d33ps1x once bubbled...
Oh yah. They didn't have cameras back then so I guess underwater photographer was out.
ut:
That's not all.
When I learned to dive in 1984, we didn't have Nitrox or dive computers either. This was scary stuff that only commercial divers or military divers were using.
Also my experience of advanced was like Pipedope's. We covered a lot of ground in advanced that's all split up into tiny bits now. And we had time to learn it. To pick a simple example, after AOW I could navigate. I don't mean look at a compass and hope for the best, which is what you get these days. I mean I could navigate around on feel for an hour and come out mo0re or less where I wanted to (after nearly 20 years of practice I've refined this to within a few metres). I learned this in AOW. AOW students these days follow me around and think that I'm some kind of a sorcerer the way I can navigate. I've even had some DM's ask me to teach them how I do this. I don't think that says that much about me but I have the sense that the quality of the AOW course has really taken a major turn for the worse with the big hurry to get people certified. Especially navigation.
Our AOW also included several night dives, several deep dives (which were 135ft wall dives), search and recovery, navigation (as I said), current, zero viz and probably some stuff I've forgotten. The zero viz dive was supposed to be a search and recovery dive but the weather was so bad that viz was reduced to zero. We were made to go in the water at point A, descend to max 60ft and navigate along the bottom following the 60ft depth to point B and surface within 45 min. The viz was so bad that I couldn't even seen my own hands let alone sign anything to my buddy. It was all body language and yelling through the reg. And even at 60ft we were still getting tossed around in the surge.
The night dives started as deep navigation dives across a rolling sand bottom to a point where it meets a wall. We would decend from a small bay, swim across the bottom on whatever compass course it was to a depth of about 75-80 ft and come out at the base of a wall. During the night dives we were made to simulate all kinds of equipment problems, OOA, lost light, flooded light, mask clearing and buddy breathing in the dark with a lamp hanging from your wrist, you name it. For example, the instructor would hold a slate up s0aying "YOUR LIGHT IS FLOODED" and then just reach over and turn it off. You had to find your reserve light in total darkness, turn it on, find your buddy and indicate that your main light was flooded -- then it was his turn, that kind of thing. By the last night dives, he would just come along and turn off your light or stop you and see how far your buddy went before he noticed that you weren't there or whatever.
The last day of the course the instructor had us (6 or 8 of us, I don't remember for sure) standing on shore by a small bay waiting. He came shooting around the corner of the bay on a zodiac, at some point dumped something overboard and drove up to us and said
"Oh dear, I've dropped my weightbelt overboard. Can you please find it for me?".
We were made to work out how to search for it with several divers on a rope, including communication, making huge U patterns across the bay and then lift it with a balloon. We found it near the end of the first dive.
I came away from that feeling much more secure in my skills but the one single thing that made it *so* good was learning how to navigate with confidence. It was this that finally gave me the confidence to go out and dive without any kind of supervision.
R..
