Starting out in Tech Diving

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Comparing JC and Trace is apple to oranges. I did a day of coaching at Dutch with Trace last month, and it was very helpful for improving my general diving (non-tech). Stuff I would have had to nail down if I had done Fundies, I suppose. John and Trace have VERY different approaches to tech. John is very big on self-reliance, whereas Trace is more in line with the team diving approach. As I said earlier, John's class was a great experience, but I would have gotten much more out of it if I had a longer time to digest stuff (and some pool time to work on basic skills in twinset before hitting the wrecks.)

I believe Trace is spending most of August way up in NY state (Thousand Islands), so he may not be back down at Dutch for a while.

Yes and no....I think Trace may still teach a class who's entire focus is self reliance. In fact, I thought he was certified to teach solo cave diving (very rare) and may have been the first to reach that status. Overall, I think it depends on what class you take with him but most of his tech classes....In particular those that are for people who may move to a GUE class.....are "Team" based. My PSAI Trimix class was very team based.
 
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Can you please explain???

Just my personal experience. I've been around quite a lot of fundies classes and I've been involved with post fundies training dives where divers wanted to work on what they learned before.

In a sense it is a very simple course. Like the name of the course (fundamentals) it is there to just teach you the basic stuff that you need to able to progress into GUE style diving. Some of it is irrelevant if you are going to take other non GUE courses (because it will be GUE procedures) but most of it will be VERY relevant and a big benefit to your general diving and future technical diving.

A lot of stuff that makes technical diving different and more difficult than recreational diving is taskloading. This can be taskloading on many levels, from equipment stress (you are handling much more equipment while typically doing other stuff as well), to awareness stress (you are so busy doing one thing that you are no longer focused on everything else going on around you), to procedural/planning stress (on a typical technical dive you are doing a lot of stuff in a precise manner, one after the other). All of this can bite you in the ass in one way or the other and typically it's a snowball effect.

Before you start learning about all of that it makes sense to get a tune-up on basic skills. These are buoyancy, position in the water (trim) and different kicks. If you have these sorted at a very very high level, then all of the above will become easier because you at least don't need to manage your basics anymore... they are ingrained. Fundies does exactly that... It's a check up / tune up of your basic skills at a very very high level. And unfortunately many people (including very experienced divers) will find out that their basics are not yet on par. Fortunately in this course you'll be shown your skills in a very very harsh mirror but will also get the tools and roadmap how you can achieve this high level of basics.

Believe me it's incredibly fun not to have to think anymore about basics but just doing them.

At the moment there are 4 scenarios how you can finish fundies after 4 days (or 2 weekends) of hard work:
Fail: You are not cooperating in the course or have a very unsafe attitude. You are basically unteachable. I don't know anybody who got a fail.
Provisional: You do not meet course requirements on one or more parts of the curriculum. You'll get a roadmap to improve and typically can come back to the same instructor without cost (or a slight cost) to do a 1 day review of those skills and get an upgrade to rec or tec pass. In my limited view about 30% get a provisional.
Rec pass: You meet all the course requirements on a recreational level. Congrats! You can continue on some of the GUE courses but not the tech courses (cave, tech). You can get a review to upgrade your skill set to tec pass. Most who want to progress will do so and it will typically take between 3months and a year of training to upgrade your skills sufficiently. I also know some other federation tech instructors who are very happy if a student applies for a tech course with them with a fundies rec pass. It means they have at least a good basic skill set. About 55-60% get a rec pass.
Tec pass: You pass all course requirements on a technical level. Congrats! You are free to sign up to any follow up GUE course including tech courses. Your skills are at a high enough level to give you a very decent chance at finishing a GUE technical course. IMO about 10-15% get's a fundies tech pass on first try.

Above on my limited view of about 50 fundies students.
 
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