smellzlikefish
Contributor
I've always maintained that divers should be trained up to rescue with their OW course, and that the intermediate half-steps along the way are pointless.
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
So I feel that the training is adequate to allow a recreational diver to dive under guidance but not substantial enough to allow a diver buddy pair to go offon their own into the unknown. This is exactly what being OW certified allows you to do.
This whole conversation is a BRILLIANT illustration of the very issue that caused the OP to start this thread.
We have what appears to be an intelligent woman, judging from her writing. She made a decision to do something that has caused an almost unprecedented thing -- unanimity on ScubaBoard! Despite a great many people with a lot more experience and training, and approaches ranging from harsh to very gentle, telling her that what she is doing is unacceptably high risk, she remains adamant that it is not, and that she will continue to do it. Furthermore, she has dismissed the entire body of collective wisdom about the kind of dives she is doing as being overly conservative.
You cannot change those people. They are not stupid and may not even be ignorant. They are arrogant in a particularly dangerous way, because they just aren't swayed by the input from anybody except someone who is telling them it's okay to do what they want to do. These personalities exist in every sport and probably in every walk of life. The only thing that EVER changes such people is having a close brush with disaster and surviving it . . . and as I know well from the ER, all too often, such people are capable of an internal dialogue that convinces them that the accident they avoided or survived was not due to their error in judgment, but due to some other factor which simply wouldn't apply if they were to persist in their behavior.
I was taught a lot of good things in my OW class. I was taught to dive with a buddy, and I was taught to do a buddy check before each dive.
One of the first things I saw, when I started my AOW class, was that nobody did any of those things I had been taught. They didn't do their BWRAF (or any substitute for it) and they didn't stay together underwater. It wasn't that these things hadn't been taught -- they either hadn't been LEARNED, or they had been abandoned.
No matter what you teach people, or what you emphasize, you will be fighting powerful peer pressure and bad models, once the person leaves your class. I try to make a real point of telling Peter's OW students that, once they leave us, they WILL see a variety of things done (or not done) that we warned against, and that it's important that they not succumb to modeling sloppy diving. But I know that even I (and I have a reputation for being stiff-necked about such things) have been pressured into being less than what I believe is diligent on occasion.
That said, I have also found that, if I stick to my guns, most people will honor my wishes. I tell folks that we ARE going to do a dive plan and a buddy check, and we ARE going to stay together, and if one of us ends the dive, the other will end it, too.
In the diving I've done over the last seven years, I've had buddies who had HORRIBLE skills (I call them two-state divers, crawling and corking). I've dived with airhogs and rototillers and people who think there's a prize for the fastest swimmer. The only people I can think of with whom I do not want to dive again are the ones who did not honor my request to stay together, and they are very few (in fact, I can only really remember two). Everything else, you can manage or even help someone with . . . but somebody who thinks it's acceptable to leave their buddy underwater simply sees diving too differently to make a good companion for me.