Nice thread, Mike. My, the posts really pile up while one goes diving.MikeFerrara:There is very little taught in most open water courses that has anything at all to do with deep diving. ok . . . very little that has to do with any kind of diving but certainly not deep.[snip]
SB postings sure paint a picture of new and not-overly-practiced divers abounding. I can't say, I haven't dived widely outside our Southern Oregon area--just a few boat trips. And I'm not an instructor, just an assistant-in-training. But that makes sense, as I see my fellow baby boomers flocking to this and other spare-time pursuits.
I looked back from the perspective of my first hundred dives and was surprised by some of the things I saw. I'd forgotten about my third post-OW dive, just me and my instructor's wife. It lasted sixty minutes, on a single AL80. Don't know how I could have forgotten that, maybe I just assumed it was normal. We didn't go below sixty feet.
More to the point: Some few dozen dives later, my dive shop owner wants to check out his new six-pack dive boat in the lake, and the manager and I ride out with him and dive down a bridge support column to the silty bottom, one hundred feet dead on. Pitch black below forty-five feet, and almost freezing at the bottom.
Pretty darned stupid, I guess, but I was totally relaxed about it. I can only assume I was too dumb to be scared.
I read an article by "Harris" Taylor that muses about the 130 limit, and whether it's in fact seen as a goal by some OW students. I think that was true in my case. I completely forgot (or maybe never learned) that OW qualified me for 60 max. That was my fault, and I'm still something of a "numbers wh0re."
Gotta stay on my toes, that's for sure.
Thanks for the reminder, Mike.
Bryan