ibnygator
Contributor
I have since been bitten by the bug and I am planning a much more active year of diving and more training as well.
The attitude that is discussed above, about only diving once a year and "it is only a leisure thing" was exactly the attitude I had. But I was doing dives that were mostly greater than 70- 80' depths with many below 100'; included doing penetrations on wrecks that were put there for divers; included night dives and also included multiple dives per day over multiple days, which pushed the limits of the tables regularly.
Until I decided to dive more frequently and then stumbled onto this board, I simply didn't know any better. I was diving off of friends' boats who had been divers for years and who never once commented (over eight years of diving) about my skills.
Many people become interested in diving and are willing to take the first steps and fork over a few hundred bucks and do the classes for OW. After the class though, there are no requirements for continuing to hone your skills and it is possible, in fact fairly easy actually, to continue to dive infrequently without ever practicing your skills, but without ever getting hurt either.
I believe that just through parctice (92 dives so far) I have improved my skills significantly. I don't believe that I have ever been a danger to anyone else in the water (on that, I have to disagree with a comment made earlier) just because I don't have perfect kicking form or don't regularly practice clearing my mask.
I guess my point is this, that just because the people on this board are more serious about improving their diving skills (I count myself in here now) and know much more about better diving techniques and equipment than others, doesn't mean that there isn't a place for people to partake of the sport in a leisurely fashion with a minimum level of understanding and training in how to dive safely. Not everyone will aspire to technical diving or even care to do AOW, but that shouldn't preclude them from diving at all.
The attitude that is discussed above, about only diving once a year and "it is only a leisure thing" was exactly the attitude I had. But I was doing dives that were mostly greater than 70- 80' depths with many below 100'; included doing penetrations on wrecks that were put there for divers; included night dives and also included multiple dives per day over multiple days, which pushed the limits of the tables regularly.
Until I decided to dive more frequently and then stumbled onto this board, I simply didn't know any better. I was diving off of friends' boats who had been divers for years and who never once commented (over eight years of diving) about my skills.
Many people become interested in diving and are willing to take the first steps and fork over a few hundred bucks and do the classes for OW. After the class though, there are no requirements for continuing to hone your skills and it is possible, in fact fairly easy actually, to continue to dive infrequently without ever practicing your skills, but without ever getting hurt either.
I believe that just through parctice (92 dives so far) I have improved my skills significantly. I don't believe that I have ever been a danger to anyone else in the water (on that, I have to disagree with a comment made earlier) just because I don't have perfect kicking form or don't regularly practice clearing my mask.
I guess my point is this, that just because the people on this board are more serious about improving their diving skills (I count myself in here now) and know much more about better diving techniques and equipment than others, doesn't mean that there isn't a place for people to partake of the sport in a leisurely fashion with a minimum level of understanding and training in how to dive safely. Not everyone will aspire to technical diving or even care to do AOW, but that shouldn't preclude them from diving at all.
