Liability of Agencies for their instructors??

[wetb4igetinthewater]

Nope, they were in general negative and had to keep moving and kicking to stay off the bottom.

I took my original training in 1979. We worked very little on buoyancy. Skills were on our knees.

That's interesting. But you were on a BCD, right? As per How BCD’s Transformed Diving Almost Overnight - it was invented 9 years prior. Or were you in a horse collar?

I'm curious how training was prior, and also prior to the invention of the horse collar. If only Dr. Miller was around.

 

[boulderjohn]

There is a certain amount of practicality of grathering students in a group on their knees.

In the days before the invention of anything to control buoyancy, it would not be genius. How else would you do it?

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

In the days before the invention of anything to control buoyancy, it would not be genius. How else would you do it?

Underwater nail gun

 

[Landau]

. But you were on a BCD, right?

Nope, Horse Collar. Manual inflate plus a CO2 cartridge for emergency.

BCDs existed but only as pictures in magazines. Same with Alternate second stages. In the words of my instructor “Those are for rich guys, and you’re not rich”

Many regulators only had 1 or 2 LP ports. I remember an ad in a magazine saying how great it was to be able to plug both an Octo and a BCD into their new reg.

Edited to add: I was in a very small town. Our LDS was a corner of the local sporting goods store with a few tanks, regs, masks and fins. You had to walk past the hockey sticks and curling brooms to get to it. The instructor came for a week or so from the big city with the rental gear.

It was about 2 years later they had a couple of BCDs for sale in the shop.

 

[boulderjohn]

Here is a rough and highly incomplete description of the the development of instruction. The purpose is to highlight the step-by-step evolution, showing how one step was indebted to what went before. (I am writing this from memory--I could make minor errors.)

1. In 1951, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California created scuba classes in response to the death of a diver in Berkeley. They made it all up out of nothing, learning how to dive themselves first, brainstorming what could possibly go wrong, figuring out what to do if it did, and designing a way to teach it all.

2. In the later 1950s, Los Angeles County sent Al Tillman to Scripps to take the class and learn how to teach it. He brought it back to Los Angeles, and that became the Los Angeles program.

3. Scuba was also being taught by a wide variety of people across the country, including in YMCA classes. There was no established way to do it. Al Tillman (and others) decided to take the Los Angeles program nationwide, although he could not, of course, use the local tax money that had been funding it. He hosted a gathering of various instructors in Houston in 1960, and that led to the creation of NAUI. Tillman became NAUI Instructor #1. The core of the program was the original Scripps program, but they openly allowed the instructors from other backgrounds to add their own stuff. Many of those instructors were originally trained in the military. One of those additions that was not part of the Scripps program, for example, was harassment--removing masks, shutting off air, etc.

4. Tillman tried to maintain the Los Angeles structure, but without a tax base, he was dependent upon donations to replace it, and much of that came from Skin Diver magazine. When that relationship ended, they struggled to survive. They focused on university students for their customers, because their already-paid tuition made the courses essentially free. In 1965, they decided they were overextended nationally, and they retreated to California. In doing so, they canceled a major instructor training session scheduled for Chicago. The Chicago branch of NAUI was furious, and they responded by forming PADI.

5. [This part may possibly come just before the end of the last part--not sure.] Los Angeles County was frustrated that so many of their students quit diving shortly after being certified. In an attempt to get them to continue diving, they added a course--Advanced Open Water. They hoped that by introducing people to a variety of kinds of diving, their interest might be piqued. NAUI adopted the program right after that. (I am not sure when PADI picked it up.)

SUMMARY: The original Scripps program in 1951 was the core of instruction throughout the formative years of scuba instruction, and most of what happened during those years was a matter of tweaking. Instructors coming from outside of that tradition, especially instructors coming with military background, brought additional stuff that many older divers may have experienced and assumed were mainstream activities.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

The cost of living in Northern California is high but there are a lot of affluent people. I see them buying fancy toys (like carbon mountain bikes) and taking luxury vacations. The dive industry's woes can't really be blamed on local economic conditions.

San Francisco/ San Jose/ Silicon Valley / is not Sonoma or Mendocino County. We are normal up here. There is a hell of a lot more money down there. In fact there’s enough money that they don’t need to dive locally to get their fix, they can fly off to wherever they want to go diving. If I was in tech and made that kind of money I wouldn’t dive locally either.
But even so, there are still less people getting into diving than before regardless if there is money for it or not. Yes, they are spending thousands on carbon bikes, but bicycling is not diving.

 

[boulderjohn]

Nope, they were in general negative and had to keep moving and kicking to stay off the bottom.

I took my original training in 1979. We worked very little on buoyancy. Skills were on our knees.

Sheck Exley wrote of his earliest cave exploration, and the details would make you shudder. He would kick to stay up in the water column, and he would periodically rest by lying on the bottom.

 

[boulderjohn]

Our LDS was a corner of the local sporting goods store with a few tanks, regs, masks and fins. You had to walk past the hockey sticks and curling brooms to get to it. The instructor came for a week or so from the big city with the rental gear.

My cousin learned to dive in the early 1960s, and that is where he got his gear and his instruction. The instruction came from the salesman, and it took about 5 minutes. He had nothing like a BCD when he dove--just a wetsuit for buoyancy. He was never certified.

That leads to a follow-up to my previous history lesson.

In the early 1960s, John Gaffney owned such a store, and he formed the National Association of Skin Diving Stores (NASDS) with the goal of promoting the sale of skin diving (scuba) gear. He realized the need for more extensive instruction at the stores, and he changed the name to the National Association of Skin Diving Schools. NASDS was later purchased by a scuba shop owner in Tennessee, Doug McNeese. He brought his marketing techniques into the organization. He later merged NASDS with SSI, and then he bought out the SSI people to become sole owner. SSI was later sold to Head (Mares), but I believe McNeese is still a leader.

At about the same time that NASDS was deciding that the people purchasing scuba equipment was a better market than the NAUI choice of university students, PADI was created by the Chicago NAUI branch, and they came to the same conclusion. They, too, focused on providing instruction through local dive shops. The biggest difference was that NASDS/SSI stayed more true to its roots as a organization of stores selling equipment, which is why SSI instructors must work for a dive shop and cannot instruct independently.

 

[tursiops]

My first scuba class was at Northwestern University when I was a grad student, in 1966. It had no agency affiliation, was taught by a Phys Ed grad student, used double-hose regs, and was in the classroom and pool. We could not do any open-water dives because Lake Michigan was frozen over. I took it again in 1967 (and helped with the class because other than the instructor, I was the most experienced person in the class) and again did no open-water dives because the Lake was frozen over again.
We had backpacks and weight belts...no BCDs, no buoyancy of any kind, and spent our time in the pool either swimming or on the bottom.

I did one open-water dive in Malta in 1970 with a borrowed single-hose reg and Fenzy vest, then took a real class (NAUI) in 1982 with a BCD....and were on our knees in the pool work. Buoyancy was certainly important, but more for air consumption than anything else. The diving idols of he time (Cousteau's folks and Mike Nelson) were certainly not concerned about staying off the bottom.

 

[diver42]

I think what’s lacking in today’s local dive scene is a sense of community.

I guess it depends on where you are. My first local dive shop had a pretty good group of people, but it was small. My current shop is relentless about building a local community, with local trash pickups at the park, fun dives at the local training site, and a lot of continuing education as a result.