Warped View of the Dive World

[tddfleming]

A number of years ago I was assigned to teach two English classes for students who had failed the class previously. During a discussion, one of the students said casually that everyone gets arrested at least once before age 16. I said that wasn't true, but everyone in the class agreed with him. I later checked and found that every single student in those two classes had been arrested at least once before age 16. They refused to believe that this was not true of the general population because everyone they knew and hung out with had a criminal history.

John:

I think you hit it here. I used to work for Jr. Achievement long ago teaching kids about economics. Every time a inner city school came into the program, we always had the same problem. The kids did not learn how to use a checkbook, bank or understand much about it. All of a sudden the entire program would turn into a cash based society and what I found was that the adult vol. did not help the situation. This is all the kids knew, in their world everything was cash based. Parents, grandparents, did not get a check and deposit it into the bank. The check was cashed someplace and everything was paid my cash. But the point is we only know what we see.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

The stated belief that the dive industry does not support a certain segment of the dive community may be a pretty good indication of where the vast majority of the dive world is focused.

In Colorado where I live, almost all of the shops cater to the warm water diver. Only a handful of shops (and we have a surprisingly large number of shops) carry any tech equipment, and I know one shop that decided a couple of years ago that it would only carry jacket BCDs. Despite the fact that all local diving is pretty cold, few shops carry dry suits. If you decided (as I did a few years ago) that you were interested in tech diving, you had to do a real good search for an instructor. If you want to see what I mean, go through each of the tech agencies and do a search for tech instructors in the entire Rocky Mountain region and see what you find.

I am currently spending a month in Florida, and although it is very different here, it is not as different as you might expect. A little objective research will show this. Do a web search for the various wreck diving possibilities north of Fort Lauderdale. You will easily find a wealth of them, with many nice dives within the deeper recreational limits. Now look at the schedules for the various dive operators, pretty much all of which are online. See how many are scheduling trips to the deeper recreational sites. You will the same bland, shallow, easy sites listed over and over and over and over again. Want to an easy dive on a shallow, overturned barge called the Sea Emperor? You can do it almost any day of the week. Want to do one of the deeper interesting wrecks? It's probably not going to happen unless you personally get a group together and charter the boat to go there.

The dive industry does not tend to support that kind of diving because, oddly enough, it wants to stay in business. Dive operators do not carry certain kinds of gear because they do not want an unmoving inventory cluttering their stockrooms and their cash flow. (I was just in two dive shops in the Pompano, Florida area and saw mostly jacket BCDs on the walls.) They don't schedule the more advanced dives because not enough people will sign up for them and the boat won't run.

So, no, the industry does not support the more advanced diver because they are not perceived as providing enough income. A single tech diving spending even as much $5,000 annually does not stack up against a hundred divers spending hundreds of dollars annually. Most companies that make and sell tech-type gear (like Dive Rite) require more minimal sales for its vendors than most shops can count on, so it doesn't make sense for them to form a relationship that is only going to lose them money.

I agree that the level of support you get from the industry boils down to economic decisions ... but I don't think you can summarize it in a monolithic comment. It varies from region to region. In my area, you will not find a single dive shop that only sells jacket style BCDs ... and most will offer some sort of BP/W option. All will have one or more lines of drysuit for sale ... they wouldn't long remain in business otherwise. Very few shops here don't sell nitrox. And I would estimate that about half will offer some level of tech training.

The reason is obvious ... there's enough of a market for those goods and services here to make it profitable.

Anyone who writes cold-water destinations off as "fringe" is delusional ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

For example ... I doubt you'd find a single agency out there who would agree with you that there's something "normal" about someone with OW-only training and very little practical experience diving overheads. I can tell you for certain that the agency I teach for doesn't believe it's acceptable to dive beyond your training ... and I'm fairly certain yours doesn't either.

First I want to make it perfectly clear; this thread is not intended to be about my view of the Dive World; I want to know your view of the Dive World. How would you describe the World of Diving from your perspective?

Please try to stay on topic here Bob. I see nearly every dive customer in Hawaii wanting to go into our easy caverns, no matter their skill or training level. Is that really the topic here?

 

[Diver0001]

Are you familiar with the LM-002, which was first sold in '86? Hummers are a cheap imitation!

Lamborghini cars full specifications

yeah. I think even by American standards it gets unacceptable gas mileage. I suspect there aren't enough gas stations in Alaska to make it possible to drive one

R..

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Please try to stay on topic here Bob. I see nearly every dive customer in Hawaii wanting to go into our easy caverns, no matter their skill or training level. Is that really the topic here?

... depends on whether or not you believe that Hawaii is the center of the diving universe.

I believe not. I also believe that your agency doesn't support the notion that you should find the practice of taking new divers into overheads acceptable from a safety standpoint.

Just because you believe it's OK doesn't make it mainstream. But if you, as an instructor, teach a new diver to believe it's OK, then certainly they'll want to do it.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Blackwood]

But if you, as an instructor, teach a new diver to believe it's OK, then certainly they'll want to do it.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

They may want to do it even more if they're explicitly told not to...

 

[tddfleming]

For example ... I doubt you'd find a single agency out there who would agree with you that there's something "normal" about someone with OW-only training and very little practical experience diving overheads. I can tell you for certain that the agency I teach for doesn't believe it's acceptable to dive beyond your training ... and I'm fairly certain yours doesn't either.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I think your correct here, agencys do not support it, however, I am sure there are inst. and LDS that encourage it. ie. I know someone that took his OW this past year, the shop owner also the inst. encouraged him to do swim throughs. A bus, a airplane and a fish hachery. All three of those were on different events. Not to mention the careless way this owner talks about his diving adventures. Going OOA only to buddy up with his dive buddy to finish out the dive. I also believe that when someone goes on vacation to someplace like HI, and they feel as if they will NEVER get to do something like the caves again, they will take that chance as to not miss it.

Are there guided tours of these cave sites in HI?????

 

[Peter Guy]

It certainly would not surprise me to find:

a. The majority of people who do a dive do so in warm (tropical) waters;

b. The majority of people who do a dive use an AL 80; and

c. The majority of people who do a dive use a jacket BC.

It would also not surprise me to learn that a majority of people who do a dive under the circumstances outlined above:

a. Have minimal diving skills (i.e., lack consistent buoyancy control), and

b. Make fewer than 8 dives every 24 months.

Several years ago I had the pleasure of spending a week in the BVI with an instructor who had > 1000 dives (I think he had about 1500 dives) -- all of which were in the type of conditions outlined by the OP. This instructor was a very nice diver who showed us numerous wrecks and reefs in the BVI (and yes, most of the dives were "led" by him -- why not? he knew the area).

In discussing diving with him, however, he freely admitted his view of diving was very skewed and that if he attempted to dive in, say, Puget Sound, he would be an absolute newbie -- and I'd guess he would not be very comfortable either due to the cold and poor viz/darkness. He knew what he didn't know and knew that different environments have different issues. What he also knew, and what the OP appears not to accept, is that the skills and gear needed to be a "good diver" in extreme environments can easily translate to benign environments (spring straps are so much easier to use when one has big heavy gloves) whereas the converse is not necessarily true.

As to other points -- there is a lot of recreational diving going on in cold(er) waters -- without anywhere near the numbers of people diving but, instead, fewer people diving a lot. (We have to justify the thousands of dollars we spend, don't we?) Now "a lot" is still the minority, I'm sure -- but a strong minority none-the-less.

The biggest difference though is that the minority of divers who are doing many dives each year are also the ones who, FOR THE MOST PART, have the best diving skills and understand why some gear is more appropriate than other -- EVEN IF the other, perhaps less appropriate, gear will work OK, especially in more benign diving sites (aka Maui).

Even though those divers, the ones who are diving frequently, have more training and more experience and experiences, may not be frequenting the dive sites identified by the OP (aka, the "typical tropical dive") their advice may well still be appropriate -- and perhaps much more appropriate than the advice given by someone who has very limited experience and experiences. Going back to my BVI instructor companion -- HE was quite willing to admit that my experiences gave me a much broader background from which I could give my opinions on skills and gear.

This, btw, is one of my biggest complaints about "the typical PADI instructor" -- which is the narrowness of the instructor's diving experiences. I don't care if one does 200 or 400 or 600 dives during his diving instructor training -- IF all the diving is under similar circumstances, then, in fact, the person is only doing 2, 4 or 6 dives 100 times each. My BVI instructor companion was very open about that which is why he was, truly, interested in what those of us with very different diving experiences could teach him.

 

[fdog]

Thanks for a thought-provoking thread.

...Like all of us, my perception is colored by my experiences; this, I think, is what you're getting at?

No particular order, just as they come to mind:

• I perceive the Majority of recreational divers will never make it to 20 logged dives
  
• I perceive the Majority of recreational divers will have a gap of 6 years between training and diving
  
• I perceive the Majority of recreational divers will do these dives in warm water
  
• I perceive the Majority of recreational divers will do these dives as incidental to a vacation, not as the reason for the vacation

• I perceive the Majority of recreational dives done is split 50/50 between cold water/warm water
  
• I perceive the diver that dives more than 80 non-professional dives/year is well skilled and self-sufficient
  
• I perceive the well-skilled diver of today eclipses the well-skilled diver of 20 years ago
  
• I perceive the freshly-certified diver of today pales in comparison to the same of 20 years ago

and lastly

• I perceive the Majority of recreational divers use open-heel fins, and don't know how to use them

Cheers!


All the best, James

 

[adurso]

As long as one enjoys what they do, and how they do it, why should one care what the majority/minority/fringe does and how they do it?