Where & How to start learning the skills for GUE?

[elan]

do Findies as soon as you can. The sooner the better as you will not have stuff to unlearn. You might not pass from the first try but you will definitely have good idea about what to work on.
And even when you pass you still have a good idea what skills you need to take from level 3 to level 5. My wife is taking the rec fundies this week after having only 30 dives. She is going with a mindset that she does not need to worry about passing/failing but to absorb the skills given in the class.

I found the most difficult skills for me are not actually the water performance related skills but mental skills - awareness, teamwork, task loading realtime calculation of the dive parameters etc.

Be very carefullwith mentorship as I have seen it in the past even a mentor with good GUE training is not the same as an Instructor as they sometimes cannot see critical errors that you are making which the instructors are trained to recognize

 

[eelnoraa]

You take fundie to learn the skills and GUE system. What you shouldn't do is to learn the stuff on your own and take fundie to get a pass (if you really learn the right stuff on your own). What I am trying to say is focus on the learning part, not the getting a pass part.

Having gone through it myself, I can wholeheartly say that getting pass or not, you will learn a great deal. The $600 + change will very likely be the best money you spent on diving

 

[Banyan]

I'm curious about where to start learning some of the GUE type skills for bouyancy, trim, stability, and kicks to begin with.

3. Is a BP/W an absolute must for the basics?

The issue with not using a a BP/W when trying to learn GUE-type skills is that a wing will naturally put you into a nice horizontal position when you're relaxed, and you can make very small movements to transfer air in the wing left-right, back-forward to fine tune your trim. Other styles of BCD may buoyancy in places that are not optimal. If you don't get your buoyancy and trim down, you'll likely find things like backup kicks and helicopter turns, which will awkwardly move you up and down the water column if you're not horizontal, to be more difficult. There are plenty of people on SB who will tell you that an experienced diver should be able to put on any BCD and make it look good, so I wouldn't call it a "must," but I would suggest saving yourself the extra frustration and transferring to a BP/W. Certainly, if you think that you'll be taking GUE Fundies at some point, the BP/W will be required.

There are plenty of threads about getting a good value for a BP/W setup.