Thank heavens for PADI

[MikeFerrara]

Warning - leading questions (and general rambling) ahead...

Um, what are the platforms for, students? If there are platforms, are they full of silt to begin with? If not, why would using them create silt? If so, why do you have platforms?

It's a platform that's off the bottom. The purpose is to give students somplace to kneel that isn't silty. The bottom of the quarry is silty so once they leave the platform they will usually reduce the 50 ft vis to zero.

That's cool, really! Sounds like the snowboard parks we built around here. Great for practice, I guess, if that's your thing.

When it isn't totally trashed by divers it can be a nice dive. Great vis, lots of fish and very scenic walls and submerged forest.

Zero-current - must be nice. I suppose no wave surge either? Finning is at a premium, of course...

No current or surge but once you get below 60 ft or so the water temp doesn't change much through the year the warmest being 45 f or so.

If you can "make" them, then I'd say you don't have to find them. Not arguing with you, but you are describing conditions that *most* warm-water vacationing rec divers never find themselves facing...

Divers faning the bottom with their fins, standing on the bottom and so forth can reduce the vis to nothing in a hurry. Also as I said it's cold down deep.

A diver who's done deep dives at a warm water resort and didn't have too much trouble wearing light exposure protection and little weight and thinks they can do the same thing here is often in for a stern lesson.

Since divers just aren't taught "trim" and how to get there when they get deeper in a heavy wet suit they have trouble.

As the suit compresses and air is added to the bc and all that weight on the hips they stand up like wiebals (you know the ones that wobble but won't fall over?)

Being so head up they must be nedative to move foreward without going up so if they stop they sink like a rock or have to kick like crazy to keep from sinking. All that kicking with their fins ponted at the bottom will envelope the diver in a cloud of silt that takes many hours to settle.

Worse sometimes the become overworked and panic.

Maybe a warm water diver in a swim suit or a very light wet suit can egt by wothout understanding balance and trim and being able to stay horizontal but in a heavy suit and going deep enough to compress that suit it gets ugly at best and dangerous at worst.

Shops sell some of these poor people all these warm water regs. The cold water combined with all the heavy breathing by these over worked divers causes lots of free flows which as often as not results in a rapid ascent either on accident or because of panic. Sometimes with injury.

One diver reported here on the board last year that he witnessed 5 such incedents in a single weekend. I have had several of my classes interupted when divers surfaced screaming after a rapid ascent or exclaiming that their buddy was missing. We've helped divers out of the water, cleared the road for ambulances and stopped classes to search for missing divers.

It makes me a nervous wreck and for the last couple of years it seems that I see something happen every time I'm at one of these places yet I keep hearing how adequate training is. ok, if yall say so.

Different conditions, different *required* skills. Maybe the cert classes ought to take that into consideration?

You might suggest that to the people who write the standards.

 

[gj62]

There used to be a guy on the board who used to argue with me all the time about the same stuff you are. He claimed he didn't see things as being so bad.

He spent a weekend at Gilboa and he was convinced. LOL

I think this says volumes about the fact that Gilboa should be considered an advanced dive and not a good choice for OW checkout dives. This is a LOCATION issue - I can find a number of locales that I would never take an OW class. I suppose this is the only place within reasonable distance, therefore it is used by default, not by choice?

 

[rab]

I think this says volumes about the fact that Gilboa should be considered an advanced dive and not a good choice for OW checkout dives. This is a LOCATION issue - I can find a number of locales that I would never take an OW class. I suppose this is the only place within reasonable distance, therefore it is used by default, not by choice?

Well, it's about 150 miles north of my LDS. There are some close locations, but they are much smaller. (I've only been to one other quarry in the area, but looked at the web sites of many others.) There are even a couple other quarries in the vicinity of Gilboa open to scuba. The LDS does winter checkout trips to Vortex Springs in Florida, but if Gilboa wasn't so cold, it would be used more. (I.e., OW and AOW students are usually diving wet.)

-Rob

 

[MikeFerrara]

I think this says volumes about the fact that Gilboa should be considered an advanced dive and not a good choice for OW checkout dives. This is a LOCATION issue - I can find a number of locales that I would never take an OW class. I suppose this is the only place within reasonable distance, therefore it is used by default, not by choice?

It's not an "advanced" dive. With regard to silt and temperatures it's completely typical of any fresh water dive at this latitude with the exception that vis is better and there isn't any current or waves (because of the size).

It isn't even deep really with a max depth of about 140 depending on water level. That depth can only be reached in one small hole and most people probably don't even know where it is. The rest of the deep end of the quarry runs between 115 and 125.

The shallow side slopes to a little over 60 ft at one end though the road bed can be followed a little deeper.

No it's not advanced. In fact it's my favorite place to teach except for the crowds they get these days and what they do to the vis. None of my students have ever had any problem at all.

The problem comes in when divers who were trained with the assumption that they would be taken care of a DM in the tropcs tries to dive on their own in a place where they can make their own choices. Besides it isn't OW students getting hurt. It's AOW students and divers who arn't in training but diving on their own.

Lets face it many many divers do all their diving under some level of supervision. Even if the DM isn't in the water leading the dive they picked the site and key points of the dive plan are taken care of in advance since the boat takes divers to the same sites day after day. When divers try it on their own they just don't seem to do as well.

 

[dweeb]

The problem comes in when divers who were trained with the assumption that they would be taken care of a DM in the tropcs tries to dive on their own in a place where they can make their own choices. Besides it isn't OW students getting hurt. It's AOW students and divers who arn't in training but diving on their own.

Lets face it many many divers do all their diving under some level of supervision. Even if the DM isn't in the water leading the dive they picked the site and key points of the dive plan are taken care of in advance since the boat takes divers to the same sites day after day. When divers try it on their own they just don't seem to do as well.

And, of course, the number of AOW students getting hurt there shows that, contrary to PADI's paradigm, supervision is NOT a substitute for competence. Of course, there is no provision in their system for a universal recognition that a diver has reached competence (competence here meaning not needing supervision and capable of being responsible for oneself.) If you can't do it on your own, then you can't really do it.

 

[Bubble Blower 479]

Let's ask that a little differently-how many incidents could have been prevented with better training?

This is not directed to DD, but I'm curious. Has anyone seen a real study on diving ability or diving accidents in comparison to their original training source. I wonder if there is a real correlation between training and abiltiy. We all hear about the idiot that ignores his training. Some of them are even very exprienced and well trained. Pure numbers cannot be used unless every agency was equally involved. At least we should take the number of "problem divers" and divide it by the number of people that agency trained and the type of training they received. Then we can compare apples to apples. To say that my agency has very few problem divers is totally misleading without a bit a statistical ajustment. The one thing I have learned in this world is to be very skeptical about statistics and even more skeptical about the source. I can prove almost any argument by the stats I choose to use.

Until somesone can show true numbers that PADI produces problem divers, this whole debate is just one bias opinion after another.

 

[MikeFerrara]

Until somesone can show true numbers that PADI produces problem divers, this whole debate is just one bias opinion after another.

Yep, and when you see enough divers get hurt you start to have an opinion.

After you teach for a while you start to have a feel for what it takes to get a student to be able to dive. When you read the PADI standards (as well as other agencies) you realize that it's not there.

 

[neil]

I would be careful of exceeding PADI standards. PADI indicates that there could be liability issues by doing this.

This comes up a lot and here's my take on it. If I teach "extra" things in a PADI course (skills in mid-water, trim, more fin kicks, swimming with one fin, etc) these skills are only going to make my students BETTER divers, and are really the same skills as in the manual taken to a higher level. What kind of liability am I going to incur by teaching these skills to this level? How is a student going to get hurt by using these skills when diving? Is a student who sues likely to prove that one of these skills caused their injury? So, where's the liability?
What do YOU consider exceeding standards? NAUI suggests more dives and more academic content as examples of what they WANT you to do.
As Mike F. (I think) has already said, PADI doesn't explicitly prohibit (at least I can't find where it says so) you from altering the course. It only says that doing so may make your actions less defensible.

Neil

 

[MikeFerrara]

neil,

I agree. There isn't anything in the PADI standards that says you must do skills on tha bottom or limiting the number of times that you do them. Just because you are required to have students hover for one minute (in any position) doesn't mean that they can't spend more time off the bottom in a horizontal position (which is how we dive). It's the difference between teaching to the minimums and having students really learn how to apply the individual skills.

Now, if you add something that isn't in the course at all and some one got hurt doing it, you might have to explain why they were doing it in the firstplace. OTOH, gatting student diving to higher level of proficiency reduces that chances of some one getting hurt in the first place. It also shown the application of mastery learning.

 

[Lawman]

was that the serious divers that visit ScubaBoard are 72 percent PADI. That would indicate to me that recreational
SCUBA is PADI. There are other fringe agencies, but when you talk about the SCUBA industry you're talking about PADI.
PADI is the standard.

Perhaps we should talk less about PADI and more about how the other agencies survive or if they even should.