The Philosophy of Diver Training

[Web Monkey]

DAN does not have the information to compile statistics. No one knows how many dives are being made. No one knows how many divers there are. DAN does have some of the accidents reported to them, but not all. DAN has no idea how many close calls and rescues are made. It's more than you might imagine. The most rescues I've made in one day is 12. I once had to rescue the same guy 5 times in one weekend.

I go on a cruise every winter. There hasn't been a single year where one or more divers hasn't needed to be rescued, either on the surface or underwater, with a completely preventable problem.

This is either the world's biggest statistical anomaly or there are a lot of really unqualified divers out there.

If I was a resort dive op, I wouldn't even put a DM in the water. If the divers aren't qualified to dive with only a buddy, they don't meet the requirement for the OW C-Card and simply aren't qualified to dive. And I'd be willing to bet that if dives weren't guided, infrequent divers would be much more conservative and you would find most of them hanging right around the anchor/up-line.

Terry

 

[Kingpatzer]

Most of what is left out of many OW classes is never included in later classes.

What you see as missing that is never covered?

 

[rstofer]

Funny . . . I have the money (and the time) to dive Thailand or the Maldives, but I'm headed back to Monterey in May because it's some of the best diving I've ever done, anywhere!

In my view it isn't even close! Now, mind you, I am a lot older and diving isn't as easy as it was. But I liked living in a hut on a beach or spending a week on a sailboat off the Similan Islands. I like being warm. It's nice to live wearing a T-shirt and shorts. If you want to surface dive, you just jump in! I belong in SE Asia...

At the time, the exchange rate was such that we had a crappy motel room within a couple hundred feet of the beach at Phuket for about $6 per night. If you had ice, you could get lobster.

Monterey is great but it is cold and I don't like cold. I can understand why the drop-out rate is so high. I wonder if we could speed up this global warming thing? It could do a lot for the industry - well, except for the Maldives.

Richard

 

[rstofer]

What you see as missing that is never covered?

Buddy breathing? I think it is a lost skill. And it doesn't count if your regulator only has one hose!

Richard

 

[Walter]

What you see as missing that is never covered?

Panic cycle, skin diving, requiring people to swim (300 yd snorkel isn't swimming), and confidence building exercises (Doff & Don, Bailout) are things that immediately come to mind.

 

[Kingpatzer]

Panic cycle, skin diving, requiring people to swim (300 yd snorkel isn't swimming), and confidence building exercises (Doff & Don, Bailout) are things that immediately come to mind.

All of those have been covered in PADI courses I have taken.

 

[DCBC]

All of those have been covered in PADI courses I have taken.

The market doesn't want these things. How about diver rescue?

PADI HQ told me these things are too much for an open-water program. "You need to sell them on another course."

Try teaching buddy-breathing with PADI, or adding anything as "required for certification" that's not in the manual; you can't.

 

[Walter]

All of those have been covered in PADI courses I have taken.

I believe you, but they are not in a typical class today and are not required by PADI standards.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

All of those have been covered in PADI courses I have taken.

But was your proficiency in them tested as part of your certification. Or were you just shown them and allowed to try them and go on. These are things that should be and are tested in some Basic OW courses. I was never shown or tested on the doff and don thru Divemaster with the PADI instructor I had. Never learned deco procedures, unconscious diver from depth and rescue tows while stripping gear did not occur until rescue.

 

[Web Monkey]

The market doesn't want these things. How about diver rescue?

PADI HQ told me these things are too much for an open-water program. "You need to sell them on another course."

Try teaching buddy-breathing with PADI, or adding anything as "required for certification" that's not in the manual; you can't.

I'm not sure the lack of Buddy Breathing training is a valid complaint It was dropped because it became unnecessary with the advent of alternate second stages. And from what I've heard, even when it was taught, OOA divers frequently didn't give it back.

What would be even better is teaching divers how to not "run out of air" in the first place. Aside from extremely rare hardware failures, OOA is almost entirely Diver Error.

Terry