Scuba agencies

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Several experts have given good advice, with more to come for sure. I have assisted quite a bit with the "weekend" PADI course (one weekend classroom or e learning review and pool and the next the required 4 open water checkout dives). This seems to work well for many people. Some find it "rushed". Not so much in that learning the skills is rocket science, but in that you basically complete 20 skills in the pool over two days. I took a course that had 6 week nights spread over 3 weeks, then the OW dives in the ocean. If I were to start over, this would again be the set up for me.
 
It's all about the instructor and not so much the agency. Find one that suits you and don't pick based only on price. Ask former students if you can.
 
Here's a write up of some market research I conducted recently on student-reported satisfaction and overall preparedness coming out of the pool portion of scuba training. Might be of interest when comparing one course to another:

Getting New Divers Off On The Right Foot
 
Lets be honest here. Not everyone wants - or needs - to be a DIR/GUE style diver. The vast majority of people getting into the sport want to get in the water and see the pretty fishes. The don't care if they're perfectly neutral, don't care if they are wearing a long hose & bungee backup, and don't ever plan to go tech. The majority of training caters to this kind of diver.

GUE offers a consistent training curriculum and instructors who follow it in their training. There's nothing wrong with it, just remember it's not for everyone.
 


A ScubaBoard Staff Message...

Yet another which agency is better thread. Moved from New Divers to Q&A.

Which really make very little sense, seeing as you moved it from a forum that address questions to divers in general and put it in a forum that supposedly addresses questions to specific scuba agencies.

- This will limit the feedback received to the relative handful of people who prowl this forum
- Agency feedback won't be germane (not a real worry because few actually participate here)
- And the OP will probably not find the thread here anyway since A.) he didn't put it here, and B.) It doesn't make sense to look for it here because it doesn't belong here.

But other than that... seems like a fine idea.

:D
 
Lets be honest here. Not everyone wants - or needs - to be a DIR/GUE style diver. The vast majority of people getting into the sport want to get in the water and see the pretty fishes. The don't care if they're perfectly neutral, don't care if they are wearing a long hose & bungee backup, and don't ever plan to go tech. The majority of training caters to this kind of diver.

GUE offers a consistent training curriculum and instructors who follow it in their training. There's nothing wrong with it, just remember it's not for everyone.

issue with that though comes back to a fundamental issue with the system where they train divers but they are dangerous to the environment and pretty fishes they are diving with. They don't care if they're perfectly neutral, but they should, same with danglies, etc. There is a reason it is a better way to dive, it truly is and no one can deny it. They might go a bit farther than they have to, but better to start there and let them regress a bit then start in a manner dangerous to the environment and try to fix it....
 
I think there is general agreement on what someone needs to learn to dive: One must be able to clear a mask, retrieve a lost regulator, share gas with a buddy, achieve neutral buoyancy, and remain generally calm. You have to understand Boyle's law at least to the degree that you realize you add air to a BC when descending and let it out when going up. You have to understand that you will use your gas faster at depth, and that there will eventually be some nitrogen-related limits to your diving. It's probably a good idea to have some idea of navigation, and to be able to get out of your gear on the surface (since many tropical dive operators require this).

Given that the core set of skills will be quite similar across all agencies (because diving, after all, is diving) then the differences in classes will boil down to the length of the class (how much pool time, how many OW dives), the standards to which students are held to pass, and the caliber of the instructional staff. Honestly, to my knowledge, among the "usual" agencies, very little in that list is controlled by the agency. The required skills must be taught to a standard which is deliberately left somewhat vague, and there may be absolute minimums set for in-water time, and some control over the order in which skills are introduced, but the class schedule is usually up to the shop or instructor, and when an instructor is satisfied with the student's performance is quite individual. In fact, the diving skill and experience of the instructor, and his teaching ability, can be extremely variable. For these reasons, it's really difficult to say any one agency's classes are reliably better than another's.

The only exception to that are small agencies which have retained intense control over their curriculum and their instructional staff. GUE has already been mentioned as one of these. There are several other agencies which are similarly small and state a commitment to diver quality (UTD, NASE) but I don't personally know all that much about how they operate or control their quality. I do know that, if you are going to mandate a longer and more demanding class, you are going to have to charge more for it; and if the process to become an instructor is similarly grueling, that instructor is not going to teach for the $50 a student which is what instructors in the Puget Sound region get for their OW classes through shops.

As much as I am a fan of GUE, the organization and its training, I don't think you have to start with GUE to get a reasonable OW class. You DO need to work with a shop or instructor which is not trying to minimize the time invested to try to improve profits. You DO have to work with an instructor who can, himself, dive reasonably well, and who has some ability to teach, and has remained inspired by teaching (burnout is a problem with diving instruction). That instructor has to have a vision of what a "diver at that level of training" should look like and be able to do, and that bar needs to be set high enough to turn out a diver who is comfortable and reasonably competent, and has a really good mental image of what good diving looks like, and an understanding that it will take practice and some application to be that diver.

Finding that needle in the haystack of dive instruction is a challenge. But those folks are out there.
 
note, he said "is one agency better than the other". That is a simple question, yes. GUE is the best, and I wholeheartedly disagree with some of their core values. After that, it largely is on the instructor as all of the agencies are capable of putting out good enough divers. That is the only agency *recreational, technical, or cave* where you can be guaranteed consistent training regardless of the instructor. That makes it the best whether you agree with what they teach or if they take it too far, etc etc. It is a simple question with a simple answer that is pretty much irrefutable.

After that, it becomes a question of the instructors as mentioned above. Lynne, your other half Peter teaches a good PADI class from what I have heard, but that doesn't mean that all PADI classes will be that good, that makes the agency as a whole not as good as alternatives because the consistency isn't there. When discussing PADI/NAUI/SDI etc, the agency is irrelevant, but that wasn't the question.
 
Question for the original poster; roughly where are you located? In many places you'll find PADI and SSI dominate in terms of local availability. How many GUE OW classes are widely available?

Richard.
 
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