UTD vs GUE revisited

[WhiteSands]

I was looking through the old thread on this.

I am currently with UTD, done Essentials of Rec 1. I chose UTD because it costs about 1/4 of GUE fundies. And for fundies I have to travel to another country to do it and the schedule is fixed whereas for UTD it was more flexible.

I am more interested in caves. I read comments on the old thread like UTD is better for wrecks, GUE for caves. Why is this so?

I also read that UTD uses ratio deco almost exclusively. I don't know much about this, looked it up and it seems this isn't such a good idea according to some? Can someone pls advice. I am very concerned about DCS and correct off gassing strategy is very important to me.

Lastly my feeling about the UTD training lectures hasn't been good. Some parts are well put together like the part on propulsion & drills. Others on gas mixtures and gas properties seem haphazardly put together. Terms being used without definition, poor pedagodgy and even mobile phone going off in the background recording. This might not have an impact on dive training but it does not inspire confidence.

At this point I am not sure if I should progress with UTD or switch to GUE. Cost is a big factor for me. Safety is the next. I don't want to have to redo GUE fundies after I've spent a lot of money on UTD courses because I understand I cannot switch over to GUE.

I looked at the literature put out by GUE and they seem well thought out and put together. But UTD offers side mount and GUE doesn't.

Pls help me decide thanks.

 

[elan]

I cannot comment on UTD as I have never taken their class but I took 3 courses with GUE and they were worth every penny spent.

 

[TSandM]

UTD offers a specific wreck curriculum; GUE does not. I think that's why people say UTD is better for wrecks.

When I took my UTD Tech 1, we did use RD. When I did GUE Rec Triox, we used DecoPlanner with fudges. I believe GUE is still teaching DecoPlanner (maybe with gradient factors? I dunno. . . ) and RD as a backup/contingency approach. I think it's a good idea to get exposed to a number of different approaches to decompression, personally; not everyone agrees on what is most advisable, especially once you get into technical depths and times.

I would agree that the online classrooms ought to be better than they are, but at least they exist. When the classes first came out, I spent a great deal of time going through the slideshows and picking up typos and other errors, and submitting errata for correction. Some of them got done, and others didn't. However, if you read some of the older GUE manuals, you'll find editing problems there, too, including duplicated pages and, IIRC, mislabeled graphs and figures. Even my beloved Deco for Divers has a bunch of those types of errors. I think people who write diving educational stuff just can't afford or don't know where to find good proofreaders or editors.

UTD has taken the approach of trying to bring all kinds of diving under one roof -- standard backmount, sidemount, and CCR. To do that, they have had to come up with a number of odd departures from standard. Opinion on those departures is mixed. The agency is still very new and seems to be constantly evolving and changing.

GUE is an older agency and has a much more conservative approach to their diving system. They don't change things unless the training council is convinced that a change needs to be made. This usually occurs because a fault in the system has shown up and caused a problem or accident, or because the instructional staff has noticed a deficiency that needs to be addressed (such as the near-total abandonment of flutter kicking). Their basic philosophy is that the vast majority of open water, techical and cave diving can be done using the GUE Standard equipment configuration, so that is what they teach. By the time you get to where you are doing dives that truly require rebreathers or sidemount, you are probably at a point where you can make rational decisions about what you want to do and from whom you want to learn it.

 

[nadwidny]

You need to look at where you want to end up and who you want to teach you to achieve that. If you are into caves and decide that a GUE guy is who you want to teach you then you need to do the GUE thing. If you decide that the instructor you want is a UTD guy then you need to go UTD. After you've decided that you need to find a local mentor to help you on the way. All in all I would take pretty much take anyone with either UTD or GUE training on my expeditions with few questions on their abilities...unless they showed up with that weird assed UTD sidemount or RB rigs.

 

[Ubiquitin]

I do not think that you should be overly worried about ratio deco by itself causing DCS-- at least not at this stage as a recreational diver. Ratio deco is actually pretty conservative when applied to a recreational dive profile especially when compared to the standard 3-6m safety stop taught by many of the other agencies. Also, I only have second hand information, gleaned from "boat-talk" from another diver who completed both Essentials of Tech with UTD and GUE-F (Tech), but according to him they played around with DecoPlanner during Fundies and the ascent profiles it generated were pretty similar to what you would generate on the fly with ratio deco. They were diving at recreational depths within min deco, so I don't know if this similarity holds when applied to deeper or deco dives. Maybe one day I could play around with decoplanner myself and see if the similarity holds.

I agree with you that the UTD online classroom is pretty bad at times. The printed handbooks are actually pretty good, but the online slide presentation man... less than awesome. AG should book a studio, write down a lesson plan with what he wants to say, and redo the whole thing. LOL. Well, at least we have online material... a lot of other agencies don't have it at all.

I don't know if it is fair to make sweeping statements like UTD is better at X, GUE is better at Y. I think what you have to learn to safely dive in a cave for example is broadly the same.Sure, there are some small differences --how you are taught to route the light cord, whether your backup light can have rechargable batteries, etc.-- but in the end it boils down to the instructor... which instructor do you have access to? Which instructor is more experienced? Which instructor has a teaching style that is right for you?

A caveat to that though: I don't think GUE teaches sidemount, or CCR, so if that is what you want to do in the future then plan accordingly. If, at this stage, you know that you want to dive sidemount exclusively and never want to dive backmounted doubles, then I would suggest not going GUE route (at least beyond Recreational Fundies). Otherwise there is nothing (aside from cost) really stopping you from learning backmounted doubles first then sidemount/CCR later if you want. You could do GUE-F for the rec pass and make a more informed decision on whether to go for the tech pass and continue along GUE syllabus, or to stick with UTD, or a mix of both.

Wait a second: Essentials of Rec, gripes about the online classroom... do I know you? Say yes if you just got back from a Redang liveaboard after National Day. If so, what the hell, man. I thought we were supposed to go Cave 1 together? LOL.

 

[eelnoraa]

If I may suggest, if you are thinking about cave diving, maybe you should look beyond the cost of training itself. The overall cost of cave diving will make the cost difference between GUE and UTD negligible.

 

[WhiteSands]

Thank you, very good points for me to think about.

UTD offers a specific wreck curriculum; GUE does not. I think that's why people say UTD is better for wrecks.

When I took my UTD Tech 1, we did use RD. When I did GUE Rec Triox, we used DecoPlanner with fudges. I believe GUE is still teaching DecoPlanner (maybe with gradient factors? I dunno. . . ) and RD as a backup/contingency approach. I think it's a good idea to get exposed to a number of different approaches to decompression, personally; not everyone agrees on what is most advisable, especially once you get into technical depths and times.

I would agree that the online classrooms ought to be better than they are, but at least they exist. When the classes first came out, I spent a great deal of time going through the slideshows and picking up typos and other errors, and submitting errata for correction. Some of them got done, and others didn't. However, if you read some of the older GUE manuals, you'll find editing problems there, too, including duplicated pages and, IIRC, mislabeled graphs and figures. Even my beloved Deco for Divers has a bunch of those types of errors. I think people who write diving educational stuff just can't afford or don't know where to find good proofreaders or editors.

UTD has taken the approach of trying to bring all kinds of diving under one roof -- standard backmount, sidemount, and CCR. To do that, they have had to come up with a number of odd departures from standard. Opinion on those departures is mixed. The agency is still very new and seems to be constantly evolving and changing.

GUE is an older agency and has a much more conservative approach to their diving system. They don't change things unless the training council is convinced that a change needs to be made. This usually occurs because a fault in the system has shown up and caused a problem or accident, or because the instructional staff has noticed a deficiency that needs to be addressed (such as the near-total abandonment of flutter kicking). Their basic philosophy is that the vast majority of open water, techical and cave diving can be done using the GUE Standard equipment configuration, so that is what they teach. By the time you get to where you are doing dives that truly require rebreathers or sidemount, you are probably at a point where you can make rational decisions about what you want to do and from whom you want to learn it.

 

[mathauck0814]

Cost is a big factor for me. Safety is the next.

So... safety is good... so long as it's cheap... otherwise it's better that it costs less? Really?

 

[TSandM]

You know, sometimes you have to do the best you can on safety, within the budget that you have. Not everyone can easily come up with 2K or more to take a diving class.

 

[mathauck0814]

You know, sometimes you have to do the best you can on safety, within the budget that you have. Not everyone can easily come up with 2K or more to take a diving class.

We diverge here.