kasdeva
Registered
This is perhaps a bit long and mostly posted to vent and perhaps get a little perspective.
I decide to go Scuba Diving. I have wanted to dive for a long time and the finances and personal situation was all good for it. I don't have any friends that dive so I start searching for a training school. Eventually I picked one that would include inland and coastal dives for its qualifying dives. I live in Johannesburg and it is common practice to certify new divers in one of the local quarries. I am not comfortable with that notion and made sure my course would include a trip to the coast.
I book the course and my lectures start in a weeks time. I am a prodigious reader, researcher and spend hours and hours researching everything around diving. Being a bit of a math head this includes decompression theory, bubble models and the physics of diving.
Armed with a million questions I walk into my first lecture excited to learn everything I can. Imagine my disappointment when the first thing the instructor says starting the lecture is : "Please don't ask me hard questions". The book is covered and nothing else. I try several times to get a deeper understanding of some of the course work but every time the question falls even slightly out of the recreational diving domain I am told "That is Tech diving, you don't want to do that."
These questions were not unreasonable, I got the canned answer for daring to ask what the difference was when diving between a BP/W setup versus a traditional BCD.
Being disappointed with the lectures I just sucked it up and told myself that I will pursue enlightenment in the theory of diving some other route.
I arrive for my first pool session. The instructor is and hour and a half late... Some of her cylinders have missing o-rings and she arrived without spare o-rings. I am not happy, drink my water, keep my mouth shut and wait for the chaos to settle. Eventually after nearly expiring from heatstroke in my wetsuit we make it to the pool.
We must do the swim test. 200 meters in my wetsuit with no weights. I splutter. Having done my research I know that the agency she is representing requires the swim without a suit and its 300 meters. I breeze through it, I had spend many hours in the pool at the gym making sure my swimming skills are on par. Next is the float/tread water. What! Only 5 minutes with the wet suit still on? I say nothing and bob around bored. This cannot be good.
The mask removal, regulator recovery is pretty standard and once underwater the instructor does run the drill reasonably well. Next we are off the the deep end to practice the drills at the bottom of the pool. There is no explanation of buoyancy, BCD workings, just: "Deflate your BCD and go to the bottom.". Being seriously overweighted I plummet to the bottom and hurt my ears trying to equalize, breath, not fall over and staying calm. I ace the drills. Two students are now stuck at the top in the shallow end of the pool. The descent was too much for them and they are too scared to continue. Private sessions are arranged with them and they leave. We cover the rest of the drills, pretty standard. I found copies of the instructor training materials online once I realised that the training may not be up to par. I am now reviewing my pool sessions in the evening to make sure the material is covered
Next pool session the next day. The instructor is late again (at least an hour) and arrives with a discover scuba class in tow. She is going to do both our open water sessions and the discover scuba pool sessions at the same time.
It is chaos. Two groups, one that has no lectures to prepare them and never seen scuba gear before, the other with me in, frothing at the mouth having to now hang around while they are kitted up. Oh, she has no o-rings again, borrows a cylinder from one of the other dive schools and manages to get everyone into the pool with air on their backs. We are now doing BCD removal and replacing, buddy breathing etc. The whole time she is visiting the discover scuba crowd to make sure they are not drowning and swimming back to us to see if we are fine. She covers all the pool drills, well almost, no tired diver tow. I go home with an earache, a headache and elevated blood pressure.
Open water dive 1: At the quarry.
She is two hours late. Arrives with empty cylinders, one still has an o-ring missing. Get them filled and kit checked out. We go snorkelling, good fun, not much that can go wrong.
We get out and kit up for the first dive. I am so excited, regardless of the situation, and have an absolute blast in 3 meter (10 feet) viz at 15 meters (50 feet). I was born to do this. I had sorted my weighting out by myself in the meantime and studied buoyancy theory and watched every youtube video I could find. I have a 7 liter AL cylinder, one of the odd ones that she dragged there, no idea why, but thats what I was given. It is nearly half the size of an AL80 so I burn through it in 18 minutes and the dive ends.
I am stoked. That was awesome. We have late lunch. Time for the second dive. Guess what, the compressor room is now closed because it is late in the afternoon and the second dive is now canned. I just get in my car and go home. I am now committed to just finishing this course and never seeing them again. We arrange a dive for yesterday morning to catch up. I wake up, my phone rings its the dive instructor, dive cancelled, something came up. I took leave to do that dive... leave that I will now spend at home wondering how I chose this outfit. An extra coastal dive is arranged for the weekend to cover the drills. Thats an extra sea dive, I can live with that.
I am leaving for Sodwana (Tropical reef dive site) tomorrow morning. I have four dives left with this outfit and I think I will have to redo my OW1.
Aside from the general training disasters I am comfortable with the instructor in the water. She is diligent about keeping us close, checking air and making sure we are safe. To be honest, with a regulator in her mouth, submerged, she is an excellent instructor. The rest the class did not survive the pool sessions so there is only four of us getting qualified making the instructor to student ratio at least safe.
My bags are packed, lets hope my instructor arrives...
If all goes well, I will post the results, otherwise you may see me hanging around Near misses and lessons learned
I decide to go Scuba Diving. I have wanted to dive for a long time and the finances and personal situation was all good for it. I don't have any friends that dive so I start searching for a training school. Eventually I picked one that would include inland and coastal dives for its qualifying dives. I live in Johannesburg and it is common practice to certify new divers in one of the local quarries. I am not comfortable with that notion and made sure my course would include a trip to the coast.
I book the course and my lectures start in a weeks time. I am a prodigious reader, researcher and spend hours and hours researching everything around diving. Being a bit of a math head this includes decompression theory, bubble models and the physics of diving.
Armed with a million questions I walk into my first lecture excited to learn everything I can. Imagine my disappointment when the first thing the instructor says starting the lecture is : "Please don't ask me hard questions". The book is covered and nothing else. I try several times to get a deeper understanding of some of the course work but every time the question falls even slightly out of the recreational diving domain I am told "That is Tech diving, you don't want to do that."
These questions were not unreasonable, I got the canned answer for daring to ask what the difference was when diving between a BP/W setup versus a traditional BCD.
Being disappointed with the lectures I just sucked it up and told myself that I will pursue enlightenment in the theory of diving some other route.
I arrive for my first pool session. The instructor is and hour and a half late... Some of her cylinders have missing o-rings and she arrived without spare o-rings. I am not happy, drink my water, keep my mouth shut and wait for the chaos to settle. Eventually after nearly expiring from heatstroke in my wetsuit we make it to the pool.
We must do the swim test. 200 meters in my wetsuit with no weights. I splutter. Having done my research I know that the agency she is representing requires the swim without a suit and its 300 meters. I breeze through it, I had spend many hours in the pool at the gym making sure my swimming skills are on par. Next is the float/tread water. What! Only 5 minutes with the wet suit still on? I say nothing and bob around bored. This cannot be good.
The mask removal, regulator recovery is pretty standard and once underwater the instructor does run the drill reasonably well. Next we are off the the deep end to practice the drills at the bottom of the pool. There is no explanation of buoyancy, BCD workings, just: "Deflate your BCD and go to the bottom.". Being seriously overweighted I plummet to the bottom and hurt my ears trying to equalize, breath, not fall over and staying calm. I ace the drills. Two students are now stuck at the top in the shallow end of the pool. The descent was too much for them and they are too scared to continue. Private sessions are arranged with them and they leave. We cover the rest of the drills, pretty standard. I found copies of the instructor training materials online once I realised that the training may not be up to par. I am now reviewing my pool sessions in the evening to make sure the material is covered
Next pool session the next day. The instructor is late again (at least an hour) and arrives with a discover scuba class in tow. She is going to do both our open water sessions and the discover scuba pool sessions at the same time.
It is chaos. Two groups, one that has no lectures to prepare them and never seen scuba gear before, the other with me in, frothing at the mouth having to now hang around while they are kitted up. Oh, she has no o-rings again, borrows a cylinder from one of the other dive schools and manages to get everyone into the pool with air on their backs. We are now doing BCD removal and replacing, buddy breathing etc. The whole time she is visiting the discover scuba crowd to make sure they are not drowning and swimming back to us to see if we are fine. She covers all the pool drills, well almost, no tired diver tow. I go home with an earache, a headache and elevated blood pressure.
Open water dive 1: At the quarry.
She is two hours late. Arrives with empty cylinders, one still has an o-ring missing. Get them filled and kit checked out. We go snorkelling, good fun, not much that can go wrong.
We get out and kit up for the first dive. I am so excited, regardless of the situation, and have an absolute blast in 3 meter (10 feet) viz at 15 meters (50 feet). I was born to do this. I had sorted my weighting out by myself in the meantime and studied buoyancy theory and watched every youtube video I could find. I have a 7 liter AL cylinder, one of the odd ones that she dragged there, no idea why, but thats what I was given. It is nearly half the size of an AL80 so I burn through it in 18 minutes and the dive ends.
I am stoked. That was awesome. We have late lunch. Time for the second dive. Guess what, the compressor room is now closed because it is late in the afternoon and the second dive is now canned. I just get in my car and go home. I am now committed to just finishing this course and never seeing them again. We arrange a dive for yesterday morning to catch up. I wake up, my phone rings its the dive instructor, dive cancelled, something came up. I took leave to do that dive... leave that I will now spend at home wondering how I chose this outfit. An extra coastal dive is arranged for the weekend to cover the drills. Thats an extra sea dive, I can live with that.
I am leaving for Sodwana (Tropical reef dive site) tomorrow morning. I have four dives left with this outfit and I think I will have to redo my OW1.
Aside from the general training disasters I am comfortable with the instructor in the water. She is diligent about keeping us close, checking air and making sure we are safe. To be honest, with a regulator in her mouth, submerged, she is an excellent instructor. The rest the class did not survive the pool sessions so there is only four of us getting qualified making the instructor to student ratio at least safe.
My bags are packed, lets hope my instructor arrives...
If all goes well, I will post the results, otherwise you may see me hanging around Near misses and lessons learned
