You need skills, not dives.

[all4scuba05]

"Lessons for solo" thread has a repeated statement that irritates me. Way too much emphasis given to number of dives. Divers need to get skills down more than they need number of dives.
We've all seen divers with 100+ dives and yet suck at diving. So to make a blanket statement "you need more dives before attempting this or that", is not good enough.
Someone said that with only 17 dives you can't have your weighting right. BS. And that's just one example.

A person can dive a hundred times and all they did was make their horrible diving second nature. Way too many things are being said here online simply because they are catchy phrases that people have memorized. Memorizing something is not the same as understanding it.

There are no scuba police. Or so I'm told. But I come here and there are plenty acting like it. At this rate, it wouldn't surprise me if years from now there will be. Maybe the Coast Guard will be policing underwater too? Once upon a time we were able to get on a boat and go fishing. Didn't matter what time of the year or size of fish. Not anymore. We're saving the fish. I have no problem with that. Some day we will be saving the scuba divers too. Since they are more important than fish. We'll be policing the underwater world because everyone wants to apply all these rules upon everyone else.

My point? I don't know. I already lost it. I guess I was just venting.Feel free to move the thread to whine and cheese.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I think you're right ... but implicit in the statement is that we tend to get better with practice. As for the solo application, I also think there are many aspects of diving that can be explained over and over ... but you really won't understand what it means until you experience it. A lot of the things you'll need to know in order to solo dive safely will come from practical application and context ... problem solving becomes easier with practice, and when you're alone, solving problems calmly can be the difference between living and dying.

FWIW - I have seen people with hundreds of dives who are absolutely horrible divers ... they just do the same bad things over and over. However, they're more the exception than the rule. Most people gain skills through bottom time.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[all4scuba05]

True. Some are lucky enough to have great mentors who help them learn the skills correctly right from the start. That's a hell of a headstart.

 

[Guba]

And that's what I felt the emphasis was with the original thread to which you refer. The diver in question needed more dives with an experienced diver--not solo--in order to fine tune, perfect, and develop skills more quickly. In the same way that you noted that a diver with many dives might simply develop horrible diving habits and retain them, with an experienced buddy (mentor), that might all be avoided (and note I said "might"...but the chances are good they can learn better habits from someone who has been around a while). The number of dives is simply an abstract notion to imply a significant amount of experience. It's not like those who responded meant that on the 100th dive he would be ready to solo. No police action is required. They were just suggesting that more experience (gear and training) is needed before venturing out alone.

 

[emttim]

"Lessons for solo" thread has a repeated statement that irritates me. Way too much emphasis given to number of dives. Divers need to get skills down more than they need number of dives.
We've all seen divers with 100+ dives and yet suck at diving. So to make a blanket statement "you need more dives before attempting this or that", is not good enough.
Someone said that with only 17 dives you can't have your weighting right. BS. And that's just one example.

A person can dive a hundred times and all they did was make their horrible diving second nature. Way too many things are being said here online simply because they are catchy phrases that people have memorized. Memorizing something is not the same as understanding it.

There are no scuba police. Or so I'm told. But I come here and there are plenty acting like it. At this rate, it wouldn't surprise me if years from now there will be. Maybe the Coast Guard will be policing underwater too? Once upon a time we were able to get on a boat and go fishing. Didn't matter what time of the year or size of fish. Not anymore. We're saving the fish. I have no problem with that. Some day we will be saving the scuba divers too. Since they are more important than fish. We'll be policing the underwater world because everyone wants to apply all these rules upon everyone else.

My point? I don't know. I already lost it. I guess I was just venting.Feel free to move the thread to whine and cheese.

Excellent post. My instructor said it best...practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent. It wouldn't surprise me if there were people with 1,000+ dives who were terrible divers because they either never learned the correct way or never cared to keep doing it the correct way. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if the aforementioned divers with 1,000+ dives were the ones who were convinced that they had an expert opinion on anything related to scuba and could pass advice to others as if it was fact and not opinion.

Fact of the matter is there's idiots everywhere, and whether a diver has less than 20 dives or over a 1,000 dives, that diver could be one of them. Scuba diving, in my opinion, doesn't deal in absolutes anyway. While I personally would not solo dive myself, I don't think that once I hit a certain amount of logged dives then I will be experienced enough to solo dive. Whether someone is qualified to do something or not depends on their experience and knowledge, not how long they've been diving or how many dives they have logged. Ironically, I would imagine that a good amount of people with 1,000+ logged dives would probably disagree with me.

 

[Buoyant1]

I think I'm a decent diver until I see the one instructor from my LDS, and then I think I really suck!

It takes me a few minutes to settle in and get my buoyancy "workable", then it's a tweak here, and a nudge there, him, he drops in and it's perfect (like the scene in Mission Impossible when Tom Cruise drops down that line)

(ok...I've got 68 dives he has 1,000+) but still! Watching him helps...

 

[Diver Dennis]

I always say you can't judge how skilled a diver is until you see them in the water, no matter how many dives they have. All the rest is just bla bla bla...

 

[all4scuba05]

here's a scenario then. A diver with less than 20 dives gets online here and states that he plans on diving deeper than 60 feet the next day. The very first statement that others will say is"you need to get more dives first".

That's without knowing how the diver dives, who trained him, who his mentor is, who he dives with, or anything else that matters.

A whole lot of judging goes on here without knowing enough before speaking.

 

[Diver Dennis]

Hey, this is the internet, land of cyber divers. What do you expect?

A lot of the bla bla bla is internet based because if you met the same people in person, they would have a whole different attitude.

 

[GDI]

good point here. You can two divers both with their AOW one has 25 dives the other only 9 dives. It would be wrong to assume the diver who has only 9 dives would be the worst diver of the two. garbage in and practiced is garbage out. Or as I say

poorly trained and practiced skills is no different then not having the skills