50ft dive after 1hr of instruction?

[dpaustex]

Most introduction to scuba classes are kept shallow. There are industry standards for depth.

The lax attitude at some of these locales is why I take all of my own gear with me. If they're that relaxed on safety, what about the safety of their rental gear? The hassle of hauling my gear is more than offset by me knowing my gear is in good condition. Ask yourself if the hassle is worth it if your reg fails at 50 ft.

I know I'm not a fish, and don't breath too well underwater without scuba. So I want that scuba equipment to work. All the time, please.

 

[RonFrank]

This sounds like a resort course. If done in Coz, 50' is about as shallow as many of the reefs. 50' sounds a bit deep for the resort class. OTOH, it's easier to maintain buoyancy at 50' than it is at 20', so in some ways maybe less dangerous in that regard.

In any event, he is not certified after one hour and one dive, and he likely paid close to the cost of a full certification which he will need to repeat to get certified.

 

[Fordan]

Did he have an Instructor/DM with him the whole time (aka a Discover Scuba program as others have said)? How confident are you that he really was at 50 feet? Did he check a gague, or was he simply estimating? I know on my Discover Scuba class that got me into diving, I thought I was a lot deeper than I later realized I was.

 

[AndyM]

What happens if your "buddy" kicks your regulator out of your mouth? Sure you did one recovery drill before leaving, but do you remember it? In which case do you hold your breath on the way to the surface....

Maybe I am paranoid, but diving requires more than just a basic head knowledge. (Why we have certification agencies and not just "how to books". Because we love it it is easy to forget that diving takes us into an environment that can kill us. I wouldn't want anyone that I care for taking a class like this. Get certified before you go to a location that will have awesome diving.

 

[John_B]

But there's no law that says you can't print up a couple of fancy wall documents and call yourself "Supreme Instructor Trainer of My Very Own Agency." There's no government oversight agency that allows, or prevents, an agency from operating.

So tell us, under what authority were the existing agencies created?

 

[Arabidopsis]

It's this sort of thing that gives safe divers a bad name IMO. When some idiot instructor has people doing this in their first hour and the person gets hurt, the headline reads "DIVING... DANGEROUS OR THE MOST DANGEROUS?"

 

[k374]

I was talking with my friend today who did this dive and he was telling me about ascending. In my OW course we ascended by dumping all the air (which was put in to establish neutral buoyancy underwater) and then swimming upwards to the surface at which point we re-inflated the BCD to establish positive buoyancy. The reasoning against using BCD to ascend was that as you ascend air in the BCD expands and you could go up in an uncontrollable fashion.

He told me the way he did it was that he was told to press the BCD inflation button once, then wait until the rising stops, count to ten and the press the inflation button again and so on until they reached the surface. Is this a valid way of ascending to the surface?

 

[John_B]

He told me the way he did it was that he was told to press the BCD inflation button once, then wait until the rising stops, count to ten and the press the inflation button again and so on until they reached the surface. Is this a valid way of ascending to the surface?

No. Absolutely not.

 

[DandyDon]

I was talking to a friend the other day and he told me he tried scuba at a resort in Mexico, he was briefed for 1hr after which he dove 50ft and claimed that there was "not much to it". What can you really learn in 1hr? Isn't this dangerous? Is it common for resorts to do this?

I'm late and did not read all of the comments, but yeah - it's common. When you leave the US, you leave the US - questions...?

Rules are merely suggestions in the Caribbean. I did a 10 minute on boat class then three dives with my St.Kitts Resort course, deepest one to 100 ft - and came back with a "nothing to it" attitude that challenged me taking scuba seriously. Well, part of that is just me, but then...

 

[driftwood]

Actually, I am amazed that there are so few accidents on what I call 'kill a tourist' scuba excursion.