Sounds like you are acting in the capacity of an instructor. Of course, I am assuming that you are an instructor.
Phil Ellis
www.divesports.com
I don't see the relevance of your question to the topic at hand.
Instructor, smuctor, who would provide better mentoring beyond the pool, a guy like ZKY with much experience in real world diving or the dive chick/dude PadI instructor with 12 dives total, 5 logged in the pool? Okay, 14.
N
Yup.
Regardless of the competence of the OW instructor, taking away a new diver's BC invalidates a great deal of OW training and creates a huge liability.
Terry
I'd say that showing a new diver how to work without a BC will do more to advance his diving than just about anything else you could do. What's the big deal, is it so hard to teach someone to drop their weightbelt if something goes wrong?
Well, actually, OW students are taught and trained that it is a "life jacket" of sorts and is used as such when on the surface. Regardless of your opinion, it is part of the training and is taught and tested.
You might not want a BC and are certainly welcome to not use one, however taking a newly certified diver and convincing him to give it up is just begging for a fatality and a lawsuit, since every OOA emergency procedure taught in OW ends with the diver on the surface, inflating his BC.
Terry
Given the current length of courses I'm sure that those skills are not exactly etched into muscle memory.
Don't care what the agencies say, it is a free country and in a free country adults get to choose. The lemmings follow each other off the cliff, they still all drown. You guys always go off the deep end like "your gonna die" if you do this or that or don't follow this PadI memo. Who cares about that crap, they have no legal standing, people can do as they please and they are free to learn another way, a way that does not require an air bag to buoy them up. ...
Agreed.
I would take issue with that ... the only thing that limits skill and enjoyment is an individual's desire and effort. Any piece of gear can be a tool or a crutch ... depending on how it gets used.
All gear is a double edged sword ... using a tool requires skill, using a crutch requires a deficit that needs to be compensated for, I know, that you know, that there's a big difference.
I have no idea what PADI says. I never mentioned them and don't work with them, so you're on their own there. I also never said you would die. However brand new OW divers have been taught to use a BC and it's required for a significant portion of their emergency procedures.
Beginning divers have not really learned much or anything, there is still lots of room for mentoring them into a better place.
I think this is one of the single most disastrous practices in OW training today, teaching students that a BC is a big safety tube on the surface and overweighting them to make it easy on the instructors. This is where I agree with the DIR philosophy 100% about the atrocities commited by these so called instructors that weight their students like anchors to make sure they stay down so they can get the skills over with on their knees then kick them loose and tell them good luck.
A BC IS NOT a life jacket and it even says so on the inside tag of every BC and wing I've ever seen.
In almost every case for exception of super gear intensive tech diving with minimal exposure protection the diver should be positive at the surface with no air in a wing or BC. At the end of a dive the diver should be neutral at 10 to 15 feet with all air expelled from the BC and should be able to hold a perfect stop using breath control exlcusively. This is the definition of peak buoyancy.
There was a guy who died in Southern California 50 feet from the beach in 15 feet of
water because his BC inflator hose came off at the BC connection. He was overweighted and all the air escaped in a second from the BC sending him straight to the bottom before he could utter a sound. He was tired from the surface swim and had an empty tank. He fumbled trying to get his integrated weights out and get his junk off but wasn't able to do it. He panicked and drowned right there almost to the beach. His buddy was ahead of him and made it through the surf zone. When he looked back to see how his buddy was doing he was nowhere in sight. Just a minute earlier they where talking and laughing getting ready to hit the surf zone. His last words were "Here we go, see you on the beach".
This is what overweighting and counting on a bag full of air to keep you floating will get you,... dead.
There, I said it.
And I'm glad that you did.
I meant exactly what I said. Telling a new diver to get rid of equipment that the mainstream agencies use as an integral part of their safety protocol would be a very big liability in the event anything bad happens to the new diver. The OP would essentially be re-training the diver how to dive, which would put him in the same position as any of the training agencies, however he would be lacking a curriculum, lawyers and insurance.
If anything bad happened, a good lawyer would have a field day.
Terry
The "mainstream agencies" do a singularly poor job of defining what one needs to dive (especially in challenging environments like the NORCAL coast).
Just like PhilEllis, it sounds to me that you are acting as your friend's instructor. Are you an instructor?
Who cares, and why do they care?
He's acting as a
mentor. His friend is already certified OW.
I think, at least for PADI, a
mentor is the next step above Course Director?
Just kidding. A little.
Very little.
Well said.
Given the choice between a good mentor and the "average" freshly-minted, less than 2,000-dive instructor, I'll trust myself and family with the mentor.
While we might argue about numbers I agree with you sentiment.
What potshots? ...Oh you mean how instructors overweight students during open water then those divers go on diving like that thinking that's the way it should be done because god almighty instructor said so, then they die 50 feet from the beach when their inflator hose breaks off their BC and they sink like a rock, those potshots??
Yeah, I'll take the potshots.
Bang! Shooting fish in a barrel.
This has very little to do with a torn hose and everything to do with ignoring training.
A torn inflator hose would have been a non-event if the diver followed
almost any of his training and did any one of these:
Before the dive:
During the Dive:
- Gas Management
- Buddy distance and awareness (Just like the Tango, losing a buddy takes two inattentive divers.)
During the Emergency:
- Buddy grabs his butt and they share air back to the surface.
- Ditch weights and swim to surface
- Ditch entire BC including weights and swim to surface
This event (wherever/whenever it was) has everything to do with ignoring training and very little to do with BCs.
I can say this with great confidence because I actually had one of these little eye-openers on the Santa Rosa wall in Cozumel on my #7 dive. You know what happened? Nothing. The hose ripped off at the elbow, I showed the torn hose to the DM, he shrugged his shoulders, and I gave him the thumb and surfaced.
Darwin will only wait just so long before picking someone out of the gene pool. If somoene dives over-weighted with no buddy and no gas management, eventually something bad will happen.
You will learn nothing, nothing at all, about teaching, training, or mentoring on the NORCAL coast whilst diving in the warm, calm, gin clear waters of Cozumel.
I like those wetsuit tops with the attached hood and zip down... and beaver tail. Where do you get those? Do they have a web site?
Thanks
Many custom shops. BTW: the zipper is completely unnecessary except for remarkably endowed, thin women of short stature, and even then the zipper is better fit from the armpit down to the waist.
I get the feeling you work somewhere in the industry, is that true?
You cannot deny that training has suffered over the years with almost all OW agencies
accross the board. The bigger the machine gets the more fuel it requires to keep it running. Agencies need more sources of people to run through their system to take more classes to become DM's to become instuctors to teach more students, and all the while the standards get decreased to be able to accept people that are younger or weaker, or more overweight, or not as comfortable in the water, can't handle their gear, or can't swim or tread water well or whatever. The dive shops capitalize on all this by selling gear that compensates for all these inadequacies like big poofy jackets with levers, new fins that don't require much effort to use, dry snorkels so people don't have to be bothered with knowing how to clear a snorkel, fancy computers so people don't have to waste time learning the basic tables (no time for that. They need to get the next class in - that's another $300 bucks a head waiting) and the list goes on. What about the classes. Every single little thing is a specialty and requires another card and more money. So with all this you're telling me it's not a fleecing machine?
If you want to believe there is no fleecing machine then fine don't believe it. I've demonstrated way beyond reasonable doubt that it is a fleecing machine and at 100% markup on most items in a dive shop (which is one of the only industries left to enjoy such a healthy markup) this only adds a little icing on the cake.
I'm so glad I live in a free country where we are allowed to expose things we see as, in a way, corrupt or dishonest. I see the whole established dive industry as bordering on a conspiracy. I don't necessarily think this was intentional, but it seems that this pattern I described kind of fell in place. Now days I think they see what they have and will go to any length to protect the machine that has developed. It's all corporate big business.
I am a radical of sorts. I, on my own, removed myself from the dogma of what the standard is today. I saw many pitfalls with how it is now. All this was actually way before I was on scubaboard and knew any of the other minimalists here.
I even went as far as to develop my own minimalist backplate called the freedom plate because I couldn't find anything that suited my imagination of the direction I wanted to go in diving, so I created my own.
I don't regret posting the initial thread about the mentorship one bit. I like food for thought, and given my foreward thinking views I thought some people might be enlightened by the minimalist idea. I knew there would be some flack from naysayers but it went a little futher than that. I'm not surprised though.
When you say "potshots" I see that as "debating". that's why I like this country, becase we are allowed to debate ideas without going to jail.
Before there can be a debate, there has to be a conflict. If we are all on the same page there is no conflict. So, I point out what I see wrong and you call it potshots and presto we have a conflict. If everything was honky dory why then would so many of us decide to seek out minimalism?
It reminds me of one particular political party that claims they are all into freedom of speech and liberty, but as soon as someone disagrees with them they call them fascists when in reality THEY are the fascists.
Sorry that you see my independant thinking as a threat to you somehow.
Sorry to say it but minimalism is here to stay.
Minimalist was here first.
Have fun with your group ZKY. Sounds like a great time with good folks!!
I was thinking proper weighting might be more difficult where you dive (with a 7mm) than with the thinner wetsuits my friends and I used to wear here in Hawaii (old USD beaver tail 2-piece, that I guess was approx. equivalent to a modern 5mm in buoyancy).
On reflection, we just had to solve opposite problems: Your 7mm's have more reserve buoyancy at the surface that can be regained by ditching weights compared to our thinner suits, but we had less buoyancy to lose due to compression at depth...
Anyway, looking beyond the "grumpy" parts, this thread has gotten me all nostalgic, since most of my dives were made using a plastic campack-type harness and later a crude aluminum backplate with bent aluminum arms instead of shoulder straps that seems to have been unique to Hawaii at that time... and of course no BC
What I'm moving toward here in Hawai's is a thin suit, small belt, old plastic backpack and my Fenzy
for emergency flotation.
