Having more than ten years more "time" than I do, surely you
must remember the early 1 day pool course stuff at "the resort hotel". Even the most basic PADI (and now NAUI)
is better than that baloney!(some still do it?)
My first scuba course was the old Ft. Lauderdale Diver's Training Acacdemy in 1965,since bought out by Oceaneering or somebody. I and my eighth grade buddy took it, with our Air Force Colonel Daddies overseeing the process.
Mike and I were both Civil Air Patrol junior cadets (eaglets) also.
We watched Navy training films, studied the Navy dive manual and they made us "field strip" regulators and valves. WOW!
Our fourth and final eight hour day concluded with a "decompression" chamber dive to 70 ft.(big pro Navy chamber w/o2 masks and requisite hard plastic beach ball to show pressure effects) and a tour of the "hard hat"
area where they let us try on rat hats, band masks and (unsuccessfully!)the Mark V helmets that weighed about twice what we did. My NAUI course the next year was weird and anticlimatic as I took it with my Aqua Addicts
dive club who were all DTA or YMCA trained also.
But, alas, Al Tillman and John C. Jones were in town from Los Angeles and had this crazy Frenchman with a big white boat in tow with them. (the guy claimed he had invented the aqualung!) It was hard to turn down. They say NAUI dosen't do the surprise valve turnoff underwater (panic test)anymore. Not officially anyway.
From some of the posts on scubaboard, I think some of the instructors still do it.
I think a lot of divers don't realize that "quailfied to 30 ft." means 30 feet, not 60 feet or a hundred feet. It starts getting dark and strange after 30.
