Donating the "primary" regulator

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I think one of the problem's is divers get their OW card and stop doing safety drills... They Think well I'm good to go.. Then get AOW card and again don't use the skills that were taught..

They need to be removing their mask , swapping regulators with their buddy... Checking their gear through out the dive.. Just simply working on being better divers.. 90% of the skill divers need can be self taught or working with a mentor....

Jim..
 
Excellent point Jim.

My wife a new diver and i go to a lake, that we play in, to practice skills. Every dive we do something like share air shoot buoys, navagate, ect. She keeps asking why they did not teach her these things in class. Well they did for the most part, and here are how things went with her. air share and mask clear was done at 2-5 feet ,,,,,,,,, nav (vis 5-8 ft) was done by swimming out 15 ft and returning. cesa at 10-15 ft. The water instructor pressed for time said here is your temp card. Now the next day and following week we started hitting our play lake and we started over. off with the bcd and on with the bpw and long hose. one day of buoyancy and gettng the kit to work for her and keep her belly down. next several days were getting comfortable in 25 ft water. took one day to get her to remove her mask and put in on on the 20' platform without panic surfacing. I darn near drowned getting her to donate her primary reg with exhaust ports down and not up. It took perhaps 5 trips till she could with minimal assistance put her rig together alone. a compass took a couple of days to make it work for her. i had to mount the compass on a plexy sheet so she would not get the problems with her arm not remaining square with her travel. That does not even touch the problem with the compass having too many rings of numbers on it. Now she is excellent with the compass as she can make a 300 ft trip and miss the target by no nore than 10 ft. We are now working on awareness of surroundings. I say that because when she misses the target by a couple of feet. she does just that,,, she swims right by it from the intensity of focusing on the compass. The times she does not swim buy she hits the target if she is at the right depth. after a few head thumps she is now starting to do weigh point navigation so she can look around. She finds it is much better way than having to explain how she got the head scrape in the resteraunt. One place actually asked if she was doing compass work. She has the basics down pretty well. We hit the road and went from one hole to another. each place with its own challenges, each time I let her fail and each time she learns. she doesn't fail much any more, not because she knows it all but because she knows she doesn't know it and stops to ask before she proceeds. We progressed to fla for a honeymoon dive trip to ginnie and vortex. vortex she learned first hand not only that she uses air lots faster at 55 than at 20. But there is no difference in the feeling of 55 vs.20 which means she watches her gages now. As safety drills go she is right at home with the bpw and necklace. she has inhaled water from an upside down reg and she now donates it right. There is no place for any new diver to stop perfecting their basic survival skills. On a trip to ginnie I took her to the various cave entrances and she saw first hand what real depth control was and she wants that for her self. Especially when the guy she saw hovering with no movement for 10 minutes turned out to be a girl. Come May we are gong to the carribean for her first ocean dive's. in a week or so she is taking nitrox. She is ready to dive at the drop of a hat and is now telling me what she wants to work on. Later i will get her adv OW done. Some may say a waste of time but if she has the skills she should be papered as such. I am pretty darn proud of her.


I think one of the problem's is divers get their OW card and stop doing safety drills... They Think well I'm good to go.. Then get AOW card and again don't use the skills that were taught..

They need to be removing their mask , swapping regulators with their buddy... Checking their gear through out the dive.. Just simply working on being better divers.. 90% of the skill divers need can be self taught or working with a mentor....

Jim..
 
Excellent point Jim.

My wife a new diver and i go to a lake, that we play in, to practice skills. Every dive we do something like share air shoot buoys, navagate, ect. She keeps asking why they did not teach her these things in class. Well they did for the most part, and here are how things went with her. air share and mask clear was done at 2-5 feet ,,,,,,,,, nav (vis 5-8 ft) was done by swimming out 15 ft and returning. cesa at 10-15 ft. The water instructor pressed for time said here is your temp card. Now the next day and following week we started hitting our play lake and we started over. off with the bcd and on with the bpw and long hose. one day of buoyancy and gettng the kit to work for her and keep her belly down. next several days were getting comfortable in 25 ft water. took one day to get her to remove her mask and put in on on the 20' platform without panic surfacing. I darn near drowned getting her to donate her primary reg with exhaust ports down and not up. It took perhaps 5 trips till she could with minimal assistance put her rig together alone. a compass took a couple of days to make it work for her. i had to mount the compass on a plexy sheet so she would not get the problems with her arm not remaining square with her travel. That does not even touch the problem with the compass having too many rings of numbers on it. Now she is excellent with the compass as she can make a 300 ft trip and miss the target by no nore than 10 ft. We are now working on awareness of surroundings. I say that because when she misses the target by a couple of feet. she does just that,,, she swims right by it from the intensity of focusing on the compass. The times she does not swim buy she hits the target if she is at the right depth. after a few head thumps she is now starting to do weigh point navigation so she can look around. She finds it is much better way than having to explain how she got the head scrape in the resteraunt. One place actually asked if she was doing compass work. She has the basics down pretty well. We hit the road and went from one hole to another. each place with its own challenges, each time I let her fail and each time she learns. she doesn't fail much any more, not because she knows it all but because she knows she doesn't know it and stops to ask before she proceeds. We progressed to fla for a honeymoon dive trip to ginnie and vortex. vortex she learned first hand not only that she uses air lots faster at 55 than at 20. But there is no difference in the feeling of 55 vs.20 which means she watches her gages now. As safety drills go she is right at home with the bpw and necklace. she has inhaled water from an upside down reg and she now donates it right. There is no place for any new diver to stop perfecting their basic survival skills. On a trip to ginnie I took her to the various cave entrances and she saw first hand what real depth control was and she wants that for her self. Especially when the guy she saw hovering with no movement for 10 minutes turned out to be a girl. Come May we are gong to the carribean for her first ocean dive's. in a week or so she is taking nitrox. She is ready to dive at the drop of a hat and is now telling me what she wants to work on. Later i will get her adv OW done. Some may say a waste of time but if she has the skills she should be papered as such. I am pretty darn proud of her.

I am doing the same thing with my wife.. I know where you're coming from...:wink:. In Bonaire after we have been in the water for 45 minutes.. I'll look at her with my arms in the air and say which way... She's getting us back to the same beach.. Not the same rock.. But , She is improving...

When she got to close swimming through a rock formation , I kicked her regulator out.. She told me in the boat... Thank you for all the training... It was no big deal.. Just love diving with her...

Jim...
 
If you train her then you know exactly what you have for a buddy. Makes the dive so much more enjoyable. The wife at our play hole.... http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/members/bws-447190.html



I am doing the same thing with my wife.. I know where you're coming from...:wink:. In Bonaire after we have been in the water for 45 minutes.. I'll look at her with my arms in the air and say which way... She's getting us back to the same beach.. Not the same rock.. But , She is improving...

When she got to close swimming through a rock formation , I kicked her regulator out.. She told me in the boat... Thank you for all the training... It was no big deal.. Just love diving with her...

Jim...
 
Or you could just use the services of an instructor that is not useless...
 
Or you could just use the services of an instructor that is not useless...
Hard to find and few are willing to pay for it.
There are several good instructors here on SB that will train divers well, but in the rest of the world not so much.
 
In most cases you are getting an instructor in the blind unless you live in an area that has lots of shop support. I will admit I was prepared for this to some degree in that training is not all it is cracked up to be with many instructors. The number one goal at the time was to get a card. Unfortunately that is about all she got form the 1 on 1 500$ class. The nice aspect f this is that we can proceed at her pace, which makes retention so much better than 3 days of cramming.


Or you could just use the services of an instructor that is not useless...
 
SSI teaches both ways (donate primary or donate alternate), but identifies donating primary as the preferred method. The SSI Instructor manual does not, however, discuss equipment configuration or when one method might be preferred over another - that is up to the instructor. Although I teach donating the primary (with longer primary hose & alternate bungied) first, I also discuss different potential equipment configurations and donating the alternate as these would be common configurations met by divers in real life. I encourage my students to ALWAYS review the configuration of their buddy and review & agree on OOA procedures before getting in the water with them as a part of the pre-dive prep.

The SSI Instructor manual does NOT teach swapping regulators once air sharing is established
 
Open Water Diver - 'certified to dive with a buddy of equal, or higher, training level and without professional supervision'.

What you wrote merely illustrates the woeful gap between expectation and reality in entry-level scuba training.

If only DM, and above, were expected to have any level of vigilance or anticipation, then we see a complete failure and break-down of the buddy system. The buddy system being core principle of recreational diving safety.

Really... we shouldn't expect buddy vigilance, air checking and basic anticipation of gas depletion below divemaster/professional level?

Standards of diving may have dropped to such an extent that we see too little responsibility or inter-diver support.... but please, at least here on Scubaboard, let's not lower our sights so far that we start publicly stating such pitiful standards are now the least we should accept or expect....

I've only just got my PADI OW c-card and I was doing all of this on my 3rd and 4th OW dives. It probably helps that I'm in my mid-30s and risk adverse, and my instructor has 30 years of experience and literally himself was in military risk management.

I was making a point of checking my gas consumption rate versus his, by asking him what he was on before he asked me. Even when I hit 50 bar and signalled I was low, I was never anything less than completely calm as I felt prepared to deal with any eventuality.
 
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OP, all I can say is 'I tried to wade thru your post----but I got too sleepy----------that sucka is loooong'........& then your 1st page(that's all I could handle..:))responses were about the same.....Maybe the Cliff Note version came later------if so, I might have missed a good post-----------bye bye.........
 
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