What my Fundies instructor said, when specifically asked, "Well, should I not dive with non-DIR divers, then?" was this: "No. That would not be reasonable or desirable. However, I would be more careful about WHAT kind of dive I did with a non-DIR diver."
I think (and this is my opinion and not anything quoted from a GUE representative) that anybody from GUE would agree that having a unified team and standardized equipment, gases and procedures becomes MORE important as the dives get more aggressive. For the dive I did today, where we never got deeper than 60fsw and we were only in the water 40 minutes, having standardized procedures just makes it more relaxed, and having standardized equipment probably isn't going to come into play at all -- if anything fails, you just thumb the dive. But I try to dive the way I was taught in Fundies on every dive, because ingraining the behaviors will make them solid when I get to anything more ambitious.
Why not DIR? If you're the kind of person who stubbornly has to "do it his own way", this is not for you. If you don't like instruction that pushes you to the failure point, this is not for you. (Fundies is humbling for almost everybody.) You can be quite content to be safely competent and aspire to nothing more -- then this is not for you (btw, I tried REALLY hard to phrase that so it wasn't implying that there is anything wrong with safely competent.) If you are really wedded to the gear you dive, this is probably not for you.
And I think what may be most important -- if you are the solo diver type, firmly determined to be completely self-sufficient and expect anybody you dive with to be the same, then you won't fit in the DIR ethos. The idea of the unified team, shared resources, and looking out for one another, is one of the things I like most about the DIR teaching I got. But for some people, that approach just doesn't work.
I think (and this is my opinion and not anything quoted from a GUE representative) that anybody from GUE would agree that having a unified team and standardized equipment, gases and procedures becomes MORE important as the dives get more aggressive. For the dive I did today, where we never got deeper than 60fsw and we were only in the water 40 minutes, having standardized procedures just makes it more relaxed, and having standardized equipment probably isn't going to come into play at all -- if anything fails, you just thumb the dive. But I try to dive the way I was taught in Fundies on every dive, because ingraining the behaviors will make them solid when I get to anything more ambitious.
Why not DIR? If you're the kind of person who stubbornly has to "do it his own way", this is not for you. If you don't like instruction that pushes you to the failure point, this is not for you. (Fundies is humbling for almost everybody.) You can be quite content to be safely competent and aspire to nothing more -- then this is not for you (btw, I tried REALLY hard to phrase that so it wasn't implying that there is anything wrong with safely competent.) If you are really wedded to the gear you dive, this is probably not for you.
And I think what may be most important -- if you are the solo diver type, firmly determined to be completely self-sufficient and expect anybody you dive with to be the same, then you won't fit in the DIR ethos. The idea of the unified team, shared resources, and looking out for one another, is one of the things I like most about the DIR teaching I got. But for some people, that approach just doesn't work.
