rye a,
I agree with Reg Braithwaite's statement. If you are just getting the DM cert. to impress or think it will provide you proffesional curdosy while on vacation, you are doing it for the wrong reasons. If you plan to get the cert. to gain the experience to help others in your dive group and not actively work as a DM, that is fine however let your LDS now that you rae not interested in the crash (6 week) course, you want the DM course as if they planned to let you work at their shop. It took me one year to complete my DM since my LDS new that I wanted to work at the shop they made me aware that I would have to put in a minmum of one year working with different instructors & DM's as well as my Certifying Instructor to become a competent DM by experiencing many different situations that id impossible to see and learn in six weeks. This is the LDS's policy and I now thru experience that this was the best learning experience I could have ever been put thru. I see the abilities / diving levels of the professionals at my LDS to be far more superior than from other professionals that I have seen out there, this is not to say that there are not alot of other great dive prof. out there because there are I am simply saying that the level of training that I recieved was bar non superior. With all this said if you simply take the six week crash DM course, in my opinion you are not totally ready to help other divers in most situations simply since you did not have time to experience them and you cannot replace experinece over time with short term knowledge gain. The six week course will make you a better diver pending the quality of your instruction and belive it or not the course did not cost me extra to do it over a year, I believe I paid $450 total. Good luck on what ever you decide and hopefully this was some help even though it is my personnel opinion.
Mark
I agree with Reg Braithwaite's statement. If you are just getting the DM cert. to impress or think it will provide you proffesional curdosy while on vacation, you are doing it for the wrong reasons. If you plan to get the cert. to gain the experience to help others in your dive group and not actively work as a DM, that is fine however let your LDS now that you rae not interested in the crash (6 week) course, you want the DM course as if they planned to let you work at their shop. It took me one year to complete my DM since my LDS new that I wanted to work at the shop they made me aware that I would have to put in a minmum of one year working with different instructors & DM's as well as my Certifying Instructor to become a competent DM by experiencing many different situations that id impossible to see and learn in six weeks. This is the LDS's policy and I now thru experience that this was the best learning experience I could have ever been put thru. I see the abilities / diving levels of the professionals at my LDS to be far more superior than from other professionals that I have seen out there, this is not to say that there are not alot of other great dive prof. out there because there are I am simply saying that the level of training that I recieved was bar non superior. With all this said if you simply take the six week crash DM course, in my opinion you are not totally ready to help other divers in most situations simply since you did not have time to experience them and you cannot replace experinece over time with short term knowledge gain. The six week course will make you a better diver pending the quality of your instruction and belive it or not the course did not cost me extra to do it over a year, I believe I paid $450 total. Good luck on what ever you decide and hopefully this was some help even though it is my personnel opinion.
Mark