Questions for you good divers

[TSandM]

I spent a good portion of what was otherwise a lovely, long, liquid lunch on the water today wrangling with my husband over what he perceives as an unnecessary and perhaps misguided intention on my part to pursue some more intensive dive training. (He thinks diving is easy, you just have to do it a lot.) As a result, I have a few questions:

For those of you who feel you have reached a gratifying skill level at this sport, what part did instruction or mentoring, as opposed simply to practice and "miles", play in the process?

Do you feel that your road to competence could have been shortened, and if so, how?

Were there any unproductive paths you took on the way to competence? In retrospect, how would you have avoided them?

 

[MichaelBaranows]

I am not going to say I am a good diver. I consider myself a rookie since I have only been diving about 8 months and have only have 58 dives. Only about 20 dives with an instructor/mentor the rest of the dives have been with my dive buddy who started diving with me back in Feb. I think best bang for the buck has had to be a "bounacy clinic". Besides that to me time in the water is what is important.

 

[m3830431]

I don't think you can learn much more about basic diving from many of the classes that you can not learn from just diving. However, I plan on taking the Rescue Diver class next year. From what I understand it puts you in stressful situations that you learn how to take control of.

 

[CDFDiveMaster]

Hi TSandM,

I am a firm believer in continued education be it PADI, NAUI, etc. I have found that the best course I've taken was the Cavern or Intro to Cave. This course has fine tuned my diving skills and made me an overall better diver.

Peace

 

[tedtim]

The balance between training and practice is an interesting one. "Just doing more dives" may not be sufficient if it results in continued use of skills without any thought to practice and improvement. I am comfortable with my skills as far as they have progressed and for the type of diving that I do.

For myself as a recreational diver I do not see much requirement to take any more of the "specialties." One of my instructors advised against some of the specialties because they truly offered no improvement to skills. I took the Rescue, then the DM course. The motivation for the DM course was to dive with my wife. Long story, but she is now certified. After the DM course I did the brief intership to allow me to run the Discover Scuba Diving sessions in confined water. Having to demonstrate even a limited number of skills to someone who has never done SCUBA before puts you on the spot to ensure that your personal skills are well practiced. I don't find time in the pool wasted for practicing the basic skills.

I don't think that my road to competence (such as it is) could have been shortened. There were a few dives when I thought both during and afterward that I should not have been there. That is all part of experience. Heck, it was the same way when I was flying for a living.

IMO, the intensity of your dive training is directly related to what you want to take out of the sport. You may reach a point where the training gives you a set of skills, but you also discover that you don't want to pursue that kind of diving because you have reached your comfort limit.

The biggest problem I see is that we have some folks who talk about "those of us with the advance skills" as being the only ones who should be in the water. How soon they forget where they came from.

 

[2Tours N Iraq`]

I started skin diving at the age of four when my parents bought my brother and I a decent mask, pair of fins, and a snorkel. We would go down to the Florida Keys every year for lobster season and my brother and I loved following mom and dad around. Twenty-three years later I am now recently scuba certified and feel that all those years of lobstering and snorkeling (with a weight belt on since around the age of 15) have paid dividends in my scuba ability. Time in the water definitely makes you more comfortable in the water which in turn makes you a better diver. Other little tips and tricks that have helped me is to think through a situation. I completed all but one skill on my first attempt during my confined water portion by thinking through the problem and saying "slow is smooth and smooth is fast" to myself. This little mantra makes your moves deliberate and with purpose instead of trying to rush something and be frantic about it. It sounds goofy but it works. Another little Army saying that has helped is "Stay alert, stay alive." This is more of a mindset saying than anything but has saved lives on the battlefield and is 100% applicable to scuba diving. By maintaining situational awareness of your guages, buddy's and fellow divers' locations, and distance and direction to your dive boat/ascent line will prevent you from being unprepared when a new situation arises. Situational awareness is something you can also work on not while diving. You can practice while driving by being extra cognizant of street signs, traffic, and pedestrians while driving, looking at what people are wearing and memorizing their basic features upon first glance, etc. This will train your mind to constantly watch what is going on around you which in the water could be the difference between panicing and knowing what is happening to you and thinking your way out of it. If you want a good example on how thinking your way out of a problem will save your life while scuba diving, look to the book Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson and all of what John Chatterton went through while trying to identify a German U-boat found 50 miles of the New Jersey coast.

Good luck and happy diving.

 

[Diesel298]

i think its all important..
you never wanna stop learning.
experence is very important
but so is continuing yor education.. weather it be more classes or diving with somone who has experence you dont. or both.
I have been diving avidly for several years now.. and i am always looking for something new to learn
also when you take a class. alot depends on the instructor....you want a instructor thats not just gonna meet the minnimum requirements and take your money..
basically sell you a c-card.
hope this helped.
and good luck
Ray

 

[PerroneFord]

I am an absoulte novice diver. However, I have 13 years experience as a coach in another sport. One of the decisions we make as we plan the "construction" of a player is the training vs. match experience balance.

It is well understood in our craft that in order to develop a person, you must give them a solid foundation from which to work, you must hone their skills, and then you must put them in challenging situations to allow them to grow. I am speaking now of competitive sports. A recreational player will not approach training the same way a competitive or professional player will. The dedication to the craft is different.

Diving can fall in the same category. Someone who's sole intent is to drift over the reefs in 25ft of water may not want, or in fact may not be able, to hone their skills to the degree someone doing cave diving will. And it's not necessarily talent that is the primary factor. It's the environment. I am strictly an open water diver. I am working to change that. However, my forays into caverns this past weekend, highlighted my weaknesses and showed me where I need to work. I would not have ever seen that swimming around in 20ft of water. The environment became the teacher.

I've listened to many good divers talk about others who "have a lot of dives". One thing they frown upon is those who have a lot of the "same dives". If you have 400 dives, and all of them are shallow openwater reef dives, you are not going to be the same as the diver with 400 dives who's done 100 reef dives, 100 caverns, 100 dives below 150ft, and 100 cave penetrations. Time in the water may be exactly the same, but the environment demands more and develops the diver.

While diving is not a competitive sport, it does bear resemblance to other skilled sports in that it demands skills be kept sharp in order to be effective. Watching a diver with 150 dives silt up a sandy bottom while a diver with 40 dives glides over it cleanly is a perfect example. Time in the water is very unequal, but learned skills make a huge difference.

Personally, I think you can learn to dive better from ANY class. Provided you have a good instructor, and this is crucial. Having a goal when you start diving is also helpful. If you get certified because you want to learn to cave dive, your path is set, and you can be very efficient in getting to your goal. Most people seem not to start that way though, and the path can be meandering and unclear.

What is it you want from your diving? If you just want to fall in the ocean from a boat, then perhaps advanced training will have diminishing returns. If you wish to do technical diving, or diving in challenging environments, then advanced training may pay you back multi-fold. However, I think it's important to train, then perform. If you're in class all the time, when do you absorb and apply? And when do you test yourself?

 

[CD_in_Chitown]

Do you feel that your road to competence could have been shortened, and if so, how?

I dunno about the "Good Diver" remark, there are days that I can't miss but there are unfortunately days when I'm just not meant to dive. I made 15 dives in a handful of years before I earnestly devoted the time to learning. And moving to your neck of the woods did it for me, the beauty of the sea so close that you can dive after work prompted me to be a much more active diver. When that happened I met a larger circle of dive buddies, I found resources like scubaboard where divers talk, I joined DAN and started actively perusing their library, I searched out other sources of information and read some interesting books and articles, and I followed up my education with AOW (which is nothing more than a confidence builder, don't be fooled into thinking you're going to come out the other side "Advanced" in any way, you will only have the tools to advance in your diving) and Rescue diver (Dollar for dollar the best money I ever spent on the sport, well on education anyway I gotta hedge on the drysuit.) After all that I looked around and realized that education and experience are invaluable, I'm not sure you can separate the two. Education by itself is worthless, being able to apply the skills and grow in your diving and thus gain experience is the juice.

Were there any unproductive paths you took on the way to competence? In retrospect, how would you have avoided them?

Gain an understanding of what you want to do and dive with like minded folks, there are so many reasons to enjoy the sport and it kind of be off-putting to dive for someone else's reasons. Know that you can learn from every diver out there, sometimes you learn what not to do but hey its a free lesson. Learn your limits and dive within them, don't do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Its just bad mojo.

 

[victor]

I would recommend that you get instruction before you venture into any new environment or outside your comfort zone. E g. If the majority of your dives are above 50ft but the wreck you are planning to visit is at 100ft take an instructor. If you are going into a cave or inside a wreck, get instruction first. If you are unfamiliar with a dive site get advice. Practise sharpens a skill not teaches you new ones. However nothing replaces time in the water. You need it to keep your skills current and instinctive, not to mention it is fantastic fun.