Lead_carrier once bubbled...
I think there should be a time and dive requirement. At least 18 months and 50 dives in various conditions before DM training can begin.
I know this subject has been argued back and forth on BBS's for years. But, i wonder the following.
I have seen people in favor of X amount of logged dives, X amount of years diving, X amount of specific diving enviroments or styles of diving etc.
But, what if diving standards instead followed experience as flght instructors follow.
See they dont count how many flights you did. They count how many hours you have with a particular model (plane).
What if diving styles were broken into categories. Like lets take something like wreck diving with three categories.
1. Wreck without Penetration
2. Wreck within sunlight penetration
3. Wreck with line penetration
Then divers tracked how many hours they have done for each of those. Like maybe for "Wreck with Line Penetration" they have logged 14hrs while "Wreck without penetration" they logged 3hrs.
Would you say having logged 14hrs for a wreck dive with line penetration is a better milestone than saying i have 24 wreck dives?
Cause one of the common debates is what is a dive! You can have 20 logged dives but half of them could have been 15min dives while the other half could have been 60min dives.
Same would go with deep diving. Diving to 130FSW for 5 min. is not as significant as diving the same depth for 20min.
Time underwater in a specific diving enviroment seems to be a better way to measure experience (not knowledge) than logged dives.