First, my apologies to the friends and family who may come across this thread where discussions unrelated to safety measures that may have saved the young woman's are being discussed. I did request to the mods to move these discussions to a separate thread, but it has yet to happen. I hope it still will.
Defeats the purpose if you go along. Your methods may need reviewing? Has SSI finally published their own dive literature?
Fortunately, I do have PADI materials from when I was an IDC Staff Instructor. Regarding the navigation course, page 39 of the IG:
Open Water Guidelines for
Navigation Dives
A. General Open Water Considerations
3. The use of qualified assistants is highly recommended. Assistants can help keep track of buddy teams, accompany student divers underwater, and at the surface can help with check in, check out procedures and be prepared to help in an emergency.
This contradicts in my opinion:
4. During the dives in this course, you can best determine student diver performance from the surface. Prior to the dive, assign each buddy team a colored buoy and line (small painted bleach bottles work well). By observing the buoys on the surface, you can easily determine the progress of each team and the severity of any errors (conditions permitting).
Let's apply some logic here when it comes to navigating a predetermined course with multiple waypoints that cannot be seen from the surface. How do I determine that my students actually find them underwater? I'm not dealing with tropical viz here. There'a reason why I do this package course only during the worse visibility of the year: to challenge students to navigate accurately. Before I became a dive pro, I took a search & recovery class with great viz. Finding stuff was no challenge whatsoever, so the improvement in skills was marginal as I was never tested. Yes, I have some idea as to the starting point where they return, but even then, they could miss it, and wing it. The only way for me to verify is to be with them.
Now from the surface, one can observe triangle and square patterns. That's pretty straight forward, but those are easy (triangle is harder when going up and down a slope as that throws off divers). However, given that I have duty of care, despite that (when I taught under PADI) I could do so at the surface, if there was an emergency where one of my students drowned, I'm still going to wind up in court as a defendant as I wasn't there. I can guarantee you that the plaintiff's attorney is going to bring in their own expert witness who would say that being at the surface wasn't prudent and therefore I was negligent.
Following my students as they navigate through a multi-waypoint course, I can stop them if need be. We can go to the surface, discuss how to correct if they are missing waypoints (as the distances between waypoints are far enough away that if you are at 5 degrees off, you will miss it in bad viz), and we start over.
What I do is validation and corrective teaching as needed.
The Asian dive operator is one of the best for OW training.
If they place students on their knees ever, then definitely not.
Now that we've established you are a PADI instructor, feel free to cite from PADI materials where you think I'm wrong.
