What one thing do you wish you'd learned in BOW?

[MikeFerrara]

theskull once bubbled...
Hey Hydroslyder,

How can you highly praise the 2 PADI instructors who proved excellent models for you and at the same time broadly misaglign PADI isntructors in general as overweighting students.

Most of the accomplished cave divers and instructors I hang with are also PADI instructors--very good ones. And they're people. All PADI instructors are people, therefore most are average instructors and some are poor at it.

There are good ones and bad ones.

In all cases, though, if you ever get the chance to work with a couple OW classes, you will see how terribly frustrating it is to deal with an underweighted (or even perfectly weighted) student. They just flail on the surface and say "I can't get down" while kicking and refusing to exhale to get negative. Far easier, and better instruction to put extra weight on the first dive and then pare it off them as they gain confidence and relax more.

theskull

Here I disagree though. I want my students weighted correctly. They will only flail at the surface if they didn't spend enough time getting the basics down before going to OW. If their weight and balance isn't right they belong at the surface, IMO.

In my experience nobody can learn buoyancy control unless weight and balance and trim are pretty close. You can't learn to kick correctly if you're out of trim. All those things need to be developed together. Balance for pretty good trim, improve body position, readjust balance and so on.

Until those things are adressed you're not diving but just breathing underwater.

IMO, the situation you present needs to get worked out in confined water. I found out the hard way that I wouldn't have the flailing student you describe in OW yet. And I found this out by working with lots of OW classes.

 

[SterlingDiver]

.............how about how to avoid their full-retail+ prices in the LDS's.

 

[MikeFerrara]

SterlingDiver once bubbled...
.............how about how to avoid their full-retail+ prices in the LDS's.

The reason classes are so short and cheap is because they're used as a loss leader to sell equipment. That puts all importants on pumping through large numbers of beginners.

 

[torbaydiver]

MikeFerrara once bubbled...


There are good ones and bad ones.

Here I disagree though. I want my students weighted correctly. They will only flail at the surface if they didn't spend enough time getting the basics down before going to OW. If their weight and balance isn't right they belong at the surface, IMO.

In my experience nobody can learn buoyancy control unless weight and balance and trim are pretty close. You can't learn to kick correctly if you're out of trim. All those things need to be developed together. Balance for pretty good trim, improve body position, readjust balance and so on.

Until those things are adressed you're not diving but just breathing underwater.

IMO, the situation you present needs to get worked out in confined water. I found out the hard way that I wouldn't have the flailing student you describe in OW yet. And I found this out by working with lots of OW classes.

Talking of correct weighting, that reminds me during my open water class a trainee dive master swam up to me and started hanging weights from my belt, when I asked him what he was doing he said "I'm adding weights to you so that you can descend", I said, "the reason I haven't descended is because my BCD is full of air, and I haven't even attempted to descend as yet!

he was completely useless lol and he actually passed at the end of the course

 

[torbaydiver]

MikeFerrara once bubbled...


The reason classes are so short and cheap is because they're used as a loss leader to sell equipment. That puts all importants on pumping through large numbers of beginners.

Not always my instructor was not a dive shop owner neither did he have any connection with a dive shop, he was also the cheapest !
Although I remember at the time thinking that he is on a pretty good wicket, six students x £220= £1320 in five days plus more students at the weekend, £1320 over two weekends £2640 in nine days, now that's not a bad turnover !

 

[hydroslyder]

I didnt mean misalign all PADI instructors, what I meant in saying is that in my OW course and a few others my friends were in we were overweighted, this thread is about what we would like to see changed in our OW courses, and being that I have taken PADI courses, I was simply saying that PADI instructors should work a little harder at proper weighting.

 

[simbrooks]

I can fully agree with a whole bunch of people on here that there were some things that werent well taught or at least not covered. I know you cant easily (unless you spend many, many hours in the pool) learn and perfected this stuff in a couple of days. We had only about 8 hours in the pool, two 4 hour sessions in the same day for 6 of us. We learnt some stuff, but weighted down like all rushed thru students we didnt rise off the bottom too easily!! However, instead of kneeling on the bottom and dumbly watching the others i practiced some of the activities that i could, mask stuff, fin pivots etc so at least i wasnt wasting my time waiting for the instructor to get around the rest of the class. I also encouraged my GF to do the same, otherwise we were just getting used to breathing underwater and not much more.

On the open water section (different instructor), i lost 10 lbs over the course of the 4 dives (24-14lbs for a 250lb guy). On those dives we had one instructor for the two of us, which helped us have time to practice a little more. It was about this time that i started reading here and learning what was deficient in the courses and realising how much more we needed to know. So some questions later with the instructor and things were more clear, we practiced things even if they werent required to be tested again.

I know i need a load more help on bouyancy, my weighting is now down to 10lbs for fresh water, possibly i can go a little lower, but checked out ok on the 500psi test on a few dives at that weight. I have learned a few from a YMCA instruction book (Graves? I think) certainly in a lot more detail than the cd-rom course we took with pretty pics and not much more in it! I would also like to get the other kicks down more, trying the frog in silty conditions last weekend was a good trial, however one of the other divers (from NJ in FL, for a rare dive, she didnt up in NJ, too cold) who had been certified in 1997 (no idea how many dives though), was blowing us away with silt! Our instructors said we were pretty good for relative newbies, mostly because of what we read on here and have discussed out of the water.

 

[mogwai]

Have mentioned this before to Torbay diver, am amazed at the amount of people who seem not to have been taught about stuck inflators. Is an accident and depending on how cool you are an injury or death waiting to happen. Must be getting missed out an awful lot, or raced past in a rush to get buck from the next set of students. Imagine doing the same thing with a student in a drysuit. That inflator gets stuck and you don't know or cant figure out what to do and it's trouble big time for that person. And the instructor.

 

[Wristshot]

that they had told us about the Scuba Board.

They taught us the very basics, and they recommended that we continue our education, but they didn't tell us about the least expensive, most detailed eductaional resource out there.

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They also told us some about bouyancy control and about balloon expansion and all that but they never put it into real world terms and how it could be used by us, ie; how to follow contours by breathing deeper or shallower to rise above or drop down into terrain features. That I learned on my own, and it was an epiphany.


Wristshot.