The depth shall be 60, 60 shall the depth be, 61 is right out unless your AOW certified????

[Killerflyingbugs]

No. 3 seems a little demanding

That's a lot of tanks.

 

[TMHeimer]

That's a lot of tanks.

No equipment. That's why it's so hard.

 

[NAM001]

This is an interesting statement, and should not be followed. Panic should not be setting in! The diver doesn't have to "cut depth in half fast." That is a prescription for receiving an overpressure injury to the diver's lungs. The diver in an OOA (out-of-air) situation should be able to easily access the surface. Remember this graph:


This shows that even if a diver exhales all the air (which we almost never do), the diver still have between one and one-and-a-half liters of air in your lungs. At 100 feet (four atmospheres absolute pressure) that air is multiplied by 4 as the pressure releases. Say this diver has 2 liters of air in his/her lungs. As he/she ascends, 2 x 4 = 8 liters of air in his/her lungs, but your capacity is usually only about 4-5 liters. This represents one to two breaths of air in you lungs as you ascend. This is easily handled, but NOT if you panic.

If the thought of this situation sets a diver's mind into a panic, the diver probably should not be there in the first place. This is because the diver is not comfortable in all situations.

SeaRat

All this is fine for those that take the time to understand the physics. The problem again is with those new divers making dives they are not really ready to do. They have never been taught this. All they now is there is no air to breath and the surface is 80' above and they will bolt. You cant rationally deal with someone that is in a survival mode. I can deal with it, but new divers cant for what ever reason. very few have ever tried to do an ascent from 50 ' or so to see if what was taught in class was true. They will beet feet to about 1/2 depth when the bcd starts lifting them and they can stop kicking, if they do. Your Phrase " This is easily handled, but NOT if you panic. " is the crux of the problem.

Your comment " If the thought of this situation sets a diver's mind into a panic, the diver probably should not be there in the first place. This is because the diver is not comfortable in all situations." could not be better put.

The realities of dong a CESA is seldom understood by the student as they do one from at times15' which gives the student so many degrees of not doing it right while an instructor has ahold of you slowing your ascent. The experience is too often treated as just a hoop to go through to get the card.

 

[boulderjohn]

Is there a link to the current PADI/SSI or other OW courses that I could use to compare with the NAUI course workbooks I have from the 1970s? If so, I could make such a comparison.

My comment above comes from the discussion on this thread.

I am confused. You already made he comparison between the courses from the past and the present, and now you are asking me for the information you need to look it up to see what those differences are. Are you saying you had no factual basis for the comparison you made and were just making it up?
P

S, I just looked at a PADI site where the different courses are shown. The PADI Open Water Diver course uses dives only in "Confined Water" and includes 31 hours of required instruction, including the 4 open water dives, I believe. I'm not sure what "Confined Water" means, but it seems that the "Advanced Open Water" course requires another 15 hours of instruction, including "5 scuba dives." So far, I have not found a breakdown of what the courses involve by teaching subject.

I have no idea what you looked up, but you must have gone significantly back in time. When PADI (and later almost all other scuba agencies) adapted Benjamin Bloom's concept of Mastery Learning for their instructional approach, all time constraints went out the window. According to modern scuba instructional philosophies as used by nearly all scuba agencies, time of instruction is meaningless. It takes as long to teach a student as it takes for the student to learn the required skills. Whatever site you looked up that is listing hours of required instruction is out of sync with that philosophy.

To answer your questions to the best of my ability, scuba courses for all agencies include three parts: academics, confined water, and open water. The academics portion is the technical stuff you learn by lecture, reading, or whatever. In the early days of scuba, this was done chiefly by instructor lecture, which learning theorists universally agree is the worst way to transfer information. That resulted in long classes with low retention rates. Then came home study via reading, which was a HUGE improvement. The most effective is well-designed online education, which is commonly used now. Weeks of lecture can be effectively replaced by hours of online study. Confined water is what is done in the pool. Almost no changes have been made in the confined water requirements in decades. A couple years ago PADI made a number of additions to those requirements, but other than those additions, they have no changed in decades. The open water requirements did not change all that much in the last 3-4 decades, but in the last couple of years,PADI added a number of requirements.

 

[boulderjohn]

Can you give examples of concepts taken out of the OW course and put into later courses? Be specific--what was in what OW course formerly and when was it taken out? To what course was it added?

I will be building on these entries as I find them. Here are the PADI requirements for watermanship:
PADI from their current (2015) manual:

NAUI, 1971 Blue Book:
These are not directly comparable, as the old NAUI course requirements were done during the course. PADI currently does require a CESA:

First of all you are wrong about the CESA, which is very much a PADI requirement. PADI has not changes its CESA requirements in decades.

You said that modern instruction took things out of the old OW course and put them into more advanced courses in order to make students pay for them. I asked you to provide examples. Is this it? Yes, PADI took out silly and unnecessary swimming requirements from the old OW course. But did it add it to another later course? You did not identify the course they added it to.

 

[John C. Ratliff]

...First of all you are wrong about the CESA, which is very much a PADI requirement. PADI has not changes its CESA requirements in decades.

You said that modern instruction took things out of the old OW course and put them into more advanced courses in order to make students pay for them. I asked you to provide examples. Is this it? Yes, PADI took out silly and unnecessary swimming requirements from the old OW course. But did it add it to another later course? You did not identify the course they added it to.

John,

If you'll look at my post, I think I said that PADI did require the CESA, then gave the actual teaching outline.

Concerning those "silly and unnecessary swimming requirements..." some would say that those showed skill in the water. Without that, when something goes wrong the diver is more likely to panic.

SeaRat

 

[KenGordon]

You do not need to be able to swim to learn to dive.

We have successfully taught two non swimmers recently. It is very satisfying to get someone who is totally uncomfortable in the water to a place where they can happily hang about in the middle of a large body of water with absolutely no concern or worry.

It used to be that students had to tread water with their arms above their heads, swim multiple length with a heavy weight belt and so forth even before they could try a snorkel.

Diving is not swimming, adding extra bogus barriers is pointless.

 

[tursiops]

You do not need to be able to swim to learn to dive.

We have successfully taught two non swimmers recently.

I don't understand this. the RSTC multi-agency agreed requirements (these are minimums, agencies can add more) are:
"(2) Physical Conditioning and Watermanship Evaluation.
The student shall effectively demonstrate basic watermanship ability by performing, to an instructor, the watermanship evaluation required by a training organization. This watermanship evaluation shall include either: a) continuous 200 yard (183 metre) surface distance swim and a 10 minute survival swim/float without the use of mask, fins, snorkel or of other swimming aids; b) 300 yard swim using mask, fins and snorkel, and a 10 minute survival swim/float without mask, fins, snorkel or other swimming aid. If an exposure suit is used, the wearer must be neutrally buoyant at the surface"

So, did you teach them to swim first?

 

[Killerflyingbugs]

no need to swim on scuba.

 

[Storker]

You are out of breath, scared to death and you are 8 or 10 lbs negative, have no means to inflate the BC (orally or otherwise) and are essentially pinned to the bottom with a bag of heavy lobsters clipped to your BC.

This is something I would never do, and if anyone asked me I'd advise very strongly against it.

Now, picking lobsters on scuba is prohibited around here, and if you're caught you're in for a pretty hefty fine, but scalloping is rather popular. There's been more than one occasion when I've had a catch bag literally chock full with scallops, and that makes you pretty durn overweighted. More than enough to make buoyancy control awkward. I'm fine with clipping an empty bag to me, and I can even clip a bag with a few shells to me, but there's no way I'd clip a full bag to me. Even the empty or near-empty bag is clipped to my weight belt, not to a D-ring on my BCD, so I can ditch it in an emergency.

People have died from hanging on to their catch bag. I'm not planning to do that.