PADI Cavern vrs....

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

RichmondKYdiver

Contributor
Scuba Instructor
Divemaster
Messages
77
Reaction score
16
Location
Richmond KY
# of dives
200 - 499
OK gang, I got my new cavern card in the mail today only to read some threads on SB about PADI divers having to go thru cavern again when they wanted to do Intro, as a lot of instructors feel PADI Cavern Divers have not been sufficiently trained. Others chimed in saying it is the instructor not the card. But I do get the feeling this PADI Cavern Card is looked upon by the majority as generally not up to standards.

Another poster listed his experience during his recent Cavern and Intro long weekend. I thought I would chime in and relay my experience with my PADI Instructor, Johnny Varner and DM Kerry Chambers. First off, I was OW and advanced trained under NAUI but the LDS is PADI so that is how I ended up doing cavern under PADI. Second off, my instructor and DM are both full cave, the instructor is 70 and has been diving caves....forever...the DM is retired Drill Sergeant and has been cave diving since 1992. Two hard but fair guys who don't mind giving you.....a piece of their minds.

We used the NSS-CDS Cavern/Intro manual as our training manual. Time was spent in the LDS classroom going over the manual along with line laying drills dryland in the back of the shop. After this training we moved to the pool where all three of us were required to dive in doubles with the standard overhead environment equipment setup and backup equipment. In the pool we did line laying drills, S drills, modified S drills, mask off, eyes closed line OK around three different tieoffs with arrows on the line, jumps line and cookies to cross us up, air sharing touch contact, 1st, 2nd and 3rd team member responsibilities from running line to compromised team member whether equipment or physical. Much discussion took place afterwards in debrief.

The morning of our first cavern dives, we assembled our gear, checked one another and then had our equipment checked by our instructor. Again, all three of us were in doubles with two spare lights, spare mask per team, line cutting devices all equipment arranged the same. Matter of fact, all three us were diving Dive Rite dual bladder wings. A full brief was conducted on the surface so we knew...or thought we knew....what was going to happen. Our first trip into the overhead environment was at Peacock 1 with the instructor going in first laying line with a 2nd. and 3rd team member being the newbees. The DM swam alongside watching the goings on. At the conclusion of this 1st dive, 2 became 1, 3 became two and entry was once again made into P1. At the end of line laying and after the dive turn signal, it was then time for the gremlins (instructor and DM) to appear out of the dark and provide "problems" to the team. On a side note, the three of us had a debrief dinner two nights ago where we decided to always do a emergency training scenario, whether a light out, valve problem, whatever before ending any future training we do independently. After three dives in P1, we moved to Orange Grove where in addition to line laying and retrieval, we had to use our training in what to look for in locating the entrance to the cavern/cave along with horizontal 15' safety stop, no holding on to anything..horizontal, fins up, hands out...stay there!! Sunday was a repeat performance at The Eye with line laying, OOA, etc. followed by an experience dive into The Ear. We moved up in the first alcove and peered over watching a three man cave team do their final checks before moving in the cave system.

As you can see, our first experience was in low flow, large cavern P1, followed by deeper cavern entrance, more flow at Orange Grove, to even more flow at The Eye to max flow at The Ear.

While I know 6 cavern dives in two days is not enough to convince me to dive in haphazard past the reaper, I do feel a lot of what you get out of this training is who you train with..as in the person..and how much dedication you put into the thought process. I know my manual didn't leave my bedside table, or floor in front of the toilet....for 4-5 weeks. I did find an occasion to revert back to my studies in the caverns. With all that said, no matter the card (I started diving in 1988), I would fully expect my next overhead environment instructor to evaluate my performance before we took the next step, no matter what card I was carrying. I would want him to do so.

I have my new card in front of me as I type.......Cavern Diver!!, this is one card I am proud to have earned!!

See ya in the dark:D
 
Last edited:
Congratulations on passing your course. In fact, your post made me call PADI to find out when a change was made in the standards to permit a PADI Cavern Course to be done in doubles. The PADI Rep found the change as of the first quarter, 2009.

Again, congratulations.
 
Congratulations! Welcome to the world of wet rock addicts :)
 
Congratulations!

I agree that it depends a lot upon the instructor. Many PADI cavern instructors are not full cave instructors, and many such people would be likely to throw all they have into the cavern course, knowing they won't be able to pick things up in later courses.

It is similar to what I feel when I teach the academic and pool sessions of the OW class. Here in Colorado, the vast majority of our students go on to complete their training on vacation. Knowing that I will not see them do their final OW work and will have no opportunity to work with them any further, I feel a lot of pressure to make sure they leave me in top flight form.

On the other hand, if I were a cave instructor and a student came to me with the announced intention of competing the full cave program with me after taking cavern with ANYONE else I didn't know, I would be hesitant about assuming the skills were there. A good instructor can handle that, though. I went to cave instruction after attaining a number of technical diving certifications, and I was already comfortable with the gear. The instructor was able to move me quickly through the first stages when he saw I had those basic skills down.
 
^ what he said. i have no doubt there are excellent padi cavern instructors - capt jim wyatt on the board here is an instructor for many agencies, including padi cavern. that being said, there are also many crappy ones. i've witnessed a crappy class myself, at a popular north florida cave.

so any instructor for your further education most likely will do some informal discussion, a couple of 'check-out' dives and see where you are. if you don't need assistance catching up on anything, yay! if you do, they'd assist, and yay! because you want these skills to be second nature, no matter where you get them.

i hope your confidence in the class proves to be well-founded.
 
I doubt Jim writes many PADI Cavern Cards. I know he can, but doubt anyone would want one. I've not had a single PADI cavern student come to me that could pass Intro to Cave without some (often a lot) of remedial work. Maybe that's starting to change. We can only hope.

At any rate, enjoy the addiction. It only gets worse from here. :)
 
so any instructor for your further education most likely will do some informal discussion, a couple of 'check-out' dives and see where you are. if you don't need assistance catching up on anything, yay! if you do, they'd assist, and yay! because you want these skills to be second nature, no matter where you get them.

i hope your confidence in the class proves to be well-founded.

I think I said that in my original post:) Not only would I expect it, if it were not part of continued training, I'd find someone else.

As a former formation pilot who trained multiple times per week, briefed and debriefed each flight, I do have a little bit of history on what is and what is not good training. There are different civilian formation flying certificating agencies. The idea behind such certifying is to train to common standards. By doing such, one should be able to put together a flight of 4,6,8 or even 50 (yes, did happen), brief it and fly it whether or not you had flown with everyone in the flight. Now, if someone came over for the weekend with the "other" card would you not fly with them. Yes, you would fly with them but you would "watch" them. With all that said I do know PADI is known as more recreational and Put Another Dollar In. I do now realize my card does have a negative quality connotation to it but I don't think my actual training has such so I do look at that card with a smile on my face because yes I do have confidence in the training and do feel like it is well founded:D (nice long sentence with no punctuation) If I dive with you, him, Joe Blow.....you can bet I'll be watching.....old habits are hard to break.

---------- Post added January 17th, 2013 at 06:47 AM ----------

I've not had a single PADI cavern student come to me that could pass Intro to Cave without some (often a lot) of remedial work. Maybe that's starting to change. We can only hope.

At any rate, enjoy the addiction. It only gets worse from here. :)

The heart of my comments were I truly believe the quality of the training does mean something and not just the name on a card. I am in no way promoting PADI, but based on the above comments to BabyDuck, I do have "some" experience in weekly training in a pretty intense flying environment....much like diving in overhead environments......"boy you sure are braver than most....nah, maybe just more stupid than most...but it sure is a heck of a lot of fun ":D

But, I can see the addiction, lame card and all:D
 
Last edited:
Let me know next time you are in FL, I'll go diving with you.
 
When my wife and I took Intro in 2005, we were the proud owners of PADI Cavern cards. Our cave instructor (with whom we did apprentice and full cave the following year) said that he would evaulate our skills and we would do either Intro or Cavern/Intro as needed. Fortunately we were deemed OK to continue to Intro without any remedial training.
 
http://cavediveflorida.com/Rum_House.htm

Back
Top Bottom