zinnia7:
Sorry to bring up skiing on a diving forum! Just another expensive hobby of mine. (we won't talk about the boat.)
And I would not use the excuse "that PADI says" as the reason for not doing something. And now I wish I would not have even quoted the PADI book in my original message! But I just thought the guidelines were established for a reason and they sounded like good ones to follow.
And I would certainly not want to ruin anyone elses dive. When we are at Anthony's Key next week I am only going to sign up for the dives I feel comfortable with.
What kind of boat do you have?
Sorry don't mean to get on my soapbox and preach. By all means dive your comfort level and training. And don't take it that I wouldn't want you to dive with me or on a boat I am diving. You and your husband seem like very good divers. You've a good recognition of your limitations and don't feel comfortable exceeding them. You are probably not going to worry a rescue diver or divemaster. You dive the type of diving that you want to. We could dive reefs all day long however you probably wouldn't be comfortable diving with us on the U-352 this summer
http://www.nc-wreckdiving.com/WRECKS/U352/U352.HTML . This is one of the reasons to consider learning deeper diving techniques.
I do have an issue with some of the modern training and guidelines. I believe that some of the dive training now unnessarily scares new divers about depths and narcosis. There are a few extra precautions that you need to take and extra stuff you need to be aware of for dives to 90-120 feet. At recreational depths narcosis will not be a hazard for the overwhelmingly vast majority of divers. The guidelines and training have also changed over the years.
If I could find my old YMCA card you and I would have the same basic open water certification. I doubt that our classes were similar. Here is some of the training topics and guidelines from my Open Water Scuba class. I still have my scuba books from my YMCA Scuba Diver course 23 years ago. At that time YMCA had three diver designations. The first book taught Diving equipment, the diver, the environment, and dive activities. In this book 100 ft was the recommended max depth for a new inexperienced diver and 130 ft the recommended sportdiver depth. There is a section on decompression diving in this book. The second book discusses advanced topics such as Scuba equipment (specialized and maintenance), boat diving, underwater navigation, limited visibility diving, diver stress, diver rescue, and deep diving. In this book the maximum reasonable depth is 190 feet. They spend a chapter talking about deep diving and decompression diving. The US Navy Decompression Tables are in both books.
This course took me about 4 months of two night a week classroom and pool work sessions and two weekends of open water certifying dives. It cost about $472. The scuba certfying agencies realized that this was a bit much for a large percentage of divers who like the type of diving that you do and have no intention of diving the Andrea Doria. Also a lot of divers simply don't have the time to devote themselves to one class for that long. So they shortened the basic class and started the diving specialities. They also make more money that way. How many of today's specialities were covered in my open water class?
