Poll: Were you OW trained to standards?

[Wibble]

How could an Open Water diver with zero experience with scuba know whether they were correctly trained at the time? Certainly when I dun my paddy at a Mediterranean resort I had never been diving before (actually a try dive 25 years previously— that was on our honeymoon and I dun my padie on our silver wedding anniversary).

Learned enough to not drown after the class and enough to get addicted to diving thereafter.

Obviously the standards on a holiday resort would be a lot more, errrm, let’s say lenient and less comprehensive than if taking the course in somewhere more challenging (cold, tidal, poor vis, drysuit, etc.). If nothing else, the local dive shop would have their eyes on the longer term relationship than the week or two at a holiday resort.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

How could an Open Water diver with zero experience with scuba know whether they were correctly trained at the time? Certainly when I dun my paddy at a Mediterranean resort I had never been diving before (actually a try dive 25 years previously— that was on our honeymoon and I dun my padie on our silver wedding anniversary).

Learned enough to not drown after the class and enough to get addicted to diving thereafter.

Obviously the standards on a holiday resort would be a lot more, errrm, let’s say lenient and less comprehensive than if taking the course in somewhere more challenging (cold, tidal, poor vis, drysuit, etc.). If nothing else, the local dive shop would have their eyes on the longer term relationship than the week or two at a holiday resort.

I got to talking with a guy at a party once about diving and it turned out he was a certified diver too, cool! Naturally the conversation became all about diving, the where’s, when’s, with who, etc.
I asked who he got certified through and he said ‘oh a friend’. I asked what agency and he ‘forgot’.
Then he asked me “I keep hearing about someone named Patty, who is Patty, is she an instructor?”
True story.

 

[BBSB]

I just finished my sdi open water this summer and my class was trained far, far, far below the standards to the point where I think the shop is dangerous and a liability.

 

[rx7diver]

You were trained way beyond standards, beyond any standard measured by todays standards, that’s for sure. ...

@Eric Sedletzky,

I've written here before, that a couple of months after I received my C-card, a small group of us newly-minted divers drove from mid-MO to the Florida Keys, during winter break, to experience our first ocean diving. Small boat diving. Unguided dives. (No divemaster dove with us.) We did several dives below 100 fsw on the shipwrecks there. A lot of fun. No issues.

But the very first time I felt like a "real" diver was a couple of months after the Keys trip, when I visited my GF, during spring break, who had graduated and moved to Boston. She had taken the same scuba course I took (and in fact convinced me to take it). We drove a short distance north of Boston, rented wet suits and cylinders in a small fishing town, parked our car across the road from a nearby cove that was suggested for us, suited up in the car, and crossed the street to walk into the ocean and commence our dive, her first ocean dive. To me, this was the real deal, the proof of concept! Absolutely no doubt, after that dive, that we are divers!

I wish everyone's open water course would give them the ability and confidence to experience this type of "autonomous" (I like your word!) diving early on.

rx7diver

 

[Waterwulf]

I was actually self taught in the beginning. I was about eleven years old and had the local dive shops and boats bamboozled into believing that I was certified. I even got a few free dives for helping out on the boats with the tourists! Then we moved to Southern Germany and I signed up with a government sanctioned "search and rescue" group. We never rescued anybody but we did search for a lot of boat motors, fishing poles, WWII weapons caches and dead bodies. I got my European certification thru them.

I came back to Florida in 1974 and I was a hot sheeiit diver! Yes sir indeedy! Then I accidentally got mixed up with those psychos from the Hurlburt SpecOps Base teaching a NAUI course and I discovered what real training was! They abused us! I would have quit if there hadn't of been girls in the class!

There was a lot of fun during the training don't get me wrong but on other stuff, they had no mercy. And they made us do pushups for screwing up!

As an example: I guess some people died because they didn't check their J Valves so they did away with them. Allegedly, their Reserves were already on when they clicked it expecting to get another few minutes so they drowned. To me, that is incomprehensible. How can you not know the status of your J valve Reserve?

I was trained in that NAUI course to check my J valve every five minutes. It's simple! You just reach your left hand back to the metal ring, pull it down and then push it back up. You can hear both clicks. They trained us on that so hard that we all walked around for six months, searching for that D ring, waving our left hands behind our butts like we were waving away a stinker.

I had enough experience when I took that NAUI course to know that I was being trained above and beyond "Standards". Yeah, it was taught by psychos, every one of them some kind of Special Forces Soldier but there were a couple of woman and even one girl and they all passed it too! Except, they talked nicer to them and called them Mam instead of what they called us and didn't make them do as many pushups.

To the question of "How do I know I was trained to standards"?: I can only suggest that if it was all fun and games, you were probably not trained up to standards. If your "gut" is telling you to run away, take big steps. The human body is comprised of many different types of sensory systems, not all of them understood. The mind listens to those signals and processes them and then tells us thru our instinct, gut, feelings, little voice, etc. to warn us. pay attention. If the training doesn't feel up to snuff, get better training.

 

[icechip]

YMCA certified back in 1979.
Was a great six-week course.

 

[JRK44]

In light of another thread going on about AOW lacking, I’m curious about what your OW course was like.
Did you get trained to standards?
Below standards?
Or maybe the instructor went above and beyond and trained you above written standards?
Below is a list I found of the PADI OW skills:

PADI Open Water Skills List • All Skills in Order

Full PADI Open Water Diver Skills List, covering all the scuba diving skills you can expect in the PADI Open Water Course. Including Video Explanation!

www.scubadivingtips.net

This doesn’t include the book theory part which is part of it. I’ll look for that as well so you can reference it if needed.
I didn’t include any other agencies because I’m PADI trained for OW and that’s all I know.
However you can add to the poll with any other agency that applies and discuss it if you wish.
I know some standards have changed so the list may be slightly different from what you recieved, but if you have a story to tell about your OW from the past please feel free.
This is not meant to be an agency bash, I’m just curious to take a pulse of how it went for scubaboard members.

I was trained right to standards in my open water class, and maybe a little beyond when it came to site conditions, how to read the ocean and also how to use a compass. We were trained to plan and conduct a shore dive in our own with another new OW diver on the Northern California Coast.
I have no complaints other than I wish they didn’t overweight us and normalize that, and also they trained us on our knees which was standard at that time.

I'm going to answer this honestly, even though it may reflect badly on me in terms of confidence

I was taught to dive originally when I was circa 14 years old by my abusive father, a PADI diving instructor.

He cut corners with every course he taught to everybody and pushed people through the course on the bare minimum on the basis that making people's training easy somehow did them a great service.
He didn't have the emotional intelligence or the foresight to realise that the opposite is true.

My bouyancy was crap and I didn't enjoy diving when I was a kid, as I was abused emotionally and openly ridiculed by my father whenever I made a mistake in his eyes. That's what I came to associate with scuba.

I'm so pleased I came back to the sport having addressed the confidence issue and having long since cut my father out of my life.

So no, I wasn't taught to any kind of respectable standard. At least not originally.

I've discovered a fantastic community with supportive instructors in both PADI and BSAC.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I was actually self taught in the beginning. I was about eleven years old and had the local dive shops and boats bamboozled into believing that I was certified. I even got a few free dives for helping out on the boats with the tourists! Then we moved to Southern Germany and I signed up with a government sanctioned "search and rescue" group. We never rescued anybody but we did search for a lot of boat motors, fishing poles, WWII weapons caches and dead bodies. I got my European certification thru them.

I came back to Florida in 1974 and I was a hot sheeiit diver! Yes sir indeedy! Then I accidentally got mixed up with those psychos from the Hurlburt SpecOps Base teaching a NAUI course and I discovered what real training was! They abused us! I would have quit if there hadn't of been girls in the class!

There was a lot of fun during the training don't get me wrong but on other stuff, they had no mercy. And they made us do pushups for screwing up!

As an example: I guess some people died because they didn't check their J Valves so they did away with them. Allegedly, their Reserves were already on when they clicked it expecting to get another few minutes so they drowned. To me, that is incomprehensible. How can you not know the status of your J valve Reserve?

I was trained in that NAUI course to check my J valve every five minutes. It's simple! You just reach your left hand back to the metal ring, pull it down and then push it back up. You can hear both clicks. They trained us on that so hard that we all walked around for six months, searching for that D ring, waving our left hands behind our butts like we were waving away a stinker.

I had enough experience when I took that NAUI course to know that I was being trained above and beyond "Standards". Yeah, it was taught by psychos, every one of them some kind of Special Forces Soldier but there were a couple of woman and even one girl and they all passed it too! Except, they talked nicer to them and called them Mam instead of what they called us and didn't make them do as many pushups.

To the question of "How do I know I was trained to standards"?: I can only suggest that if it was all fun and games, you were probably not trained up to standards. If your "gut" is telling you to run away, take big steps. The human body is comprised of many different types of sensory systems, not all of them understood. The mind listens to those signals and processes them and then tells us thru our instinct, gut, feelings, little voice, etc. to warn us. pay attention. If the training doesn't feel up to snuff, get better training.

I like hearing stories about how it was back then, quite entertaining. Scuba training then was different than now. Training was all over the board, and all of it was ‘over standards’ according to the person doing the training. A standard was also something that varied greatly.
With all the pushups and such, do you know what you get when you do a lot of pushups? You get really good at doing pushups. What this has to do with diving still leaves me scratching my head. A lot of the instructor staff back then were former military, so I suppose that’s all they knew how to teach someone; like it was bootcamp.
You mentioned something about climbing a high dive ladder in full gear then jumping off to do a ditch and don, or something to that effect?
This is all fun and hard core etc. but how is this teaching someone to use scuba?
This is where scuba kinda went off the rails and why training is what it is today. At one point scuba almost dried up because of draconian old school training and nonsensical hazing. Most people couldn’t hack it nowdays and they shouldn’t have to. Stick to things pertaining to scuba. And now we have the opposite in terms of anybody can do it, and there is a percentage that probably shouldn’t be doing it, but with enough hand holding and positive talk they somehow make it through, barely.
These are ones that are not fit to dive autonomously, they require a hand holder to be carefully lead around. That’s fine, there’s an entire industry built around this type of underwater tourist.

Now the underwater harassment fine, as long as it’s productive and not too mean. That could actually be a lifesaver in the event if a large animal encounter where a diver gets physically assaulted by something like a large sea lion or runs into an angry giant pacific octopus. Having your mask ripped off and the reg pulled out if your mouth from behind is a real thing with GPO’s.
And doing some incremental dives deep and then deeper on air I do not think is a bad thing either. It’s important for divers to know and understand what narcosis is and that’s best first experienced in a training atmosphere. And his should be BEFORE they get out if any respectable OW course. If an instructor is going to set a diver free into the wild with a bid of ‘good luck’, I would hope they know how to handle the basics, or at least know enough to get out of trouble if they wandered into some.

Yes, divers need to be in shape, but that’s not the dive instructors responsibility. There are gyms for that, and prospective divers need to be in shape BEFORE they sign up for scuba not during. Nobody that is grossly out of shape is going to get in shape in two or three weeks doing push ups and swimming endless laps in a pool, or running.
Good exercises to get divers in shape for diving is fin kicking. I’d rather see people doing endless laps in a pool with mask fins and snorkel.
Then IMO, there isn’t enough panic management training going on in todays OW training. This is the thing that kills divers more than anything. Panic.
There needs to be more repetitive training on the things that can trigger panic, so eventually those things are no big deal and just another annoyance. The more you work on the stuff the better you get at it, just like push ups.

 

[Waterwulf]

I like hearing stories about how it was back then, quite entertaining. Scuba training then was different than now. Training was all over the board, and all of it was ‘over standards’ according to the person doing the training. A standard was also something that varied greatly.
With all the pushups and such, do you know what you get when you do a lot of pushups? You get really good at doing pushups. What this has to do with diving still leaves me scratching my head. A lot of the instructor staff back then were former military, so I suppose that’s all they knew how to teach someone; like it was bootcamp.
You mentioned something about climbing a high dive ladder in full gear then jumping off to do a ditch and don, or something to that effect?
This is all fun and hard core etc. but how is this teaching someone to use scuba?
This is where scuba kinda went off the rails and why training is what it is today. At one point scuba almost dried up because of draconian old school training and nonsensical hazing. Most people couldn’t hack it nowdays and they shouldn’t have to. Stick to things pertaining to scuba. And now we have the opposite in terms of anybody can do it, and there is a percentage that probably shouldn’t be doing it, but with enough hand holding and positive talk they somehow make it through, barely.
These are ones that are not fit to dive autonomously, they require a hand holder to be carefully lead around. That’s fine, there’s an entire industry built around this type of underwater tourist.

Now the underwater harassment fine, as long as it’s productive and not too mean. That could actually be a lifesaver in the event if a large animal encounter where a diver gets physically assaulted by something like a large sea lion or runs into an angry giant pacific octopus. Having your mask ripped off and the reg pulled out if your mouth from behind is a real thing with GPO’s.
And doing some incremental dives deep and then deeper on air I do not think is a bad thing either. It’s important for divers to know and understand what narcosis is and that’s best first experienced in a training atmosphere. And his should be BEFORE they get out if any respectable OW course. If an instructor is going to set a diver free into the wild with a bid of ‘good luck’, I would hope they know how to handle the basics, or at least know enough to get out of trouble if they wandered into some.

Yes, divers need to be in shape, but that’s not the dive instructors responsibility. There are gyms for that, and prospective divers need to be in shape BEFORE they sign up for scuba not during. Nobody that is grossly out of shape is going to get in shape in two or three weeks doing push ups and swimming endless laps in a pool, or running.
Good exercises to get divers in shape for diving is fin kicking. I’d rather see people doing endless laps in a pool with mask fins and snorkel.
Then IMO, there isn’t enough panic management training going on in todays OW training. This is the thing that kills divers more than anything. Panic.
There needs to be more repetitive training on the things that can trigger panic, so eventually those things are no big deal and just another annoyance. The more you work on the stuff the better you get at it, just like push ups.

Your statements are kind of contradictory. On the one hand, you ask how jumping off a high dive with your gear and getting harassed underwater is pertinent to training for SCUBA but then you state that there isn't enough panic management training in today's training. That's what that training was for: Panic management, not training for combat with wild animals. That and the airless free ascent from sixty feet and a few other nice things that they did were all simply to teach people how to control their fear. That's called Panic management and I think it's a useful skill for every day life, not just SCUBA.

As far as doing pushups for screwing up: It was a way to get your attention, not to get you into shape, but to make you think about what you had done to deserve this. I saw nothing wrong with it then and still don't. Yeah, we did a lot of flippering too!

Why do you say that most people today couldn't hack it? I saw girls and little kids go thru that same course back then. Yeah, they were treated nicer than the men were but they had to do the same training. Why couldn't most people hack it nowadays?

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Your statements are kind of contradictory. On the one hand, you ask how jumping off a high dive with your gear and getting harassed underwater is pertinent to training for SCUBA but then you state that there isn't enough panic management training in today's training. That's what that training was for: Panic management, not training for combat with wild animals. That and the airless free ascent from sixty feet and a few other nice things that they did were all simply to teach people how to control their fear. That's called Panic management and I think it's a useful skill for every day life, not just SCUBA.

As far as doing pushups for screwing up: It was a way to get your attention, not to get you into shape, but to make you think about what you had done to deserve this. I saw nothing wrong with it then and still don't. Yeah, we did a lot of flippering too!

Why do you say that most people today couldn't hack it? I saw girls and little kids go thru that same course back then. Yeah, they were treated nicer than the men were but they had to do the same training. Why couldn't most people hack it nowadays?

Jumping off a high dive in full gear, give me a break. In what universe is that beneficial to normal scuba training? Maybe if you’re jumping off a war ship or the third deck up on a cruise ship, how many people do that? That’s not panic management, that’s just lunacy.
Why don’t people get trained the way you did now days you ask? Liability for one, and maybe because there wouldn’t be anybody that would go through that. It’s a different world now. Scuba would dry up with no new entry and no new support.
Panic management has to do with repetitive exercises a step at a time, not trauma. And certainly not push ups or jumping off high dives.
“Trained to standards” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and the era’s that they were from. Some people claim they were trained way beyond standards because they had to endure push ups, swimming holding onto towels, jumping off high dives in full gear, etc. but where did these standards come from and who’s idea is it that all these rogue things were standard?
I’m seeing now that trying to ask people if they were trained to standards is like asking who was the best all time NBA player? The game has changed so much through the years that one player from one era is completely different from a current player that may be considered the best now. There no way to compare the two.
I think scuba training kind of follows this same pattern.
So to make it a little easier, if there was a book or manual to go by, did the instructor follow the instruction in the written manual? If not, then it probably means that the person was not fully trained to that standards, whatever that standard may have been.
If it was just lunatic instructor making people do all sorts a weird stuff in their twisted little dive boot camp and there was no book or manual then who knows what the hell you got.