September LessonsforLife

[Dive-aholic]

Yet PADI says that exceeding standards is a bad thing and just makes courses harder.

How do the other agencies come down on that issue?

I don't know that PADI really says exceeding standards is a bad thing. They just encourage us to not teach above the standards. Okay, it's a matter of semantics, but that's what it's all about in the liability arena.

 

[desiredbard]

Yeah but do a training abroad in one of the scuba paradises and its more or less buying your license.
The missus unbuckled her waitbelt at -35ft last weekend because she could lnot equalise.
She paniced, swam up to fast and when i tried to get hold of her (I grabbed the back of her belt, she unbuckled)

Needless to say I gave her more than an earfull once I surfaced and saw she was ok.

I know she is panicky, and get stressed when something does not go as well as she would like. But having seen that she equalizes without pinching her nose and actually exhaling most through her reg makes me wonder about the quality of training she had.

The lack of understanding on how to behave is a risk to both her and me cause it will force me to go after her .....

Luckily my local dive school here insists on cold water training and she will damn sure have an other couple of dives with a local instructor.

Now myself I'm a fast learner and have had no difficukty on my 7 day openwater+advanced course. For herself a 4.5 day open water course seems not to have been enough.

 

[jbd]

I think my SSI instructor probably taught outside of standards. He talked a lot about stress and we did several rescue skills. I remember him talking about CO2 retention and overbreathing a regulator, narcosis and how easy it is to dive deeper than your plan. None of those topics were in the OW manual.

I'm not sure about the rescue skills but the rest is not what I would consider teaching outside of standards.

Lets use the narcosis topic as an example---if the instructor talks about narcosis in the classroom and then takes the students on a dive to 130 feet so they know what narcosis feels like--thats outside of standards or breaking standards for an OW course.

 

[TheRedHead]

Lets use the narcosis topic as an example---if the instructor talks about narcosis in the classroom and then takes the students on a dive to 130 feet so they know what narcosis feels like--thats outside of standards or breaking standards for an OW course.

My instructor assumed (and rightly so) that we would not follow the recommendations of not diving below 60 feet right after open water. He didn't condone it, but he did cover a lot of material from the deep diver course. I'm not sure if that is teaching outside of standards.

 

[Thalassamania]

So it's not a bad thing, it might be better for your students, but you're not supposed to do it. I guess I don't grasp the concept.

 

[TheRedHead]

So it's not a bad thing, it might be better for your students, but you're not supposed to do it. I guess I don't grasp the concept.

A lot of people in our area go to Cozumel to dive. It's 2-1/2 hours away and cheap. My instructor knows this and tries to prepare students for diving below the 60 foot standard, which is certainly going to be exceeded in Cozumel. Maybe he's a realist?

 

[Walt1957]

how about SSI, IDEA, MDEA, YMCA and the rest of the alphabet soup?

Do they encourage/permit exceeding standards?

Do they insist that a given skill/exercise be done during a specific pool/open water session?

My SSI instructor taught outside the minimum, and in fact he said that he felt his experiernce was part of what we were paying for and that we should take advantage of it. He is a rescue diver with over 2500 dives, and he said he doesn't count dives as an instructor as diving, those are what he includes on his resume under babysitting .

 

[jbd]

My instructor assumed (and rightly so) that we would not follow the recommendations of not diving below 60 feet right after open water. He didn't condone it, but he did cover a lot of material from the deep diver course. I'm not sure if that is teaching outside of standards.

That would be hard to say whether or not it was or is outside of standards. Much of the information that applies to recreational deep dives is relavent to shallower dives. I would consider his approach as being that of a realist.