Poll: Were you OW trained to standards?

[undefined]

Here's the problem.... the best time to learn to dive is just like the best time to buy real estate - sometime in the past.

Couple that with folks going far beyond open water and hindsight says there must be a more comprehensive training regimen that we missed out on.

 

[Cthippo]

Couple of thoughts on this...

One, I agree that the goal of OW certification should be to create an autonomous dives who can prepare their rig, execute the planned dive, deal with reasonably forseeable emergencies, and return safely without needing assistance. They may be sloppy and unskilled, but that comes with practice, which by definition, they do not yet have. They should at least know what competence looks like and have the foundations to build towards it. This was my personal goal going into my training and it was met. I also got training and advice on the specific things I wanted to do beyond the scope of OW, which is why i feel my training exceeded standards. No, I never read the standards before starting the class, but if i had come out the other end feeling like i still couldn't dive, I would have considered it a failure.

Two, I think we may be hanging more expectations on the instructor that are reasonable. Some people may have all the skills to be an autonomous diver, but have neither the confidence nor the desire to do so. For most people confidence follows from skill and experience (or sometimes gets ahead of those two), but not in everyone. Some people will just never have the confidence to dive autonomously, even if the have the skills to do so. While a good instructor will instill some level of confidence in students, there is a limit to how much. Some people don't want to do anything but dive with a professional who will be responsible for them and show them the fishies. Some people know they will only ever dive a handful of times a year and that there is no way they can ever become profiecient at it, so are content to limit themselves to the lowest risk forms of diving.

 

[Germie]

I think that most courses are teached according to standards, but that the standards are quite low. A lot of divers are not ready to dive without guide after their open water. And officially you must be able to dive on your own with a buddy.

But one of the biggest problems in the industry is that most divers will never dive without a guide as this is quite common or the way to dive after a cert. So why bother then that you need to be able to dive without guide? This means the standards can stay low because most divers don't need more.

If people complaign that divecenters require a guide it is always: yes, that are rules, also a checkdive, safer, blabla and all other #@$#$!#$ arguments.
But have you ever done a checkdrive when renting a car? Also you rent a car without a guide.
Even if you did a drivingcourse and got a driving licence in a country that has dangerous traffic and poor driving lessons, or did not drive for years, a car can be rented.

So what must be changed in my eyes?
In most cases, a diver is not able to dive with a buddy on their level after just 4 dives in open water. So you must or higher the amount of dives in a course, or you must state: after 10 dives you can go on your own.
10 dives is in 99% of the cases enough to do simple dives with a buddy.
And divecenters must accept that open water divers go then without a guide.
Or they must state: after your aow cert you can dive on your own, or after 10 dives with ow.
You cannot limit all divers by saying you can only dive guided.
Require more dives in the open water course will not happen. It are 4 or 5. With more, the prices will rise and the amount of time needed. This means less customers.
But that divers must be able to dive without guides is really important. That an open water cert means in most cases still guided diving makes also that there is not more done than only the minimum of minimum. 4 times 20 minutes in the water for example. And yes, I see this a lot happening.

Then the diver thinks he is a diver, and in my country they go on their own (all divers here do unguided diving). But then feel not safe under water. So after a while there is thought that the course was teached below standards, but it wasn't. It was only that the diver was not able to become a real diver in just 4 dives. Only skills were mastered onxe or twice, they are not trained that they feel natural. The divercenter who teached does not have a problem. If that diver comes back, there is again a guide because they say it is required.

Another thing is that if people did a course with only 4 dives, and they don't go diving directly more, their skills are gone 6 months later in most cases. Even when the course was teached according to standards.
So a refresher for divers with less than 200 dives and more than 6 months not diving is not a bad idea. But a diver with 1000 dives and due to illness not diving for a while, he will still be able to dive after this time out of the water. So then not refresher needed.

 

[Waterwulf]

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? ere was no book or manual then who knows what the hell you got.

I never said we jumped off the high dive in full gear. I said we carried it up the ladder and then held it while we jumped off. It caused a moments of disorientation when you hit the water with everything flapping around you. That was the whole point. To disorient you, confuse you and fluster you. It's called "training" for a reason.

No, I never asked why people don't get trained nowadays like I did back then. You were the one who said "Most people couldn’t hack it nowdays". I asked why not. If you're going to quote me, please get it correct.

Yes, there was a manual back then. It was the NAUI Training Manual. We also used the Navy tables and manuals quite a bit.

You started this thread with questions:

"Did you get trained to standards?
Below standards?
Or maybe the instructor went above and beyond and trained you above written standards?"

Why argue with the answers you got? A lot of people responded to your poll with what they thought were appropriate answers, including me. You asked "but where did these standards come from and who’s idea is it that all these rogue things were standard?" I think most of the SCUBA training info started with the assorted militaries of the world. They wrote the books so to speak. Yes, the training was hard but I don't know why you claim that todays people could not hack the type of training that I went thru. Like I said. There were woman and children in that course. It wasn't that tough. What's your problem? Does it sound to difficult?

 

[Wibble]

Wonder what the "they don't train 'em like they used to in my day" people think about your typical "pile 'em high and sell it cheap" holiday resort dive shop training?!?

My Open Water and "Advanced" Open Water training was perfectly adequate for the typical follow-the-leader diving around the benign reef conditions in the calm, non-tidal, warm water, excellent visibility conditions that anyone diving in that holiday resort would come across. Perfectly safe and good enough protocols with the buddy-buddy diving.

However, returning home to a place with waves, tides, cold, wind, poor visibility, deeper (30m/100ft) dives on sharp wrecks covered in nets was, to put it mildly, a massive shock to someone who's an "advanced" diver.

My buttocks clench at that thought. Had been indoctrinated in the "you're all wonderful" praise everyone model, then the reality of the canyon-like gap between my miniscule experience, lack of knowledge and mediocre skills (putting that mildly) compared with the reality found back home.

So the question: was the training up to standard? If the standard was to get people quickly "qualified" to dive in piss-easy conditions, following the leader, then yes it was. If the standard was to get someone sorted to genuinely dive anywhere... it was nowhere close.

Which is why the local dive shops that I've used and worked with (e.g. Rescue Diver course) is massively different to the holiday resort training.

The shock of my very first dive in the UK absolutely convinced me of the need for a massive training effort and focus on self-reliance. After many hundreds of dives/hours to all sorts of depths I always take every dive very seriously as it absolutely will bite you on the backside: complacency will kill. It is up to the individual diver to practice and sort their skills out.


PS: I cannot answer the poll as I simply was not qualified to know what good training was. It's too long ago to remember what we did, although some of it was kneeling!

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Wonder what the "they don't train 'em like they used to in my day" people think about your typical "pile 'em high and sell it cheap" holiday resort dive shop training?!?

My Open Water and "Advanced" Open Water training was perfectly adequate for the typical follow-the-leader diving around the benign reef conditions in the calm, non-tidal, warm water, excellent visibility conditions that anyone diving in that holiday resort would come across. Perfectly safe and good enough protocols with the buddy-buddy diving.

However, returning home to a place with waves, tides, cold, wind, poor visibility, deeper (30m/100ft) dives on sharp wrecks covered in nets was, to put it mildly, a massive shock to someone who's an "advanced" diver.

My buttocks clench at that thought. Had been indoctrinated in the "you're all wonderful" praise everyone model, then the reality of the canyon-like gap between my miniscule experience, lack of knowledge and mediocre skills (putting that mildly) compared with the reality found back home.

So the question: was the training up to standard? If the standard was to get people quickly "qualified" to dive in piss-easy conditions, following the leader, then yes it was. If the standard was to get someone sorted to genuinely dive anywhere... it was nowhere close.

Which is why the local dive shops that I've used and worked with (e.g. Rescue Diver course) is massively different to the holiday resort training.

The shock of my very first dive in the UK absolutely convinced me of the need for a massive training effort and focus on self-reliance. After many hundreds of dives/hours to all sorts of depths I always take every dive very seriously as it absolutely will bite you on the backside: complacency will kill. It is up to the individual diver to practice and sort their skills out.

Where I dive is similar to the UK. Dark cold waves swell current rocky entries low vis lots of weeds kelp (used to be kelp anyway) etc.
A pretty good percentage of people who get certified here have already had some skin/freediving experience because a lot of them were abalone divers. That might have changed now since abalone has been shut down for 7-8 years, so maybe not many people freedive anymore. But, when I got into diving I was a freediver already for a few years before scuba. What local (to here) skin diving does is acclimate people to cold water, the movement of the surge, finning techniques and leg conditioning through just doing it. They get used to the conditions, currents, bottom typography, getting in and out of the water in less than good conditions. It also gives people a chance to get used to a thick wetsuit which has it’s own way of conditioning a body with it’s resistance.
This is one of the things lacking in todays OW is skindiving skills.
When I took scuba class they trained us to be able to handle the conditions in which we certified (see above). And there was a little bit of skin diving but not a lot, probably because it was a culture here. You probably wouldn’t get that if you certified in a quarry somewhere, IDK?
So when I did get scuba certified it was a cake walk because I already had a few years of skindiving experience and knew what was down there and what to expect. We were also told that if we went anywhere else to dive like the tropics, the conditions would be a lot milder than where we did our OW, so in essence “if you got certified here you can dive anywhere”, that’s what we were told.
My issue, worry, concern, call it what you will, is that sometimes we get divers wanting to dive here that got certified in warm benign tropical conditions and they have no idea what it’s like here. Not all OW certs are created equal. I wish there was some sort if divers acclimation class that would train and condition divers for new environments, but I din’t think there is such a thing.
Right now it’s up to the individual to somehow adapt themselves through self study and self training, maybe mentorship? But that’s not consistent or reliable.
So I guess a “standard” is really a moving target, and so a standard at one place may not apply to another place.
It’s an impossible thing to measure.

 

[Wibble]

Where I dive is similar to the UK. Dark cold waves swell current rocky entries low vis lots of weeds kelp (used to be kelp anyway) etc.
...
I wish there was some sort if divers acclimation class that would train and condition divers for new environments, but I didn’t think there is such a thing.
Right now it’s up to the individual to somehow adapt themselves through self study and self training, maybe mentorship? But that’s not consistent or reliable.
So I guess a “standard” is really a moving target, and so a standard at one place may not apply to another place.
It’s an impossible thing to measure.

Absolutely. Which I'm pretty certain I faced when first meeting with the UK local dive shop all those years ago. My tales of the exciting diving I had done in benign warm waters would not have impressed the rather more experienced UK divers, i.e. all of them!

That LDS were pretty good with new divers though. They were keen on buddying newbies up with the right people and forcing the newbies to walk, not run until they were ready. And there's the crux of the matter: newbies don't have the experience to recognise difficult situations or worse still to be overwhelmed.

It's that infamous quadrant of known knowns and unknown unknowns. More experience fills out the knowns, but it'll never completely remove the unknowns.

Edit: a picture:

 

[Waterwulf]

The training that I went thru for my NAUI course, was basically military in nature because that's pretty much all there was. "Sport Diving" was a new thing and it had to rely heavily on the military because they were the ones who pioneered it. Back then, that type of training was a Very Good Thing because SCUBA diving really was much more dangerous than it is today.

It was an unknown territory and there was still lots of testing going on. Our own "dive club" was part of a test by the U.S. Navy to help find a standard depth for Nitrogen Narcosis. We had to dive deep enough to start experiencing it, then stop and surface. (138 ft for me) There was a lot of new technology coming out, some good, some not so good. There were many accidents and a few deaths. Personally, I've always felt that the training that I received was excellent because it not only taught diving skills but also taught self discipline and good emergency response reactions.

Back then, we had no Octo's and trained heavily for Buddy Breathing. Surface emergency drills were trained pretty strongly too. We all carried Finger Flares that we swiped from the Air Force but nobody had a Marker Sausage. There was no GPS so if the boat "misplaced" you, good luck getting found again unless the Captain used shore markers for navigation. Computers? Yeah yeah they have those on the Apollo capsules don't they? We looked up our bottom times in the Navy Dive Tables and wrote a few notes on the back of a marker plate or on your Buddies tank. Then we set our watches. Compared to today, it was primitive.

The training had to be more rigorous back then because SCUBA diving was lot's more dangerous. Computers that tell you when to surface, how much air/time you have left, when to stop for deomps, when it's ok to fly or dive again, etc;. etc. etc. Everybody has an OCTO, A Spare Air, etc. etc. Nowadays, SCUBA diving is much safer than it was back when I started. That's why the training has gotten haphazard. It's no big deal anymore.

 

[abnfrog]

waaaay back in the early 79 i wasnt trained to standards it was an ACUC course by a name instructor the stores boat broke down on the sunday so we only did 2 dives total, the other 2 were (quote arm chair dives ) i didnt know ,what i didnt know , i stayed with that store up to AI...he even told my GF at the time to do her exam in pencil ! she was clue less, but amazingly passed with high marks ....he was a known hound dog broke up the relationship of one of his instructors so he could get the wife ........all he tuagh me was never to be that guy , so i guess it made me a better instructor

 

[happy-diver]

It's this sort of stuff that tips the earth off it's axis and creates hesitance from otherwise competent people

It's that infamous quadrant of known knowns and unknown unknowns. More experience fills out the knowns, but it'll never completely remove the unknowns.

What a load