Jits Ronin
New
Hi everyone,
I recently did my deep and wreck specialties and wasn't overly impressed with the training or what I took away from the courses. I was hoping I could get the group's views on whether my expectations are unrealistic or whether the instructor was sub-par.
My observations were:
Would love to hear your views.
I recently did my deep and wreck specialties and wasn't overly impressed with the training or what I took away from the courses. I was hoping I could get the group's views on whether my expectations are unrealistic or whether the instructor was sub-par.
My observations were:
- Limited skills practice - for the deep course we practiced underwater DSMB deployment twice, so once per dive. That makes sense. But for the wreck course we only practiced laying a cross-wreck line once, with no repetition to practice the skill for improvement or retention.
- Limited assessment of skills - while demonstrating our ability to lay lines, three of us did it simultaneously so it didn't seem like the instructor would have been able to pay attention to how we each started, created a station, or tied off the lines. No feedback was offered on the skill other than being told I performed it correctly. But I doubt that my first ever attempt was fault free.
- No comment or correction on basic dive skills - during my advanced course the instructor was constantly telling me how I could refine my buoyancy and trim. During this course I received no such feedback to improve my general diving. I had a lot of trouble nailing my buoyancy on the last two dives and I was up and down way too much. When I asked about it the response I got was that my buoyancy was fine. I doubt that to be the case.
- Sense of just ticking boxes - the whole experience felt like the instructor was just trying to meet the minimum standards for the courses and get us to pass rather than actually trying to make us better divers. I enrolled in the courses because I wanted to develop my basic skills as well as learning new skills to a reasonable standard and pick up the theoretical knowledge. But I couldn't escape the feeling that the instructor just wanted to push us through the courses. To his credit though, he did go above minimum requirements on the deep course and had us practice carrying a stage cylinder and switch to breathing from it.
- Paying little attention to the students during dives - We did some decent swim-throughs on the wreck course, certainly requiring torches. At one stage one of the students swam hard to catch up to the instructor to tell him he was at 120 bar (agreed turnaround point) and shone his torch beam across the instructor's to get his attention, but he was unable to get his attention until we were out of the wreck. Again, from my advanced course I was used to the instructor being a lot more attentive and this seemed to be a much lower standard.
Would love to hear your views.