My first brush with scuba

[FinnMom]

You might greatly benefit from time spent in basic gear (mask, snorkel, fins) in a lake, shallow bay or other water if a pool is not available.

You say the fins are comfortable enough for the first 2-3 hours. That's 4-6x longer than most divers would be wearing them at any one time. Poor fit will cause problems, but some discomfort might be due just to the fact that you are new to this. I used to get sore soles in my feet after every single (~30 min) dive. I think I was nervous and instead of forgetting about the movement and letting it be natural, I was unconciously flexing the sole of my foot on every single stroke, as though I had to flex with my toes to make the fin move. In time I felt more comfortable with the fact that the shoe pocket and strap will keep the fin on and all I had to do was move my whole leg from the hip. Time in the pool w/ just mask, snorkel & fins will help you get more more accustomed to the proper movements. Swimmers use the kicking board to teach them to kick properly from the hip; you might find this useful too. I also found that my muscles needed to get used to new activities. Even though I had been an active swimmer for years, on my try-it dive my calves cramped every few strokes, on my first dives maybe every 10 min.s or so, then after the first summer only rarely.

And I agree with what the others say that you need an instructor with more time and who can give you more feedback. We were taught to always let the student know when he is doing something right or well, not just focus on what needs to be corrected. Learning scuba is very different, foreign and new skill set and the student deserves a more active, supportive, helpful response. It sounded to me like you were progressing just fine and are a normal student, but you should have had more time to practise and more feedback on your efforts and progress.

 

[rongoodman]

Have you considered a back or side stroke for the swim test? It will give you more opportunity to relax and pace yourself, and there's no requirement that you do the crawl stroke.

 

[Searcaigh]

Have you considered a back or side stroke for the swim test? It will give you more opportunity to relax and pace yourself, and there's no requirement that you do the crawl stroke.

I only do the breast stroke

 

[Jim Lapenta]

I agree that one weekend is not enough to get comfortable with all the skills. 4 hours in the pool each day does translate into 8 hours in the pool but at some point many people get tired, cold, bored, or overloaded mentally and at that point the learning process stops. I limit my students to 2 hours in the water per session. Those are spread out over several weeks. If we are meeting once a week it's an 8 week course.

The first session students don't even see a scuba unit. Well they do as they are in the pool area but they don't put one on. It's all swimming, snorkeling, and skin diving. Usually I teach less than 4 people and lately it's all private one on one classes. You say when you have a target to reach swimming is easier. Did they pair you up with a buddy and make that the target? That you reach the goal as a team? I do not allow racing during swim tests. You are paired up with a buddy and expected/required to stay with that buddy for the entire swim. With the tread float you and your buddy are always within reach of each other and use that time to converse and encourage each other.

A two hour classroom session precedes the first pool session and equalization techniques are gone over in detail using anatomy charts to clearly explain what's happening. As well as an intro to Boyle's law to explain why you need to do this.

Once the swims are out of the way we work on snorkeling and skin diving techniques using flutter kicks, frog kicks, modified flutter and frog, dolphin kicks, and when to choose each one. Then we spend a min of 40 min on skin diving techniques and these require equalization. There are many ways to equalize but with all of them the key is to equalize early and often using whichever one works. For some of my students it's every breath or every foot. It tends to get easier as you practice but in the first pool session you can overdo it since it is a new skill. Your body also needs to time to get accustomed to this new stress and strain on it.

Trying to forcefully to equalize at first can actually inflame the Eustachian tubes and make it harder. I disagree with the too slow of an descent view that some take. As a new diver you should not be doing dives that require rapid descents. The pace of any dive is set by slowest person on that dive. And that includes the person who needs to take the most time to equalize on the descent and the ascent. An instructor telling you your rate of descent is not acceptable needs to adjust their rate of decent, not yours.

These types of questions from newer divers that seem to not get answered in a number of OW classes are why I wrote my book that you can find using the link in my signature line. Or by just searching for it on Amazon.

What seems to happen with these quickie courses is that they can cause more problems for the new diver. They try to cram in too much in too short a time and people end up frustrated, discouraged, disillusioned, and sometimes injured or worse. You should never feel rushed or too overloaded. If you do a good instructor will slow down and make sure you are comfortable with a new pace. This may mean you have to pay extra but that should be spelled out in writing before you even start the class.

Some operations make use of the fact that for a number of people learning to dive is not given the same amount of research and investigation that buying a new flat screen TV is. What you are doing is hiring an employee to teach you to dive. Now when you take that approach it tends to make it a little more important. Because what is scuba diving? Think about it.

Scuba diving is taking some kind of mechanical device(s) to enter an alien environment that is normally hostile to human life. You can't breathe water. No gills. If you try you will die. Even with those devices not having enough information, training, and practice in a controlled environment can result in you being injured or killed in some very nasty ways.

So now how important is it to investigate the quality of training, the standards you should be trained to, and the methods of training? How important to you is the actual content of the course and how it is conducted? Now ask yourself how skilled and knowledgeable do I want to be before entering that world?

Then research, question, investigate, and clarify any training you will take. Don't just sign up for a class. I have a learning agreement that spells out all of this. My responsibility to you and yours to me. I will show you the written standards that I have to train you to as mandated by the agency I issue certifications for. I will also show you the standards for the eight other agencies I have in my library and allow you to compare the required content. They are not all the same. Not by a long shot.

 

[sandhay]

Thanks for the replies everyone!

I've decided that I'm going to continue with it, at least until I get into the ocean I'll use a different stroke on the swim portion, which should help considerably. I've also been experimenting with pressurizing my ears, and if I hold myself in a partial yawn and then blow through my nose very lightly I can reliably get my ears to pressurize in air, so I think I have a plan for the water next time.


Jim, the style you use to teach sounds amazing, and I'd sign up for it in a heartbeat if I was in PA. I'll check out your book.

They did not pair me up with a buddy for the swim portion. The basic skin-diving (pike and the other dive) were done solo, and there was very much a lack of interest in getting people comfortable breathing underwater. The focus seemed to be more on "what to do if X happens", where X is "out of air" "BC power inflate failed" "mask floods" etc, with no time spent on "how to enjoy being underwater", and no time spent on techniques. How do you tell if your trim is good? No clue. Where should the tank sit (I gather from browsing other threads that too high or low makes you float weird...)? No idea. What is a frog kick? Well, they didn't even mention that there WAS such a thing as a frog kick. I know dolphin kick from a swim class, but I only sort of learned it. From basic online searching I saw two places that teach scuba in my area, one was advertising that they have a new "one day" program. This place at least had 8 hours in the pool + another 6-8(depending on students desires, 2 of those were not cert dives) open water dives. Cost of lessons is...well, as long as the lessons are good it's worth it.

That said...gear is a different matter. I hate wasting money on gear, so: I got cold in 77ish degree pool water with a poorly fitting (too big) wetsuit. I would have been fine if I were more active in the water, but the activities I was doing were mostly "sit and wait". If I dive locally it'll be in the Pacific Ocean, with 55-65 degree water. Because their rental model does not fit me, they've said I need to buy my own.

Should I buy a more expensive "semi-dry" style wetsuit, or would it make more sense to buy the cheapest wetsuit that fits me? I'm wondering if I'll be ditching it at the first possible moment for something else, so it makes sense to spend the least, or if I'll keep it for years, where it makes sense to spend.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

I would not buy a suit right off the bat unless you can find one that fits and will work for your style of diving. As well as the temps you will most often be in. In Pacific temps I personally want a dry suit. Enough that when I traveled to Monterey for my son's graduation from the DLA at the Presidio I took mine with me. Some people do dive 7 mil suits and I saw a number of divers with 6.5 - 7 mil farmer john type suits. Before dropping any money on a suit I'd do a more comprehensive search of your area and see about renting a suit THAT ACTUALLY FITS for your OW dives.

77 vs 55 is a huge jump and having a poor fitting suit can actually be very dangerous in those temps in terms of a serious risk of hypothermia. What some shops will do is take a short cut that is just as dangerous, since you don't get any actual dive time, and keep students in for just long enough to meet the 15 or 20 minute standard, rush through the skills, and get you out of the water. This does not do you any favors at all. If anything it creates more problems since you didn't really dive. You went in, spent a few minutes on skills, and got out of the water with no time to enjoy or appreciate the environment. It's lazy, greedy, and a shoddy way to learn.

If you can't find a shop that will rent you a suit that fits then you have two choices IMO. You go ahead and buy one or you wait to do your checkouts. From the sounds of this shop I'd be hesitant to buy a suit from them. At least until you make a trip, on your own, to a local dive site and talk to divers there. Most will be glad to offer real advice if you tell them why you are asking. See what they are using for exposure protection. I'll bet you'll see more than few dry suits. But for those diving wet ask them what they are using. Some diehards may be using 5 mils with core warmers but I'd bet most are in 7 mil farmer johns or perhaps semi dry suits.

In those temps buying the cheapest you can find can be dangerous as well. A suit has to reduce water movement through it as much as possible. It doesn't keep you warmer. It slows the heat loss. There's a difference. The more water that moves through the suit the less effective it is. Them not having a suit that fits well could also be a marketing ploy. I'd expect a shop that teaches in cold water to have huge selection of rental suits. Unless they don't want to and use that limited selection to sell as many as possible.

We do our dives in cooler water in the spring and fall. I refer my students for rental gear to the shop whose pool I use and they have a couple dozen suits suitable for cooler temps from size XS to 5XL. With famer john suits we can mix and match to usually get a decent fit.

8 hours in the pool is not even sufficient for the level of training I want my students to have and the agency I issue OW certs through mandates a minimum of 12 with 16 preferred. And as previously stated trying to keep people in the water when the pool is 82 degrees for more than 2 hours is rough on them. If not temp wise, in terms of fatigue and mental loading.

 

[sandhay]

The agency is SSI. There are a total of 4 checkout dives, and 1-2 optional "fun dives" scheduled over the course of two days for the open-water part of the cert. I'm pretty sure I know what the divers where I'd be diving are going to wear: 7mil farmer johns and drysuits. In fact, my instructor for the course said as much -- he used to dive with the farmer john style, then he switched to semi-dry, then, after a dive where all the wetsuit divers were shivering in a corner while the drysuit divers were calming chatting, switched to dry and hasn't looked back (for cold water).

My understanding is that the checkout dives for getting certified have to be done in a wetsuit before I can even consider a drysuit. I'm a bit limited in where I can go to get other options for wetsuits, since there's exactly one dive shop in my city. They have one "brand" of cold water / farmer john (7mil) rental wetsuit, and their medium is too small for me (cuts off circulation in my arms, breathing is difficult), and their medium-large is too big (water circulates, I got cold/shivering in ~77 degree water). They seem to stock far more brands for purchase, however. I lift regularly at the gym, and have fairly broad shoulders to begin with, so my shoulders/traps/legs are a bit bigger than normal for my height/weight.

 

[oly5050user]

Holy cow...where to start?

You need to find an instructor that is patient and thorough. A weekend course is never going to be thorough, strictly due to time constraints.

For this type of individual it is true that a weekend course may not work. Best to pay the extra money and get private instruction.
As to time constraints, when does the instructor say " enough"? You cannot expect an instructor to spend 3 or 4 or more hours with a student without being compensated. If student signed up for a standard group class and does not "get it" in the same time frame as most other people do then they should be prepared to either pay more or quit the activity at that time and return when more prepared.

Tell the instructors what you are concerned about, and they will probably give you more pool time prior to OW. If they try to charge you extra, they are shady characters.

What makes them shady characters if the student needs to be charged more? If the student cannot learn in a reasonable time frame in the group setting they should be charged a fee . No one should work for nothing. How is it that instructor must work for nothing if student shows up unprepared and can barely swim?

don't know what body type you have, but some folks just can't fit in off the rack wetsuits. I am one of those. Wide shoulders narrow waist and quads like tree trunks...I custom order suits.

As far as numb toes, I doubt it has anything to do with the booties or fins. You say you are shivering? Guess which parts of the body lose circulation first when hypothermia starts knocking? Yup, fingers and toes.

As far as equalization, you may have some remnants of a cold or congestion that is causing your issues. Some people just naturally have issues equalizing. 6fpm is an ungodly slow decent, so you need to figure out if it's a temporary thing or something you may want to talk to an ear, nose and throat doc about. Taking medications to allow equalizing(decongestants) is not recommended, however if you ask around, many people will tell you they use sudafed or afrin prior to the first dive of the day. To each their own as long as they are aware of the risks(meds wearing off during dive, causing a block).

I think you should take a breather, release your anxiety, and get some more pool time. Diving is not a waste of time for anyone whom enjoys nature, history, adventure and good lifelong friendships that develop along the way.

Good luck to you.

Wet suit does not fit? Buy one that does or rent one elsewhere..diving is gear intensive activity. Where did student purchase boots and fins? Was it at facility that is conducting training or online? I find if purchased at the facility the staff will be sure of proper fit. if not they can remedy situation immediately by taking something else off the shelf and exchange easily on the spot.

 

[FinnMom]

re: do I need a drysuit. Individuals have their own comfort zones. There wil always be many people who happily dive wet where 80% are diving dry. Just because they do it doesn't mean you need to. If locals are at least 50% diving dry that's a clue that you might want to consider it too if you find wetsuit diving unpleasantly cold. You are entirely entitled to your own comfort zone so get whatever kind of suit lets you enjoy your dives.

The big chill by the way is not when you are underwater but getting dressed in cold air and getting undressed when you are wet. Even tougher is sitting around inside a wet wetsuit between dives, esp. on a boat where you might be exposed to wind.

 

[tomfcrist]

Oly,

Any shop that advertises a weekend course should be prepared for the students that won't "get it" in that time frame...it's just not enough time. If remedial instruction is needed after such a chopped down course, they should be providing a reasonable amount free of charge.

The student pays to learn to safely scuba dive.
The shop gets paid to provide a course that allows the student to learn to safely scuba dive.
If the shop chooses to run a course that barely meets standards, they also choose to subject themselves to giving remedial training to those who need more than a bare minimum course.

Weekend courses are ok for students that have been around diving since they were a sperm, yet not ever certified. They suck for the average non water baby.