great idea, but at the end of the day, the card says they met the SDI standards. Also, diving supposed to be fun, if someone does not have a fun, positive experience in class, you really can’t expect the sport to grow. If any significant number drop out of AOW on the second day, I would be concerned that was a failure of instruction. It’s a different matter with certifications outside traditional recreational diving, like cave, fundies or deco.

I may be reading more into it than I should, but I hope that you are giving students the chance to master the skills rather than not succede.

 

[wedivebc]

I assume you will be using this equipment for years to come. What better way to learn and get used to your new equipment than to do AOW with it.

 

[rongoodman]

I showed up at mine with a brand new Halcyon BP/Wing. I seem to remember a comment from the instructor about "fancy gear". I'm still diving with it 12 years later.

 

[Jackie Treehorn]

That's pretty much what I did.

After getting OW certified, my next dive trip was to do the AOW. I showed up with a full kit.

You will be using new gear to you regardless of which way you go. Either new gear your purchased and could learn on under the eye of an instructor, or rental gear you are unfamiliar with that you will return after the training.

If you are planning to make the commitment to new gear over renting... doing it before the training makes good sense.

There is a bit of a down side though. As you dive more you will determine what you like and what you do not. So you might end up with the desire to replace some perfectly good equipment. I know I did. In hindsight, I wouldn't have changed anything.

 

[boulderjohn]

If you don't have your buoyancy and trim along with basic skills down, you won't enjoy my class. There's a good chance you wouldn't pass it or even make it through to the second day.

I hesitated a long time before replying to this.

Jim is obviously proud of his approach, but it is absolutely not my approach. He evidently sees AOW as a high achievement, whereas I see it as the next training step after OW, a major step leading toward future high achievement The primary purpose of the class when it was conceived (by LA County and then NAUI) was to expose divers to a variety of diving experiences to pique their interest in a previously untested aspect of diving. It was never intended to achieve a level of diving skill. (I will qualify that later.)

A diver taking an AOW class is quite likely to have trouble with buoyancy and trim, because most OW instructors do not put enough emphasis on that. I know that, and I am ready for it. We will spend a lot of time with that on every dive, even if the student does not opt for the Peak Performance Buoyancy dive. In my experience, students can make great progress this way. When done, they should have come a long way from their OW training level, but I don't pretend they will be diving gods. That is something they will work toward in future diving as they apply the skills they learned in their AOW class.

Here is my qualification on what I said earlier. If you look at old videos of divers in the 1950s and 1960s, including the Jacques Cousteau films, you will see a lot of pretty poor diving skills by today's standards. In the History of NAUI co-written by chief NAUI founder Al Tillman, the authors say they believed that at the time that history was written, the average new OW diver was more skilled than the average instructor at the 1960 meeting that led to NAUI's founding. I recently heard a long time instructor say that up through the early 1970s, instructional agencies believed that the OW class taught everything there was to know about diving skill. People today who say that the skills taught then in the OW class were broken down into advanced classes and specialties are wrong. The advanced skills and specialties, and especially the skills associated with technical diving, were not taught then. Thus, if you took the Advanced Open Water class in the late 11960s, you really were, by those standards, an advanced diver. Things have changed since then, but the name of the certification has not.

 

[boulderjohn]

I thought I would give a description of the diving of someone rightly regarded as one of the reat names in diving history--Sheck Exley, arguably the father of modern cave diving. A book he was working on when he died, The Taming of the Slough, details the history of the mapping of the Peacock Springs cave system, but it was almost never written, because Exley was very lucky to have lived through his first adventure there. He got lost in the cave and only survived because he found a crack to the surface. I admit that I did not read the book, but I did read an article in which people tried to recreate that dive in the hope of finding the crack that saved him. I, unfortunately, cannot find that article now. The details of his dive will make modern cave diver's cringe because he violates pretty much all the safe cave diving rules he was later to create, but that is not why I am writing this. I am writing to describe one aspect of his diving that illustrates how diving in general was done then as an illustration of something I wrote about in my last post.

In trying to find the route he took in that first dive, the writers of the article had to recreate how he did the dive. He was diving with a single LP steel 72, a heavy single tank, with no buoyancy control device. He was a fit young man in his late teens. He had started diving in 1965 at age 16, and this event was not long after that. He would swim along for a while, using his swimming effort to maintain his depth, and then drop to the floor to rest before setting out again. Think about that for a while. That to him was how diving was done. That was right about the time that the AOW certification was created.

 

[Cert1967]

Me? I would go with Lapenta.

A better OW diver under his tutelage.

And

An accomplished diver at the end of his AOW course, ready to go places, enjoy diving, and be safe.

 

[Jackie Treehorn]

Me? I would go with Lapenta.

A better OW diver under his tutelage.

And

An accomplished diver at the end of his AOW course, ready to go places, enjoy diving, and be safe.

Versus what?

Seems like this topic has devolved from the OP's original question and turned into an ego stroke.

 

[dmcutter]

Getting back to the OP's question, I'm in the camp of try it out first, if only in the pool. My AOW was not as harrowing as OW, except maybe following in line in a blackout mask, but task loading while dealing with unfamiliar or misadjusted gear will definitely detract from whatever skill you're working on in the class.

And as far as diving with no hood in 65 degree water? I can't imagine it. The first time I hit the 68 degree thermocline in our quarry with no hood, I had instant brain freeze and immediately headed up to get my hood.

 

[MichaelMc]

If not now, when? (from a Batman movie)

Wear the new gear.