hawaiian.hokie
Registered
For all the Technical Divers in here, what skills or habits do you think all open water students should be learning?
The context for this question: I'm a fairly new open water scuba instructor, and I've been diving about 10 years. My initial open water class was with a bunch of TDI cave diving instructors, and there were definitely some skills/habits they taught early on that stuck with me. Some random examples (that I don't see taught often in Open Water):
- A greater reliance on frog kicks, helicopter kicks, and finning backward
- Nothing ever dangles (SPGs, secondary reg, etc). Everything is always streamlined and ideally clipped with a bolt snap
- Always attach bolt snaps using cave line or a zip tie (something that can be cut)
- If you're diving a new gear setup, spend the first few minutes of the dive practicing deploying your secondary breathing source to help build some muscle memory
- If you loose a reg and can't find it on the first sweep, go to your secondary. Don't keep doing the same motion hoping for a new result.
So besides making sure open water students have solid fundamentals (like neutral buoyancy, good trim, and good dive plans), what do you think are some early skills or habits that can help set them up for success, reduce risk, and help them as they continue to more advanced training? What bad habits do you see new tech students having to "unlearn" that they could have learned during open water?
The context for this question: I'm a fairly new open water scuba instructor, and I've been diving about 10 years. My initial open water class was with a bunch of TDI cave diving instructors, and there were definitely some skills/habits they taught early on that stuck with me. Some random examples (that I don't see taught often in Open Water):
- A greater reliance on frog kicks, helicopter kicks, and finning backward
- Nothing ever dangles (SPGs, secondary reg, etc). Everything is always streamlined and ideally clipped with a bolt snap
- Always attach bolt snaps using cave line or a zip tie (something that can be cut)
- If you're diving a new gear setup, spend the first few minutes of the dive practicing deploying your secondary breathing source to help build some muscle memory
- If you loose a reg and can't find it on the first sweep, go to your secondary. Don't keep doing the same motion hoping for a new result.
So besides making sure open water students have solid fundamentals (like neutral buoyancy, good trim, and good dive plans), what do you think are some early skills or habits that can help set them up for success, reduce risk, and help them as they continue to more advanced training? What bad habits do you see new tech students having to "unlearn" that they could have learned during open water?