beanojones
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As above, i know a few people who have ended up in the pot from teaching it. It's not a safe skill for the students or the instructor in general and as i've said above, don't believe its needed at all OR solves any problem. I teach all mine from 6.0m. Never deeper - i can't justify it on a risk assessment. An ex-manager of mine said he'd fire anyone teaching it from less than 6m and deeper than 6.1m and i agree with his view entirely.
I agree with eveything you said, and I will add this tidbit that I mentioned back then: CESA has killed instructor candidates during the IE, and in the real world it has killed instructors and students.
As the only skill with a page and half "follow this exactly" in the instructor manual, PADI recognizes its dangerous nature. The even used to do what was called a "Ascent workshop" during the IEs to try and deal with some of it dangerousness to the instructor and students
That said, it is a dead simple skill that people should have no hesitation about being able to do whether or not it is actually ever needed to do it because it is there to rid divers of holding their breath when out of air, which is a basic, instinctual, life-threatening response to being "Out Of Air". My go to example of why it is important is this sort of scenario: everyone is facing the boat waiting to leave the hang bar (15 ft/5m), a sudden gear failure causes a diver to be OOA, with all the potential helpers on the boat or facing away. With CESA, no problem. Without being able to respond with a casual CESA, life threatening situation. (This is a real world situation, that happened to one of my current instructor friends on their first boat dive after certification.)
---------- Post added June 28th, 2014 at 05:16 PM ----------
What if you have an overhead (either a wreck/cave or a decompression obligation)? I appreciate this is the basic scuba discussion forum, and 'recreational' divers shouldn't be in that situation, but technical divers have developed skills and equipment configurations that ensure they always have an alternate gas source.
I love telling OW students that the difference between tech diving (which I describe as any overhead environment, virtual or not) and recreational diving is that tech diving the response to any problem including OOA is never ascent. When they wrap their head around that one, they are again understanding why they are not ready for tech diving. Without that understanding just like "arbitrary" depth limits, restriction to tech activities is just some arbitrary authority saying "no you can't". The next question they ask is always what does "a tech diver do if they are out of air?".
I do not see a reason why recreational divers shouldn't have a redundant gas source, be it on their person or their buddy. It is incredibly important to tell students to always exhale on an OOG ascent, but I do not see the need to practice it. If you are ever in the situation you need to do a CESA, you have really made a bollocks of things big time!
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One, not practicing something that involves ridding a student of an instinctual response that would kill them if they did it matters. Really more than anything else done in the OW course.
Not being able to handle being OOA when alone in 15-20 feet of water is kind of a basic difference between certified divers and non-certified divers. I am perfectly comfortable denying certification to any student who cannot manage it. I am also perfectly comfortable guinding intro divers to 15-30 feet who would respond to being OOA badly (they would also panic if their mask came off.)
Let's not confuse what a basic certified diver should be able to do, what a non-vertified diver should be able to do, and how a tech diver should respond.
(I think more instructors need to do the industry standard "intro dive" so they stop turning out certified divers who have basically done four intro dives. Part of why I am confortable not issuing certifications to people even they have paid for OW classes is because I see that they got their money's worth from the dives themselves. They just failed to earn the OW rating.)