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I see. So NAUI allows instructors to add to their courses and supports them when they do. But they can't do just anything. They can't do ridiculous things.
So what things are ridiculous? What is the dividing line between practices they will support and practices they won't support?
A few years ago, an SSI instructor working for the University of Alabama had students do doff and dons in a 15 foot pool (remove gear at the bottom, swim to the surface, swim back down, and put the gear back on). She did not accompany them as they did it. The only difference between that and what I described is the distance to the surface. When a student embolized and died, it did not go well for that instructor. Would NAUI have supported the instructor in the lawsuit? How different is that from the scenario I described in my "ridiculous" example?
The important question above is this: would NAUI go to court to defend you in a lawsuit if you did something unsafe in your instruction?
An example of what NAUI won't allow is what happened here several years back. A NAUI instructor thought it would be a neat idea to combine the Advanced Scuba Diver (NAUI's equivalent of AOW) required night and deep dives into a single dive. He took four students plus a DM candidate on a deep wall dive with the dive plan to bounce to 200 feet, touch the bottom, and come right back up. The students were on standard AL80's. The instructor and DM candidate were on steel 100's. Each buddy team also carried a pony bottle (only one per team, though). Two of the students (the smart ones) bailed on descent, went back to the surface and swam in unaccompanied. The other four divers descended all the way to the bottom ... a bit over 200 feet ... and began their ascent. As they ascended through the massive silt cloud they'd stirred up when they hit bottom they realized that there were only three divers present. The DM candidate went back down while the instructor and remaining student continued ascending. He found the missing diver sitting on the bottom, narced out of his mind. Grabbing the guy he began swimming up, but the exertion caused him to go through his air supply faster than anticipated. The problem was that in going back down he "broke" the team ... and neither he nor the guy he was literally hauling back up had a pony bottle. At about 160 feet the DM candidate ran out of air. His final act was to reach over and inflate the student's BCD, shooting him to the surface from 160 feet.
The student spent the night in the hyperbaric chamber. They found the DM candidate's body half-buried in mud at 210 feet about 10 months after the incident. The instructor was permanently banned from NAUI.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
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