After 6 years . . . Cave 1 redux

[TSandM]

For some odd and personal reasons, I ended up diving as a third teammate on a GUE Cave 1 class this last week. I did Cave 1 in 2008, and it was the only GUE class I have ever done that I passed outright the first time through. I have since done Cave 2 (provisionaled) and NACD Full Cave, and have almost got my Abe Davis dives in (maybe I actually do, after this last week). I have been trying to set up a "tune-up" day with an instructor for a couple of years, to review some failure scenarios and emergency drills, but I hadn't been able to make schedules work, so when this opportunity came up, I took it.

It was a fascinating experience in quite a few ways. To begin with, I had the very strange experience of looking at the class from two viewpoints simultaneously -- I was a student, and expected to perform as a student, but I was also looking at how the class was taught and how things were handled from an educational strategy perspective. I was also constantly looking at the instructor's approach, compared with the five other cave instructors with whom I have worked.

First off, I would say that we should all do this kind of thing. Even if one doesn't want to spend five days of cave diving time in a class, I think it is absolutely worth it to spend one or two days under someone's keen eye, to have sloppy habits identified and corrected, and to review the procedures which, if you dive conservatively and carefully, you have probably never had to use. If somebody on a team in front of me gets entangled, slits out and snaps the line, I will be glad that I recently did a lost line drill . . . just from the perspective of having the, "Oh, yeah, did that recently" reaction instead of, "Oh, #*&". In addition, I don't think there are any of us who can't learn something from a good teacher. JP Bresser, the instructor in this case, handed me several really nice tips that made life easier. Little things, but everything that adds to comfort and simplicity in a cave is good, right?

It was fascinating, watching my teammates. One fellow was someone with whom I have dived a number of times, and I would describe him as a solid and pretty imperturbable open water diver. The other guy was unknown to me before class, and was the least experienced diver, but had some open water technical training and a recent tech pass from Fundies. It was very interesting to see how the unfamiliar environment and the class stress degraded their diving skills at the beginning, and how adding the task loading of new procedures made it worse. What was fantastic was to watch the two of them get on top of it and grow and improve on a DAILY basis. By the end of class, they were totally different divers. I would not have believed people could learn so quickly. And here I have to give JP huge kudos as an instructor -- he does two important things. He doesn't waste time, and he doesn't overload students. We began each day at 8, and were back in the hotel by 6. Everyone got a good evening meal and adequate rest, and as a result, performance improved every single day. In my class, years ago, we started at 0730 and got back to the condo no earlier than 10; all of us were completely exhausted by the end of the week. Performance improved through Wednesday, and then we fell off the fatigue cliff, and Thursday and Friday saw errors being made that we had not been making earlier on. My C2 was worse -- one day began at 0430, and we fell into bed, completely drained, at 11 something at night. I did a surgical residency, with similar types of hours (or worse) and felt even then that your brain shuts off when you are whipped. I also believe that running schedules like that teaches the wrong thing -- you want cave divers to make an honest assessment of their capacity on any given day, and skip a dive if they are too tired or don't feel well.

Yes, we didn't go through as much detail as my first class. Danny is fanatic about navigation, and we spent long debriefs going over what each of us could remember of the cave landmarks, as well as a student-produced rundown of the dive, the failures, the times and depths where things happened, etc. It's a good exercise, but it also takes a lot of time. Danny also spent a lot of time running us through valve and S-drills in open water each day, until they were as perfect as we could get them. It was useful, in that I know how a demonstration quality S-drill should be done, but in this class, once we had shown JP that we could do them with reasonable facility, we did them in scenarios, which is probably more useful practice, and frees up about 45 minutes a day.

I'm really not sure how to reconcile this one issue. It was very clear that running the class the way JP did it meant everybody could continue to learn and improve, and I think rest was an enormous part of that. There is only so much you can do to shorten the days with efficiency; beyond that, you have to leave stuff out. Is it better to omit things (and mind you, I'm talking details, not the meat of the class at all) and improve student success and morale, or to try to do a data dump of the instructor's incredible information base, and end up with tired and discouraged students? I loved Danny's class, although it wiped me out, and I love Danny; there are many, many small things he taught me that I think are important and have never forgotten. But I think JP does an elegant job of walking the line between creating enough diver stress to accelerate improvement, and so much that it's counterproductive. I don't know that I would say one man or the other is better; they are different, and it may to some degree depend on what works for the individual student.

Running through the exercises, it was hugely clear to me that the bottom line on cave diving is bandwidth. When I took the class the first time, I had no bandwidth to spare; I was running on max just to remember everything we were supposed to be doing. I can tell you I NEVER saw Danny during the class, whereas I often saw JP. I don't think their instructor procedures are any different. I just think I had the capacity to see and notice a lot more this time, and that has come from lots of time in the environment. (It didn't hurt that I had nothing on the line but JP's opinion of me; I have an NACD Cave card he can't do anything about, no matter how much of a doofus I proved to be.) Having better skills (for example, for working in the dark) made things like the lost line much easier, although a three-person lights-out air-sharing exit is a cluster, no matter what!

There have been some curriculum changes in the class over the last 6 years. Lights-out stuff is not done with lights out any more, but with blackout masks. JP says that was a safety change, as it permits the instructor to keep his lights on and observe the students better, but I think it's due to the prevalence of glowing gauges that defeat the purpose. . Unconscious diver is only practiced in OW, unlike my drill, where I had to haul Kirk's sorry butt out of the cave for about 15 minutes. The academic part of C1 used to include a lot of stuff on decompression, which they have decided, since C1 doesn't permit any decompression, is not a good use of class time (and I agree!). The Knowledge Review and final exam have been revised and improved; there are way fewer questions that are misprinted or are ambiguous. Good to see that the class is continuing to improve!

Anyway, two final things: One, I loved the way JP ended the class. We did a dive into Grand Cenote (where we swam out in terror of the failure that never came) and then practiced the UD drill. He then surfaced, waved bye-bye, and told us to go diving. Watching my buddy pump his fist at the mainline tie-off gave me a huge smile. I will never forget the first time I led a team into the dark; there is no feeling quite like it.

Second, one of the benefits of doing the class with JP is that he takes his successful teams for a photo shoot. Saturday, we went to NoHoch and spent an hour and a half modeling (which is quite challenging). The results were fabulous, and we all have great mementos of a good week of diving and learning:

​

 

[victorzamora]

Like always: Awesome post.

It's a pretty cool perspective to go back and do these kinds of things. My main dive buddy and I recently made a point to practice lights-out airshare drills and lost line searches and other failures independently. Our cave instructor has since become a friend, and our next round of fun dives will include some coaching and some minor drills. My buddy and I have considered joining a class for a day or two to participate and be judged.

I recently took Cave Staged Deco (AN/DP plus overhead) with my instructor and asked him to treat his judgement of me very much like he would a Full Cave class on top of the deco portion. It's very interesting getting feedback after that much progress. I can't imagine what it'd be like to actually go back and take a Cave1 equivalent once you've got Cave2.

 

[TONY CHANEY]

nice write up!

 

[LiteHedded]

i've had a similar experience in my GUE classes. by the end of the week you're just burned out. there's just SO much material to be covered.
if everyone is dialed in and the class goes smoothly hitting all the objectives, yea, it fits into five days. but if the lectures get sidetracked with conversations here and there or there are skills issues during the dives requiring more work, the days get LONG

luckily i've just taken my last GUE class so i've had my last sleepless week for a while

great report as always. will you be going on to give C2 another shot after this one?

 

[TSandM]

Yes, that's the plan, but the timing is at this point still quite vague. Don't ask me why I want a GUE C2 card, because I think my reasons are probably a little nutty, but since I promote the agency relentlessly, it seems almost hypocritical to have my certification through someone else.

I also forgot to tell a story from the class. Every Fundamentals class I've ever been involved with on any level (student or videographer) has had a really awful OW class come rototilling right through the middle of the course the instructor has laid. We had much the same experience in this class. We were exiting Grand Cenote, and there is a place where the line wraps around a buttress on the right hand wall, before heading across the passage to tie off on the other side. We saw the lights of an incoming team in front of us, and of course, expected they would move off the line and let us through, which they did not. The three divers stayed RIGHT on the line, forcing us to move well to the left, which we of course did; worse, the first two divers were literally banging off the ceiling, swimming wildly with their hands, and as a result, flinging light all over the cave. The instructor or guide behind them was placidly observing this and doing nothing whatsoever about it.

We came out and surfaced, and the first words out of JP's mouth were, "Now, aren't you glad you have the training you have?". And I've said that a hundred times . . . I am SO glad my instructors have been hard on me about having good skills and about cave conservation.

 

[boulderjohn]

The most highly regarded curriculum design system in place today is called Understanding by Design. I will describe one aspect of it here quickly. You begin by evaluating the total content of your curriculum and categorize each part. Some of it is absolutely critical--the students must absolutely have this down cold. Those are called essential learnings. If you think of an archery target, you put them in the bull's eye and make sure they are the focus of both your assessment and instruction. Some things are good to know. These go in the ring outside of the bull's eye, and you give them good attention in the assessment and training. Some items are nice to know, and they go in the next ring. As you get farther and farther from the bull's eye, you have to start asking yourself if it is wise to be teaching it at all. That is because of interference theory. Time spent learning those items of lesser importance interferes with the student's ability to learn the essential material in the bull's eye. If you spend too much time and effort there, the students will come out of the class with less ability in the really important stuff than they would have had if you had simply skipped that stuff. Ironically, too much instruction can create the same result as too little instruction.

We were exiting Grand Cenote, and there is a place where the line wraps around a buttress on the right hand wall, before heading across the passage to tie off on the other side. We saw the lights of an incoming team in front of us, and of course, expected they would move off the line and let us through, which they did not. The three divers stayed RIGHT on the line, forcing us to move well to the left, ...

We came out and surfaced, and the first words out of JP's mouth were, "Now, aren't you glad you have the training you have?". And I've said that a hundred times . . . I am SO glad my instructors have been hard on me about having good skills and about cave conservation.

Ironically, the team with which I was diving was in the same cave on the same day, and we had the same experience. We were exiting the cave and saw an incoming team. I was in the lead of our group, and I stayed on the line, expecting them to move, until it was clear that was not going to happen. I veered off to the right to avoid a collision, and we all moved out of the way to let that incoming team go through on the line. It must be contagious.

 

[TSandM]

I know Peter struggles with the "core material versus brain dump" issue. He has drawn his own lines as to what goes where, and I suspect JP has very deliberately done the same, because I do not believe that man does ANYTHING without forethought. And in thinking about my original C2 class, and this class, it may very well be that the protocols for some things (which I would view as core material) were not as well installed as they could have been, because I was paying attention to stuff like the fact that the way I had the loops tied in my pockets was going to cause snaps to migrate out and catch the line (which they did).

I still regard my class with Danny as something akin to swimming in plankton; the water was turbid with information, and there was no way I could suck in all of it.

In addition, I have worked with instructors from two schools of thought: One is that the student has not passed the class until every drill or procedure or technique is close to perfect, and the other is that good enough is good enough, if the student indicates a desire to improve. The latter approach really does mean that the instructor has to spend some energy on assessing the student's temperament and personality -- people like me, who are inherent perfectionists, will work diligently to become better, whereas "good enough" people may even let the standard set in class fall a bit afterwards, or may not respect limits. I had this argument with David Rhea, who felt that one should not pass C2 until ready to join the WKPP on a project dive; my belief is that many students simply cannot reach that standard in a week, but if the person is motivated and by temperament cautious, they will eventually do it. I think that is one of the difficulties technical instructors face, and some pass people who shouldn't be graduated (and I have dived with some of those), and some don't pass people who would fairly quickly be quite competent.

 

[PfcAJ]

I had this argument with David Rhea, who felt that one should not pass C2 until ready to join the WKPP on a project dive; my belief is that many students simply cannot reach that standard in a week, but if the person is motivated and by temperament cautious, they will eventually do it. I think that is one of the difficulties technical instructors face, and some pass people who shouldn't be graduated (and I have dived with some of those), and some don't pass people who would fairly quickly be quite competent.

I think I know David Rhea pretty well after 3 classes and countless hours spent with him over the past 7 or 8 years, and I think this is an inaccurate portrayal David's standards and teaching philosophy.

Nobody is more conservative than David. To suggest that he expects cave 2 graduates (who really just barely know the basics about cave diving, and even that's up for debate sometimes) to be ready to operate with the WKPP isn't right. He doesn't even want his recent graduates stage diving, and ALL WKPP dives are done on stages to include shallow OW support. Current WKPP standards are full cave/ c2 with 100 post certification dives. There's a reason for that number.

Your post suggests that David is unreasonable and/or unfair in his expectations of students. He is neither of those two things. He is demanding. He does expect a basic level of competency in the water. If a student cannot demonstrate that basic level, he won't pass them.

 

[TSandM]

Okay, AJ. I was just quoting what David said to us at the end of class. He may not have intended precisely what I took from what he said, but he did specifically say that he could not count on his students being conservative with their diving, and his specific statement was, "I have seen too many students say they are going to be conservative, and then I see them strap on a couple of stages and a scooter and head for the end of some line a week later."

BTW, JP reviewed my write up, and corrected me. We did do some lights-out work without the masks, but the air-sharing touch contact exit was done with masks, as was the lost line.

 

[LiteHedded]

I have to back this up here. I just completed rb80 with David and I wouldn't call any of us perfect. but we passed with the caveat that we were to progress SLOWLY on the units. there was no expectation that we were ready to go use these things on big dives.

he was nothing but professional and completely reasonable with his performance expectations. I would suggest that you perhaps remembered that quote wrong, or maybe forgot the context in which it was given. it was, after all, a very long time ago.

still, love the report and I agree that different instructors have different styles with pros and cons. Gideon liew's tech 2 was a different beast than David's RB80 etc.

cheers!