lamont
Contributor
TSandM:First off, if you don't think there is any, please don't post here!
A lot of the time, I see people posting something about DIR and saying, "But I'm just a recreational diver, and these things don't apply to the diving I do." The implication is that DIR is only of significant value to the technical diver.
It got me to thinking, though. For which type of diver DOES the system offer the most value?
In the world of recreational diving, you have the most variation in gear and configurations, the most variable buddy behavior and communication techniques and skills, and great variability in skills. But the dives generally aren't high risk.
In the technical world, equipment is likely to be more similar, although there are still outliers. You're more likely to see a team ethic (except in New Jersey wreck divers, as I understand it) and at least in caves, you're going to see a high standard of skills. But those are also the environments where the importance of rapid response to an emergency is so much higher.
So I think it's an interesting question: For which group is an approach involving standardized equipment, gases, skills and protocols going to offer the greatest increase in either comfort or safety?
Okay, back to the original point of this question...
I did my four OW checkout dives in a PADI class and all the rest of them after that have at least been done with DIR gear and I took DIRF around dive #25. Initially I thought techdivers were crazy and had no intention of doing technical diving, but after a year of diving DIR recreationally that changed. But here's what I recall of my pre-technical assessment of DIR:
First of all, as a new diver its overwhelming trying to figure out all the gear choices without having any experience to base it on. Everyone is in this boat to begin with and the heckling new divers get who are trusting DIR without knowing the reasons behind it is pointless. The newer diver needs to trust someone more experienced or else they're just wildly guessing.
When I started out with DIR I knew I wasn't going to buy a console. Ergonomically they just didn't appeal to me the first time I ever saw them in a dive shop. I didn't know that it helped to put your bottom timer on your right arm so that your left hand was free to control buoyancy, but that made sense to me so I adopted it. I bought a BP/W most because it was DIR and because simplicity in engineering appeals to me. I later appreciated that simplicity in terms of less buoyant material, a back-inflate bladder, the ability to switch to doubles and I've grown to prefer the continuous band of webbing. I also like the fairly indestructable construction. The long hose took me a long time to grok and I fought against the idea of donating a perfectly good breathing regulator in your mouth during an emergency which seemed backwards to me. A couple hundred S-drills later and I would never switch back, so I feel like that got me on the right road. I also like the organization of storage with pockets on the drysuit and the MC pack and the organization of the d-rings.
When it comes to the DIRF skills after taking DIRF and at about dive #50 I was getting complimented on my buoyancy skills from much more experienced divers that I got paired up with randomly on boats. I got so that I could frog kick well enough to not kick up the dive site and consistent experienced buddies liked diving with me. I learned to control my light and light signals for passive communication which made it easy to dive in the low-viz PNW dive sites at night. It also made me work on my s-drills, my open water ascents and my gas planning. By dive #50 I had probably done a dozen practice sessions with s-drills along with the DIRF class, I could do a blue water ascent with 10 foot stops without a reference line well enough for recreational diving, I could shoot a bag, I could plan rock bottom turn pressures, I didn't kick up silt in the dive site, I knew how to use lights for communication, and I had pretty decent buddy skills. I wasn't a perfect diver by any means, but I definitely felt like I had transitioned to being 'independent' and didn't need to have more advanced divers along with me on a dive, and felt comfortable at typical "advanced-level" puget sound dive sites.
That's not to say that I had experience. But I had the fundamental building blocks of skills and I had equipment which let me accomplish the diving I wanted to. At that point I could have cut away from the DIR training path and just done recreational diving from then on. I feel I would have been in a much better shape then than I would have been had I just bought random stuff and gone out and tried to figure out stuff on my own.
The only problem with this approach is that once you do the fundamentals in this way then the rest of the path to technical diving becomes clear, and the decision to take up technical diving starts to look more reasonable (if you don't look closely at the hit your VISA card or your lower back will take).
So, if I had to do it at over again but knew I'd instead never take up technical diving, I would have done it exactly the same way. Its a great way to go from zero to halfway competent in a minimal amount of time and while minimizing the gear and training mistakes along the way. All you have to add after that is just more diving and more experience.
YMMV.
