ucfdiver
Contributor
While I was careful to avoid his blanket statement, I must say that it confirms what my experience has been diving around PADI divers. Being the largest is irrelevant to being the best. I can make a website that gives online scuba certs in 15 minutes and quickly become the largest, but chances are I'll have the worst divers, similar to if I started offering 1-2day certification classes for vacationers :noThis is the most uneducated quote i've read on scubaboard to date, and personally I take offence to it.
It's childish and immature.
I've spent 8 years going through the PADI system, and there's been things that I've disagreed with along the way, but I endeavour to provide quality training to all my students...
The fact is that PADI is most likely the biggest certifying agency compared to the rest...lets play a little maths game and say for example that 10% of all certifications will have incidents during their Scuba lifetime. If Agency 1 certifies 20 times more divers than Agency 2 Agency 1 will have 20 times more incidents. Therefore Agency 1 receives more of a bad name.
I've become more of a lurker on this site in recent months because of stupid posts like this one.
/rant over.
I'd love to see the rates of GUE/NACD divers who have accidents vs those of PADI divers. My personal hypothesis is that GUE/NACD would have a lower accident risk per dive made, but who knows, that's just based off of personal observations and experience.
I still maintain the instructor makes all the difference.