Just finished my PADI Cert - you have GOT to be kidding me

[Daveo957]

550 is not a lot for an entire class. And not to many places will let you use your own gear for class, its a liability, your a student and they want to be familiar with what you wearing.

 

[Scubadaddy]

Yikes. I only paid $300 for my OW course (gear, taxes, etc. all included). Mind you, I am being certified through a dive club and not a dive store. The people running my club are not in it for the money, they all have 'day jobs' but simply LOVE diving. I feel very fortunate as I am receiving very thorough instruction from people who pride themselves on safety and having fun, not making a dollar.

(click the link in my sig for club info )

 

[SkipperJohn]

Well, I just signed up with a PADI shop on Long Island... I hope it's not the same place.
Around 15 years ago (more or less) I did a "vacation certification" thing (at least that's what they called it). 1 day of pool stuff then a dive in the ocean. The pool was cool. Then onto an old beat up truck with all the gear in garbage pails to the beach we went. We all grabbed equipment form the truck. Now, with all of 10 minutes experience behind me I was far form an expert. In retrospect my regulator was broken. I had to pull hard to get any air out of the thing. I mean I was sucking it out... hard! And my brain was yelling at me for sucking while under water. Because it was not fun I was one of the first out of the water. While waiting for the others I grabbed another regulator and tested it. I saw how easy it should have been to breathe. Anyway, my point is this left a bad taste in my mouth (so-to-speak) and took me many years to think about diving again. It just aint fun when you are worried about dying.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

550 is not a lot for an entire class. And not to many places will let you use your own gear for class, its a liability, your a student and they want to be familiar with what you wearing.

That's a load of crap. Unless your gear is not safe there is no liability issue in using your own stuff. Any shop that will not allow a person to use perfectly serviceable gear is afraid of losing sales when other students see your stuff is better than what's is being used for training. And the statement regarding be familiar with your gear? Do you see the absolute ridiculousness of that statement? What could be more familiar than your own equipment? They don't need to be familiar with it. An instructor who cannot become familiar with a students gear in about a minute of observation and going over the equipment needs to quit teaching. We have a couple different brands of gear we use in the pool. One of the exercises for our ow students is to set up in a square. Remove their gear at once and swim to next persons set up, put it on, get neutral and swim with it, then go to the next persons set up. A bc is a bc, a reg is a reg. ANy competent diver should be able to make use of new gear with a minimum of time to familiarize them self with it. Problem is there are not enough places turning out competent ow divers.

 

[Rileybri]

Well I will add my 2c to this conversation. I am up in Burlington VT on Lake Champlain my
LDS is right on the water and is both PADI and NAUI affiliated . OW class is. regardless of weather you are doing PADI or NAUI, (I am NAUI OW) $350 for "everything" but M/F/S and booties/gloves (the lake is cold in the spring!). Granted the lake is right there so beach dives gave us cheep easy access to the water. All of the rental gear is new or newish and all of it is represented on sales floor. I to had all of my own gear and wanted to dive it for my ow class and was talked out of it. Not because they wanted me in there BCD's but because my instructor did not want me to get my new BC all chlorinated in the pool if I did not have to. The choice was mine. I could have used my stuff if I chose to (visual inspection required of all personal gear). It was nice actually because I was able to try a bunch of cool gear out that way. There was little to no pressure to buy my gear from them aside from our instructor being a HUGE Scuba Pro fan and pushing them hard core. They have only a few brand choices but will go as far as they need to to bring in something me. Now I know my LDS is not your average shop and I consider my self very lucky for it. Hell they even carry Halcion and Dive right BP/W products, and dont push them for Tech divers only! Any how, the more dives I log the more I realize how lucky I am to be 5 blocks away from one of the better LDS around!

 

[TSandM]

You know, one of the things that amazes me (has from the beginning, and continues to do so) is why people are willing to teach diving for nothing, or near nothing. The DMs at the shop where I got certified get precisely NOTHING for their time and effort (except some gear discounts, and some of those aren't impressive) and yet they show up week after week to help with classes. I don't know what the instructors make, but it's very little. Even at the high end -- When I took Fundies, I sat down and calculated what the instructor made and divided it by the hours he spent with us, and he made about $10 an hour per student. I won't work for that much money, and there are a lot more people around with my skills than there are with us.

Honestly, I wish shops could charge more for classes, and pay their instructors, and make the classes longer and use better gear and more pool time and have higher standards. But if the average diver is like the OP (and to an extent like me, when I decided to get certified), the amount of money they're willing to spend for a class is so far below what it would actually COST to teach a quality class with quality gear and quality, paid instruction, that the shops literally cannot afford to do it, because the student numbers would be so low.

 

[tardmaster]

I also want to add my 2 cents. I'm a divemaster right outside of atlanta, ga. Our ow class is $248 for the materials, class time & pool time (including the use of the gear). studentas need to provide their own mask, fins, snorkle and booties, which i know is pretty much industry standard. We offer 20% off of the m/f/s/b if they buy them from us. The open water checkout portion really depends on where we have it scheduled. Right now we are taking students to a quarry about an hour from us. we are also camping out friday and saturday night there. For another $249 we provide the students admision into the quarry, unlimited fills (for the fun divers), all the food, snacks and drinks they want, rental of all their gear. also all the fun diving they want to do after their certification is completed.

 

[pir8]

Problem is what will the market bear.

 

[sixgears]

I'm currently taking an OW class now and I was "warned" two months before that the gear we will be using was not the newest and sexiest out there. Although I was not pressured into buying any more gear than what was required there was an orientation handout that encouraged us to buy our own gear (from the LDS I'm assuming).

My wife and I have our own reg and I have a Trans Pac but I'm kind of hesitant to use it because I did not get the equipment from this particular LDS. Seeing that my wife was uncomfortable with her gear in the pool due to the regulator's 2nd stage weight in her mouth I will be switching to our own Oceanic regs and even possibly start using my Trans Pac so I can get used to it.

I'll report back if they say anything.

 

[Winterpeg]

PADI does not routinely have access to a shop or an instructors records. In a QA invenstigation they might request specific information or in the case of an insurance claim there are obligations to cooporate with the insurance company and the PADI legal department.

PADI does send out questionairs to students, though, fishing for hints that standards violations are taking place. It's been a long time since I've seen any of those questionairs but questions like "How many dives did you do?" or How deep did you go on your deep dive?" are the types of questions that I would expect to see.

I did my OW checkout dives twice last year (2007) through 2 different dive ops. The first was on referral in Puerto Vallarta; the second at home here in Canada. Both times I was emailed a follow-up questionnaire from PADI. It very specifically asked about every single skill requirement for OW, eg did you complete the following - surface swim with snorkel, CESA, mask remove and replace, BCD removal at the surface, etc. It also asked specifically about how deep we went on each dive. As well, it asked whether each skill had been practiced in the confined water (pool) setting. It was very long and detailed. I answered every question honestly. I have never heard anything back and had wondered if I would, because the dive op in Mexico did not test me on all skills (in fact omitted most of them), and yet took me below 80 feet on my supposed OW referral dives. Which is why when I got home I redid the test here so that I could feel that I had passed fairly and was safe. If PADI ever followed up I never heard and I just checked and the shop in PV is still listed on the PADI site.