Shooting a bag in AOW

[nereas]

Why do you need an agency to to create such a course? Talk to an instructor and ask him to put a course together for you. Don't need a c-card at the end of it to be valuable.

That said, you could take Wreck Diver course with my LDS (held up at Dutch) and they would teach you baq shooting, alternate kicks, tec gear config, running line, etc. Might be a sort of "tec light" kind of thing.

Exactly !

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

It's probably quite unusual to see "shooting an upline" taught in an AOW course.

Depends on the locale. Here in the PNW it's not uncommon to see this skill taught, either at the AOW level or at the "Intro to Tech" level. I teach it as part of my AOW class, as do most of the NAUI instructors I interact with.

DMs in the Carib need to know the skill for drift diving.

And tech divers who go into deco and run the risk of losing the downline or anchor line also need to know it.

Other than that, you would probably never need to know it.

Hmmmm ... I can think of a lot of other people who can use this skill. Where I live, people don't dive with DM's ... even right out of OW class, you're pretty much on your own for planning and executing your dives. Currents are a fact of life in Puget Sound, and you can find yourself on a drift dive even it it wasn't part of your dive plan ... especially up in the Straits and San Juan islands. It's also quite useful for making an ascent off a pinnacle, which are common here. So knowing how to shoot a bag can often help you make a safe ascent, or help the boat crew know where you are as you're ascending.

For local diving, I consider it an essential skill.

As far as AOW goes, the most appropriate skills for that course would be navigation, search and recovery (in which case you really use a real bag), night diving, deep diving to the limits of recreational scuba, nitrox, and photography. Gear maintenance is also a commonly taught and quite useful AOW segment.

I think the most appropriate skills for AOW are dive planning, gas management, buoyancy control, trim and propulsion techniques, buddy skills and communication, and underwater navigation.

Once learned, you can then apply those skills to different diving conditions such as night/limited vis, search and recovery, and deep diving.

Nitrox is not a skill ... it involves some knowledge that will prevent you from exceeding safe limits, but otherwise it's as simple as breathing in and breathing out.

As for photography ... the most important skill involved in taking good underwater pictures is buoyancy control. If you can hold your position well enough to get in close to your subject and frame your shot without mucking up the bottom, you can take good pictures. Otherwise, you'll learn more from reading a good book on composition than you will by taking a specialty class.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)