Admittedly, diving skills come from the breadth of one's experience, and there is no better way to acquire them than to dive a lot. This being said, my diving opportunities are very limited*, so besides just diving and passively waiting for interesting experiences to jump at me, I would like to take a more active role in my learning process. Here by learning, I do not mean reading the scuba board, but rather engaging in some small exercises during the dive, or otherwise planning my dive in a way that would help me get the most out of it.
Classes are great, I have taken quite a few and plan to take many more, but the number of classes available to me is somewhat limited, as are the funds I am willing to invest in tuition, and arguably, classes anyway aim at providing only very basic familiarity with certain procedures and equipment, especially considering how almost everyone is seriously cutting corners wherever they can. Diving in a new environment is great, but hard to implement other than during vacation. Practising basic skills and playing with the equipment is some idea, but I suspect that repeatedly removing my BC or deploying my DSMB from the safety stop will only get me as far. Furthermore, there seems to be the whole range of skills that are apparently not being taught anywhere. For example, a number of posts on this board talk about things like situational awareness, holistic decision-making, multitasking, etc. Now, how does one actively develop any of these, other than by logging thousands of dives?
*While one might disagree with this statement, I would prefer to postpone this discussion to another thread.
Classes are great, I have taken quite a few and plan to take many more, but the number of classes available to me is somewhat limited, as are the funds I am willing to invest in tuition, and arguably, classes anyway aim at providing only very basic familiarity with certain procedures and equipment, especially considering how almost everyone is seriously cutting corners wherever they can. Diving in a new environment is great, but hard to implement other than during vacation. Practising basic skills and playing with the equipment is some idea, but I suspect that repeatedly removing my BC or deploying my DSMB from the safety stop will only get me as far. Furthermore, there seems to be the whole range of skills that are apparently not being taught anywhere. For example, a number of posts on this board talk about things like situational awareness, holistic decision-making, multitasking, etc. Now, how does one actively develop any of these, other than by logging thousands of dives?
*While one might disagree with this statement, I would prefer to postpone this discussion to another thread.