Question, regarding timeline / experience

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... or weeks, months or years :)
Time in the water is not the only good measure for experience, but the quality of it also counts. Some times, ten years of experience is just one year repeated ten times over. If you only dive your local quarry, and only when it's warm, with the same buddy in the same gear configuration over and over for many years, that's quite different from logging the same number of hours on varying sites under different conditions.
 
My only aquarium dive experience was once being in the audience watching divers do buoyancy and other tricks, fish feeding, etc. for a show. I assume volunteering at one is not this. What exactly do you do in volunteering at an aquarium? I can't imagine there is a whole lot of skill involved, but I don't know.
 
My only aquarium dive experience was once being in the audience watching divers do buoyancy and other tricks, fish feeding, etc. for a show. I assume volunteering at one is not this. What exactly do you do in volunteering at an aquarium? I can't imagine there is a whole lot of skill involved, but I don't know.

The general idea of it is janitorial/housekeeping from what I gather - for me it'd be a welcome spin on volunteer work, and I'd assume that time spent underwater could be logged. Not too deep of course, but still 'practice' none the less, while donating my time to something worthwhile.

I won't lie, I'd get a kick out of waving at people through the glass...but I imagine the majority of what is done is tidying up.

I'm sure someone else with knowledge of the ins and outs could speak more to it. The requirements are almost certainly liability related, and to weed out people who'd be better served buying an actual aquarium scuba tour - I know saw a few of those before I moved from Atlanta, they do it in the whale shark tank.
 
First recommendation is contact the aquarium you wish to volunteer for and find out their individual requirements. Coincidentally I plan on volunteering at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach when my kids are older. They require a minimum of 50 logged dives and rescue diver certification with current CPR training. They also require that you are available at least once a week every week as a condition of volunteering. At 5 dives a year that would take you 10 years to qualify.

There are also numerous threads regarding what is experience and what makes you an "advanced" diver. Simply taking a course and getting a certificate doesn't mean you are "experienced." It simply means you got a single experience doing a dive. You can also train and do all of your dives over 20 years in warm tropical waters with crystal clear visibility but your first dive in cold water with a thick wetsuit, gloves, and limited visibility you are experience wise just a beginner. So, you should also be mindful that when you volunteer you have actual experience diving in those conditions. Everyone would like to dive in the tropical environment, but can you gear up and get in the California Kelp tank with the wetsuits and 55 degree temps?

Most aquariums will also have dedicated equipment the divers must use. They are very concerned about introducing a foreign contaminant into their environments. To help control those environments it is unlikely you will get to use your own gear unless you have properly sanitized it according to their protocols. More likely you will only get to use your mask.
 
First recommendation is contact the aquarium you wish to volunteer for and find out their individual requirements. Coincidentally I plan on volunteering at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach when my kids are older. They require a minimum of 50 logged dives and rescue diver certification with current CPR training. They also require that you are available at least once a week every week as a condition of volunteering. At 5 dives a year that would take you 10 years to qualify.

There are also numerous threads regarding what is experience and what makes you an "advanced" diver. Simply taking a course and getting a certificate doesn't mean you are "experienced." It simply means you got a single experience doing a dive. You can also train and do all of your dives over 20 years in warm tropical waters with crystal clear visibility but your first dive in cold water with a thick wetsuit, gloves, and limited visibility you are experience wise just a beginner. So, you should also be mindful that when you volunteer you have actual experience diving in those conditions. Everyone would like to dive in the tropical environment, but can you gear up and get in the California Kelp tank with the wetsuits and 55 degree temps?

Most aquariums will also have dedicated equipment the divers must use. They are very concerned about introducing a foreign contaminant into their environments. To help control those environments it is unlikely you will get to use your own gear unless you have properly sanitized it according to their protocols. More likely you will only get to use your mask.

Oddly enough, I am more drawn to cold water - my guess is most of the vacations I end up planning will be more tropical in nature, but I'd like to do cold stuff domestically. Probably sounds nuts! I expect that it will be slow going initially because of compounding costs with the training and inevitable gear purchases, but once I have some distance between myself and the big spends I expect I'll be able to take more trips around the country in between the vacation stuff. I'd like to get to the point of a dive or two per month actually.
 
My only aquarium dive experience was once being in the audience watching divers do buoyancy and other tricks, fish feeding, etc. for a show. I assume volunteering at one is not this. What exactly do you do in volunteering at an aquarium? I can't imagine there is a whole lot of skill involved, but I don't know.

You're a gloried free labor aquarist at the best. You often do maintenance dives, wiping windows, vacuuming, scrubbing the rockwork, and feeding.
Depending on the institution and paid man-labor, you can get experience in aquarium husbandry, shark medicals, animal collecting in open water, etc etc.

With the way the industry is heading (which is fairly new) you're now being trained in reserve air systems (pony bailout bottles), full face mask surface supply, and general bouyancy control and competence since you're always "on-show" with the public.
Often one main aspect in all aquariums is holding bouyancy and proper trim so your BC/equipment doesn't gouge the acrylic window while you're wiping it. Acrylic is lighter, stronger, and more malleable than glass. And most aquariums use it because it makes possible curved tanks and deep tanks. Glass would need to be in excess of 20ft thick to house 16ft and greater-deep exhibits. Where as acrylic allows 12ft or less and also gets rid of the magnifying aspect of glass that makes your fish appear smaller. The only problem is acrylic scuffs easily. Even an eyelash scrubbed really hard will scuff acrylic.

There's a lot of skill involved. But all of it doesn't pertain to open water diving. Often times you break rules such as ascent rate or the rule of always breathing. When you're on comms, often you have to skip breath or hold your diaphragm open to hear your comms, as breathing garbles your hearing. Being able to hold depth during these situations is extremely important.
Ascending faster than 30ft/min is necessary at times (keep in mind you still don't rocket up), especially during fish catches on exhibit or when you're performing antibiotic/sedative shark injections and that shark goes ballistic after a hit. Sometimes you accidentally hit just in the "right" place and shark goes down quickly instead of being sluggish (you're aiming for a sluggish shark not a comatose shark). You then have to make a swift collect and recover so the shark doesn't over dose on metabolic lactic acid and poison itself. You then move it to a shallow rehab tank and manually swim it to help it recover.
There's a lot of behind the scene work and science that goes into aquarium husbandry that you don't get in your typical household pet store aquarium.

There's definitely A LOT of variance between aquariums, but what I listed is the ideal. Dependent on paid-staff man power and what not. Aquariums rely on volunteers. Without them, we would be out of business. Water quality would be crap. Exhibits would look terrible.
Dive Safety Officers are a fairly new career, so often paid staff in that position pull double duty as curator/biologist/aquarist and DSO. Its slowly being integrated into it's own position now that aquariums are realizing it's a full time heavy commitment gig.

---------- Post added April 24th, 2014 at 08:04 PM ----------

To put it in even more perspective. Imagine a fish catch in a 16ft aquarium exhibit. Both hands are holding hand nets. Or a barrier net.
You're changing depth (sometimes erratically), monitoring your ascent rate, monitoring air usage, equalizing, monitoring your target fish(es), managing air input into your BC, your buddy position, breathing, monitoring your CO2 limits (limiting perceptual narrowing), making sure you don't bang into the acrylic tunnel tank; all the while keeping within visual contact with your teammates and managing your dive profile.

This type of dive doesn't happen often, but it does hit on the fact that you really have to be on your A game. You do plenty of leisure easy maintenance dives, but every so often you get a dive that really task loads you and the basis of good aquarium training revolves around this heavy task loading and putting dive safety into your second nature.

It's a very specific specialty of diving that you would never do in open water.
 
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Sounds like a lot of work without pay, but that's another thread.
 
Sounds like a lot of work without pay, but that's another thread.

We are hugely in debt to our volunteers. Having been one myself, dive, husbandry, and exhibit guide volunteers sacrifice a lot.
They are the backbone of any zoo and aquarium. Most often volunteers outnumber paid-staff.
 
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