I am looking at shelves of books and diving manuals that I've read over the past 41 years in the sport. Two even have my name on them! The older books are my favorites. They seem to contain the most in-depth information and are also the ones I remember most due to the principle of primacy. Books also remind me of the classes I have taken, the instructors who taught them, and fellow students whose ingenious solutions and complete foul-ups served as learning experiences. As I age, I really am starting to forget a lot. Like my mask is already on my face when I'm looking for it. There's that saying, "He's forgotten more about diving than most of us will ever know." In some ways that is true because things that were once taught in diving courses are no longer taught. In other ways, it is not true because so many divers are learning to use technology that I have only had rudimentary training in (such as rebreathers) or no training (such as sidemount).
Thousands of pages of information and thousands of hours in classes (100+ certifications that are related to diving or lifeguarding), and I've only had to use a fraction of those lessons in 7,500+ dives.
One thing I have never had to do was plot a course vector to compensate for the current. In the real world, based upon the experience of missing and then getting better at finding targets with a compass, my course vector became a pretty accurate guess at the angle I needed to swim over time and distance based on how fast the water was moving me. I also never needed to plot a course on a chart.
Another thing I've never had to do was to use my exact gas consumption rate to plan a dive outside class. Battlefield calculations were fine for gas planning.
One of the strangest things I learned in initial open water training was to remove my tank to bump an aggressive shark. Yeah. Never had to use that one. My former girlfriend was a shark expert so I was exposed to sharks a little more than average, but there was never a need for the tank trick.
I learned to eat and drink underwater but never did a dive longer than about 3.5 hours. So there was no need. Freediving to 95 feet during a girl's PADI AOW course my friend was teaching coupled with swimming in reverse while practicing eating and drinking underwater the following day did get me a date with her, and she became "the girl" until she wasn't.
Those are just a few things that come to mind.
How about you? Do you have any favorite academic or practical aspects of training you learned but never had to use? Or, perhaps something you never thought you'd have to do, but you did?
Thousands of pages of information and thousands of hours in classes (100+ certifications that are related to diving or lifeguarding), and I've only had to use a fraction of those lessons in 7,500+ dives.
One thing I have never had to do was plot a course vector to compensate for the current. In the real world, based upon the experience of missing and then getting better at finding targets with a compass, my course vector became a pretty accurate guess at the angle I needed to swim over time and distance based on how fast the water was moving me. I also never needed to plot a course on a chart.
Another thing I've never had to do was to use my exact gas consumption rate to plan a dive outside class. Battlefield calculations were fine for gas planning.
One of the strangest things I learned in initial open water training was to remove my tank to bump an aggressive shark. Yeah. Never had to use that one. My former girlfriend was a shark expert so I was exposed to sharks a little more than average, but there was never a need for the tank trick.
I learned to eat and drink underwater but never did a dive longer than about 3.5 hours. So there was no need. Freediving to 95 feet during a girl's PADI AOW course my friend was teaching coupled with swimming in reverse while practicing eating and drinking underwater the following day did get me a date with her, and she became "the girl" until she wasn't.
Those are just a few things that come to mind.
How about you? Do you have any favorite academic or practical aspects of training you learned but never had to use? Or, perhaps something you never thought you'd have to do, but you did?
