The idea of that is to allow the divers to understand that just because they can penetrate most of the swim throughs in Cozumel or the simple wrecks in south Florida without a problem, that does not mean they will be safe in more complex environments.
First great info there in terms of what is being considered.
But its wrongheaded, because telling people that they can break the rules about overhead environment means that we are giving them license to make a decision to dive in an overhead environment without giving them the tools to make the decision on whether it is safe to do it. Because for most of us, we realized the true vaule of overhead environment tech training only when we realized how much we came short of what was need to safely manage tech diving situations when we first started our tech classes.
My personal deciding line on entry intro in overhead, after doing tech training, is without redundancy I don't go into overhead environments, period, because tech training showed me why every bit of redundancy was necessary. And I know I can swim, without gear, from any recreational depth to the surface safely, and I know I can dive do a hour dive without a mask, and could do all that before my tech training, because I practiced those things unless unlike almost all the other recreational divers in the world.
And yet
My wife and I have been qualified now (AOW / Deep / Nitrox) for nearly 3 years and have around 150 dives each. We are both confident in the water, have pretty solid buoyancy / trim skills and are very conscientious with dive planning and gas monitoring. I think we are pretty safe divers but I'm increasingly aware that we really aren't prepared for emergencies as we haven't really practiced some basic skills since qualifying.
We will occasionally flood and clear our masks (eyes closed!) to fix fogging and have shared air just for the hell of it a couple of times but I can't be confident how either of us would really react if our mask was suddenly kicked off or in an emergency OOG situation. I think we could really benefit from some targeted, progressive practice in these areas and would appreciate comments on the following.
(Note the training level and dive counts)
How far down a hallway in a wreck/cavern swim through does one have to go before they figure out it's one way, and they need to turn around and can't before they cannot back kick? How far down a one-way hallway can a diver safely go who is not sure if they can manage no mask swimming? How far down a one way hallway can one safely go before they realize there is no way in hell they can signal their buddy that they are OOA, and no way for them to to see their buddy signal OOA.
Some overhead is OK is a wrong headed move because standard recreational gear does not have redunduant masks, redundant regs and/or long hoses, and few recreational divers even have a glimmer of what it means the reg in your mouth is stolen from behind.
Look we can get away with being sloppy, and fudging the rules, not because the rules sometimes don't count, but because the rules are there for boundary cases, and not typical cases, so most of the time breaking them has utterly no repercussions.
I can get away with playing soccer in the street in front of my house for about 23 hours a day, but I can never safely play soccer in the street in front of my house. No repercussions does not equal safe.
I will also say that PADI is doing wild windmills trying to correct the fact that they have been allowing basic standard violations (no overhead envirnoments in training) with their two overhead environment class simply because they were doing a money grab and they did not yet have a tech training. Now that they have a tech side, they should pull all the Wreck Diving Specialty Instructor and Cavern Diver SPecialty Instrcutor cards out there. But they won't.
I have both ratings, but I won't teach them as recreational course, unless people are in fully redundant setups, and have done the training to use them. On the other hand, at no point in any Wreck Diving course that I have ever seen/helped with (as opposed to taught), had the students, let alone the instructor in any sort of redundacy or any sort of gear.
---------- Post added July 5th, 2014 at 10:43 AM ----------
Well, if the AOW wreck adventure dive is meant to provide an 'intro' or 'primer' to the subsequent full specialty, it's not bending too much logic for part of that experience to include an introduction to the proper/minimum equipment for wreck diving. How to carry it, how to deploy and re-stow it, performance issues, pros and cons of different options for reels or torches. None of that necessitates an actual penetration.
And no one fumbling with a reel for the first ten times they use it, should be doing it in a confined environment. I like to to tell people you have not learned how to use a reel well enough to count on a reel until you have managed to bird's nest it, and have firgured out how to solve that problem, and found out why we say two cutting devices reaching by both hands, because they first time you drop your cutter that was reachable with both hands and you are stuck trying to get the other cutter free off a wrist mount on your wrong hand....
And no one should be learning how to do that in an overhead.
