To anyone who reads SB regularly, it's readily apparent who here has a lot of dives under their belt and why they might no longer find a "total number of dives" to be meaningful. Instructors, scientists, just plain old-timers. It's increasingly clearer to me why you people might choose not to display a number.
/snip/..., the more ambivalent I am about counting the "smaller" dives. So, the running total that I have long kept precise track of has gotten fuzzy and not been increasing very fast. Lately, I have been keeping track not of total number of "dives" but more of number of certain kinds of dives, or dives in certain gear configurations.../snip/.. I believe I have seen rebreather divers track hours on their units. Track what's useful. Tracking some grand total number of dives makes sense in the beginning but becomes less and less meaningful. If you choose not to display some number on SB, I get it.
I am honestly not sure how many dives I have. I logged religiously while working to OWSI, after that it seemed kinda pointless. In flying, we used to have these old curmudgeons from Orvillle and Wilbur's day that just logged what was necessary for currency. "Fly what you can, log what you need".
Once you get to a certain number of hours, you have the prerequisites for any course / job you may be interested in. After that, logging loses its appeal. I think I log probably every 3rd or 4th flight at the moment.
Right now, I am working toward my CCR instructor pre-requisites so I am logging every hour, still got 20 to go
Once I have the course completed, I will probably only log specific dives as required for the next level.
On OC I log dives deeper than 30m since that will count toward my tech instructor requirements later. Once I have that cert, I will probably only log exceptional dives.
CAVEAT: I do download my Perdix to the computer so I have the data available if I ever need to go back and pull it out. I just don't bother to make the numbers correlate between various computers. RAID uses an online logbook for members, which is used to check entry- and exit requirements for courses, that's what I am referring to when I talk about logging dives.
Oh and as far as SB numbers go, I used to have 0-24 until
@Storker couldn't take the cognitive dissonance anymore. I find that sometimes people will use those self-reported numbers as a way of gauging the validity of a response, I would like people to take anything I say with a large pinch of salt and measure it by it's own worth, not because a guy with a 4-digit dive number said it.
I spend a large part of my time mentoring and training divers with a LOT of logged dives, if you don't have the correct training and good, useful experience, those numbers often just indicate how many times you have done it wrong.
- M²
