2airishuman
Contributor
When I took my AOW class, it was a zoo. I posted at length here when I took it, and the consensus reply was that AOW class is like that. Several/many students, disorganized, widely varying diving skill, usually not experienced enough to be good buddies, often quite a few students per instructor based on the presumption that everyone already knows how to dive and doesn't need personal handholding as can be the case in OW.
The typical progression is PPB followed by Navigation followed by the night and deep dives with these last being in either order. The last two are inherently more hazardous than a shallow reef bimble. During these dives, the student will typically be in a far more hazardous environment than in any dive they have completed previously. The relationship between depth and safety has been well documented by DAN. The hazards of night diving are less studied but still clear.
DAN statistics have shown that divers who have completed OW but have not completed 20 dives are at the highest risk for accidents.
While the event at A&I contains enough things going wrong to allow anyone to use it as evidence to support their safety agenda du jour, I think the broader question it raises is this:
On the other hand, running a fun dive on a shallow reef bimble like a drill sergeant is just going to turn people off to diving.
So we have people who start out by practicing sloppy diving. They get to be good at diving in a sloppy fashion, and show up at AOW with weak skills across the board and, well, sloppy procedures. I see instructors teaching AOW as being, too often, there to get these students through some potentially hazardous dives without an accident. For a talented instructor with only a few students, it works out OK. With more students it depends on the luck of the draw, class of (say) 10 if half of them are good divers it will work out.
I'm not an instructor, and teaching isn't my thing. I wonder though, whether instructors and DMs get numb to the poor dive skills, and get so used to stepping in and saving people from themselves that they let the classes get bigger until they get a particularly bad group and have a near miss or worse.
I don't know what the answer is, but there must be one.
The typical progression is PPB followed by Navigation followed by the night and deep dives with these last being in either order. The last two are inherently more hazardous than a shallow reef bimble. During these dives, the student will typically be in a far more hazardous environment than in any dive they have completed previously. The relationship between depth and safety has been well documented by DAN. The hazards of night diving are less studied but still clear.
DAN statistics have shown that divers who have completed OW but have not completed 20 dives are at the highest risk for accidents.
While the event at A&I contains enough things going wrong to allow anyone to use it as evidence to support their safety agenda du jour, I think the broader question it raises is this:
How can the dive community (professionals and individual divers alike) do a better job shepherding new divers through the first 20 dives, so that they can build the experience they need to be safe, independent divers?
Shallow reef bimbles and easy "fun dives" from shore build confidence but there is the risk that they cause critical skills to erode because they are not relevant to low-risk dives. On any easy, shallow dive, most people aren't good buddies because the surface is right there. On these dives people don't really do any gas planning, they just figure they'll get back on the boat (or on shore) with 500 PSI. The dive briefing can be skipped because there's nothing much to brief. NDL isn't a factor, so no point in using tables or checking the computer. You won't learn to call a dive when you should, because these dives don't usually provide a reason for that.
On the other hand, running a fun dive on a shallow reef bimble like a drill sergeant is just going to turn people off to diving.
So we have people who start out by practicing sloppy diving. They get to be good at diving in a sloppy fashion, and show up at AOW with weak skills across the board and, well, sloppy procedures. I see instructors teaching AOW as being, too often, there to get these students through some potentially hazardous dives without an accident. For a talented instructor with only a few students, it works out OK. With more students it depends on the luck of the draw, class of (say) 10 if half of them are good divers it will work out.
I'm not an instructor, and teaching isn't my thing. I wonder though, whether instructors and DMs get numb to the poor dive skills, and get so used to stepping in and saving people from themselves that they let the classes get bigger until they get a particularly bad group and have a near miss or worse.
I don't know what the answer is, but there must be one.
