When did you "become" DIR?

[RiverRat]

If sham training scenarios of this magnitude and "sense" are necessary to become an Instructor for this Agency, then I don't even want to be a Dive Master for this Agency. . .

Well you don't know what you don't know right? As I progressed in said agency I started to see more of this crap. I wouldn't say it was a waste. It's what you take out of it that's important. It's just that all these bad divers make everyone else look bad.
And it only makes me more determined to do the right thing. Or at least try.

 

[headhunter]

While I certainly have a long way to go, I can share the process by which I arrived at the conclusion that Unified Team Diving was the clear path for me to follow with my diving.

After taking about a 10-year "sabbatical" from diving, I decided at the beginning of 2004 that it was time to get back in the water. At the time, I was in the middle of taking a couple of years off from working and was concentrating on taking some IT certification classes to prepare for the next phase in my professional life. You might say that my mind was in a very analytical state.

As a precursor to getting back into the water, I started visiting many local dive shops. I was familiar with some that had been around since my previous diving experiences from 1979 to about the mid 90s and found many others that had opened since then. I went from shop to shop asking about what had changed while I had been gone.

I quickly learned that the biggest thing I felt that I needed to change was the fact that I still dove with a single second stage and figured that if a buddy needed air that we would buddy breathe. That was enough for me to think that it was time for a diving renaissance and made me want to re-evaluate every piece of gear and every procedure.

I asked about the various refresher courses offered by different agencies and could not see the value in them for me. So, being someone who loved to use the Internet for any kind of research, I started doing searches and kept running into ScubaBoard. I came across the DIR forum, which led me to a tremendous amount of reading on the subject all over the Internet. It seemed that this type of diving was most compatible with my previous training and mindset. That is how and when I made the decision to proceed with GUE training.

I spent about 6 months selecting new gear and reconfiguring my whole rig before getting back into the water. The whole time, I was choosing equipment with this diving philosophy in mind. Looking back, the only thing I think I would have chosen differently is my wing. I tried to get a wing that would serve for both singles and doubles. That's clearly not optimal. I was also trying to save money, since I was living off of savings and not working.

About 9 months after getting back into the water and developing familiarity with my new gear, I went back to working full time. About 6 months later I took a DIR-F class.

For me the road has been a slow and methodical one and I'm in no hurry. This weekend I'll finally have my doubles put together and start down the road toward working on the skills required for a "tech pass" of DIR-F.

In hindsite, the decision to pursue what I prefer to call Unified Team Diving instead of DIR was spot on. The divers that I have met and been diving with who share this mindset are some of the most remarkable people I have met in recent years. They are all driven to excellence in all aspects of their lives and have developed into a wonderful circle of friends that I always know I can count on.

In my opinion, most of these people were predisposed to this diving philosophy because of the way that they already lived the rest of their lives. It simply took a while to stumble across the formalized training.

For a few, this was their ticket to understanding how to achieve excellence not only in diving, but in the rest of their lives by using diving as a metaphor for life.

Christian

 

[nadwidny]

I suppose I can post my metamorphosis one more time:

Around 95/96 I was on the old Compuserve scuba forum. Things were happy until one day this George Irvine guy (some cave diver from Florida) showed up and started bad mouthing pretty much everything about the scuba status quo. He was a huge blowhard from Florida but seemed to attract a following of sycophants that were just as annoying. George was constantly yapping about something called "DIR". Well this DIR may have been all well and good for a bunch of warm water cave divers but there is no way it was going to work for us cold water ocean divers. I listened to George's rants on forums such as Techdiver but didn't pay much mind to them. It was all just a bunch of bullcrap that had no relation to what I was doing.

Then around '97 I started hanging out more on rec.scuba. There was a fellow on there by the name of Michael Kane. I used to enjoy Kane's sparring on rec.scuba with the ultimate DIR mouthpiece who went by the nom de guerre of Jammer 6. The verbal battles were legendary. I cheered Kane and thought that he always came out ahead. I sometimes joined in and asked questions like "If the current agencies that teach technical diving are so bad and DIR is so good, then why hasn't someone started a DIR agency? "

Around the fall of '98 Kane did the unthinkable. He arranged a dive date with Jammer. Of course all the usual pictures were posted: Kane with a knife at Jammer's throat, choking each other, etc... Then Kane went to Florida and dove with the WKPP group to see first hand what all this DIR stuff was about. He basically came back and said "Gang, I was wrong. This DIR really does work and makes sense." He then became a DIR ambassador and started doing Intro to DIR seminars. GUE started up shortly after that.

That got me thinking. If Kane, who was doing dives similar to what I was doing, thought DIR was OK, then maybe it bears checking out. So in '99 I put my Transpac in the corner, bought a BP and wings, and started using DIR configurations and techniques in my cold water environments. I did this mostly to see what the hype was all about but to also prove that DIR did not work outside of warm, Florida caves. As soon as I proved that, my intention was to sell the BP/wings, SS clips, TLS suit, start diving solo again, etc., etc.,...

Flash forward to 2007...still have the BP/wings (actually I have 4 backplates and about 7 wings), SS clips, institute Rule 1 on a regular basis and Rule 2 pretty much everytime I sign into a forum. It hasn't been an easy journey. Like the old saying goes "You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs".

And the Transpac? It still sits...waiting.

 

[do it easy]

OK, time for a good old fashion hijack- What is the connection betwen DIR and classes?

I've read some of the reports and the classes seem solid, but from what I read on the internet, DIR revolves around classes, specifically GUE classes or classes from DIR divers. Do we just not hear from the "quiet masses" out there that are doing the dives and not taking "offical" classes?

Is there something about the type of diver that is drawn to DIR that draws them to the classes as well? From my perspective of someone who has never taken a GUE class, it seems as if everyone is hooked on getting the card and proving that they can do the skills. Maybe it's about the limitatiions and restrictions of the certification level and following the rules? If the card says certified to 130' and one deco gas, is that the limit?

Is this just my warped perception or is there something to this?

 

[H2Andy]

well, DIR is a system ... which you employ to solve problems in a variety of fields, such as cave diving, tech diving, wreck diving, etc...

the system itself (well the fundamentals of it) are taught in DIR-Fundamentals, and if you do well enough there, you can move on to cave and tech training using the DIR system

once you're done with your training, you're done, usually having completed either the cave or the tech series (of course, you could go on to become an instructor)

.... for example, to be a GUE-certified cave diver, you would have to take DIR-F, Cave 1, and Cave 2

 

[do it easy]

Is it the simplicity of the training that makes it appealing? GUE has two (or three) paths after DIR-F that lead to either cave or tech, while PADI has that training chart that looks like a government decision making flowchart.

I'm under the impression that the people who are drawn to DIR also seek out the measurement that it provides. There's nothing wrong with that, but it appears to me to be a common mindset. Am I on to something here or do I need to up my medication?

 

[SparticleBrane]

If nothing else, I'm drawn to the simplicity of the system and its no-nonsense attitude. I also like the structure.

 

[TSandM]

DIR and classes . . . Yeah, there's a connection, but I think a lot of it has to do with the total transformation a lot of us went through from what we learned in open water. I'd already started diving a BP/W/long hose configuration before Fundies, and had learned a sort of modified flutter kick. But Fundies gave me the building blocks for the basics: All skills hovering with solid buoyancy; facility with air-sharing and air-sharing exits, whether by ascent or by swimming; and SMB deployment. And all of those things with some degree of team awareness. I suppose it's possible that I could have gotten all those things from diving with our local DIR divers, but by putting in an intense weekend, I got the materials for all of it at once.

That was a year and a half ago. Since then, I've taken the Rec 2 class from Joe Talavera, which was kind of a workshop/prep for Rec Triox, and a wreck workshop which was an informal class to introduce the skills needed to contemplate wreck penetration. I took the latter specifically to get an introduction to line skills, because I want to go do a cave class, and I was hoping to get a leg up on the course work by learning to do some line stuff beforehand.

I guess none of that is answering the question. I think we take classes because Fundies introduces us to how good the education is, and because we enjoy the process of trying to reach the bar. Each class raises the ante and sends us off with a whole new set of standards to measure ourselves against.

I've said any number of times that one of the reasons I dive is because I hope that, if I keep doing it, some day I'll be good at it. I suspect people who read that think I'm trying to be funny, but it is actually nothing but the truth. I think at least some of the people who are attracted to DIR feel the same way.

 

[JimC]

I got sucked into DIR early on in my diving. See, there is a DIR community in this area that is - well - everywhere. So its easy to see and easy to witness. I did my DIR-F, bored (berated) my wife to tears (literally) and then settled into a nice easy, semi-DIR diving style.

Unfortunately, those compromises TSandM mentioned started closing doors on me. Doors I wanted to open - so I left the DIR side rather abruptly one day. As you can see by my avatar I am now one of those happy strokes I used to laugh at. Helmet light and all.

 

[goodeatsfan]

The DIR community where I'm at is very small, but I heard about it from a friend who took a fundies course, and after looking and reading up about it, the missus and myself finally decided to adopt the system early this year. I agree about an earlier comment about this being a journey rather than a one-off. My take on DIR is that the core of it is safety and the willingness to commit to learn, and improve.