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halemanō;5626115:I was trying to imagine this "skill" done horizontal and in mid water.
This is one way to do it:
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halemanō;5626115:I was trying to imagine this "skill" done horizontal and in mid water.
So how is this your problem?
Nobody is going to do their checkout dives, and PADI won't issue a card without a real, active instructor doing the paperwork, so I really don't see it as an issue.
flots.
Just because someone knows how to scuba dive doesn't mean they are capable of teaching someone else how to do it
Because he is concerned,and rightly so.
You, or one of your loved ones, could be a dive buddy to one of these people.
Ignorance of facts is a most dangerous thing.
The Kraken
The point is being missed about the roll of Padi in diving.
Padi is a Marketing organization, a very good one, but only a marketing organization. Professional Association of Dive Instructors. It is a privately held corporation that is only interested in generating income for it's owners.
Padi is a Marketing organization, a very good one, but only a marketing organization.
However don't expect them to kick anyone out of the club. That would decrease profits, and expose them to risk of other marketing agencies gaining a bigger foothold in the market.
I absolutely agree with that assessment ... it's a conclusion I came to about training people to dive in my area as well. It's the reason why I chose an agency that encourages me to train beyond those limits, and why I chose to train independent of a business that has an interest in keeping training costs as low as possible.As to self regulation, I have mixed views on this. There was an accident in a flooded quarry in Britain a few years back, resulting in the death of an AOW student and barotrauma injury to another. The inquest, and a subsequent investigation by the HSE (Britain's version of OSHA) were damning of both the instructor and of his American recreational certifying body, who had trained him and backed him during the inquest. Their view, which had the force of law, was that the training promulgated by this certifying body might be suitable for easy warm water destinations, but was was wholly unsuited to this dive and indeed to most British diving.
I believe those three highlighted words above to be a fundamental contradiction of terms. Sometimes ... rarely ... government regulation starts out being effective. But the nature of government regulation is that those with a vested financial interest quickly learn how to circumvent regulations they don't like, and change regulations to become more about producing favorable financial incentives than about anything remotely involving safety or common sense.So I'm beginning to think that we passed a milestone some time ago, and now there does need to be effective government regulation.
It would be interesting to know how effective British regulation of the scuba industry has been ... and whether it actually resolved the problems it was intended to.It's already in effect happened in Britain and it needs to happen elsewhere.
Probably because just like everywhere else in the world, it all boils down to choosing a good instructor.Sadly I don't think the Belizean government would be capable of regulating anything, which explains why standards here and in comparable dive venues are so exceedingly variable, ranging from the nonsense I described above to world-class training.
And so what you would end up with is a mish-mash of government regulations ... each of which would evolve along it's own lines of self-interest. In places like Belize ... or even the USA ... where politicians basically work for "tips" ... the regulations would most likely be written by the very agencies they are intended to regulate.The government regulation I would like to see should be fairly transparent to the end user, and should primarily constitute regulation of the regulating bodies. PADI (for example) should be directly held to account for how it monitors and controls standards at any place permitted to operate under the PADI banner. That would include, for example, actually sending people to far-flung places like Belize to investigate reported malfeasances and accidents, and publicly removing their accreditation from offending people/dive centers. Such activity to be monitored by PADI's own governing body, the US Government (probably via OSHA). For "PADI" you can read any of the other recreational certifying bodies.
5* centers ... to my knowledge ... are more about the volume of sales than they are about the quality of services offered ... so I'm not seeing how that factors into the issue of self vs government regulation ...What's happening now is a mockery - there are even accredited 5* centers here which don't own a compressor or a single tank.