Safety stops: First Dive post-Open Water Course

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Beyond the missed stop, you really need to evaluate your weights. You should have very little to no air in your BC at the end of the dive. The fact that you need to vent a good bit of air indicates to me that you are over weighted. Being over weighted requires a large air volume in your BC to compensate for the excessive weight. That large volume of air makes it more difficult to control buoyancy, esp for a new diver, which in turn makes it much more likely for a run away accent to occur. Many divers do not properly vent their BC's and incorrectly think more weight is needed when in fact, proper venting to remove excessive air in the BC is the real problem. As a first step, I would recommend doing a good weight check and maybe a buoyancy class with a good instructor.
 
I'm with everyone on the uncontrolled ascents they really really really should not happen. Try to approach your safety stop depth slowly in a controlled manner.

I am also of the opinion that gas permitting they should have immediately gone back down and done a 5 minute safety stop. Just my opinion, What does everyone else think?
Why? In recreational diving a safety stop isn't mandatory. Yes, everyone should do them, but as long as you stay under your NDL it is just an additional step to ensure some margin of safety. In this case, the issue wasn't the missed safety stop so much as the risk of barotrauma from an uncontrolled rapid ascent. Going back down again immediately after just ads to the risk of it happening again 3-5 minutes later. Better to get out of the water, monitor for symptoms of barotrauma, and debrief and reflect on why the rapid uncontrolled ascent occurred in the first place and train under more controlled circumstances (pool would be best) so it doesn't happed again.

Just my opinion.
 
My understanding is that if the dive is close to your NDL then even with a safe ascent rate and a safety stop about, 1% of dives will cause some DCS processes to occur (not necessarily noticeable symptoms) This varies depending on divers physiology, temperature, activity in previous 24 hours etc. Not having a safety stop or having a too fast ascent just increases the % likelihood of DCS,
 

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