Best agency for learning Tech diving - criteria given - honest :)

[LiteHedded]

... so now you're calling me a jerk? Nice ...

I don't think I have anything whatsoever to do with the prejudices of people in Florida ... and those prejudices, in both directions, were extremely obvious when I came there for a dive vacation. They left me with the impression that you folks don't really WANT to be friendly with each other.

Agency wars suck ... and completely miss the point of why most folks took up diving in the first place.

As for relevence to the OP ... I'd think he'd want to consider that aspect of his associations with the people he'd be signing up to dive with ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

yea i think you've been a bit of a jerk from the start.

go back and read the progression of our posts in case you've forgotten. i'll leave you to have the last word. or the last ellipsis

 

[kr2y5]

In order to brighten up the discussion, I would like to offer an anecdote based on real-life events. My wife is a South Korean. When she was a small child, she, along with other children, was required to draw pictures of North Korean communists as monsters with red faces. For many years thereafter, she genuinely believed that the faces of people in North Korea are red. She was surprised to eventually learn that this was not the case. Of course, she grew up just fine... she is a professor at a top university. I have also seen a North Korean communist up close, and I can confirm their faces are very much like yours and mine.

The die-hard supporters and die-hard opponents of team diving alike could use a trip to Seattle to meet with the members of our local GUE community. The opponents would discover that the monster is not 10 feet tall, and does not blow flames from its nostrils. Fanatical supporters could learn what it means to act in the best interest of your agency (in particular, that you do not have to constantly prove to be the best, not everyone is your enemy, not everything is an attack, everything has limitations, and that an open-ended discussion generally does not represent a life-threatening emergency). Our local folks are extremely friendly, inclusive, and unassuming. That goes a long way...

 

[kensuf]

I'm rubber, you're glue.

No I'm not.

Yes you are.

 

[Warren_L]

Back when I first started diving we had a group of GUE divers who used to hang out at our local training site and make a point of publicly snickering at all the OW students trudging past them with snorkels and split fins in hand. The rest of the dive community called them "The Posse" ... because they were the self-appointed arbiters of all that was wrong with scuba instruction. They helped create a lot of prejudices that have taken years and a lot of effort to dispel. My trips to Florida showed me a lot of the same thing happening down there ... only in some cases way worse than anything we had to deal with in my neighborhood. Maybe if you guys were a bit less judgmental about everyone else, people would be less inclined to return the sentiment ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Do you still see this happening?

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

In order to brighten up the discussion, I would like to offer an anecdote based on real-life events. My wife is a South Korean. When she was a small child, she, along with other children, was required to draw pictures of North Korean communists as monsters with red faces. For many years thereafter, she genuinely believed that the faces of people in North Korea are red. She was surprised to eventually learn that this was not the case. Of course, she grew up just fine... she is a professor at a top university. I have also seen a North Korean communist up close, and I can confirm their faces are very much like yours and mine.

The die-hard supporters and die-hard opponents of team diving alike could use a trip to Seattle to meet with the members of our local GUE community. The opponents would discover that the monster is not 10 feet tall, and does not blow flames from its nostrils. Fanatical supporters could learn what it means to act in the best interest of your agency (in particular, that you do not have to constantly prove to be the best, not everyone is your enemy, not everything is an attack, everything has limitations, and that an open-ended discussion generally does not represent a life-threatening emergency). Our local folks are extremely friendly, inclusive, and unassuming. That goes a long way...

... and it wasn't always like that. It took a lot of effort and the right people representing the community to make it work out that way ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Jack Hammer]

END and EAD are not the same thing.

Good catch, in this case both the EAD and the END are 141' when diving EAN25% to 150', neither of them equate to 150'.

END can refer to the Equivalent Narcotic Depth when using trimix. The acronym also refers to the Equivalent Nitrogen Depth. [emoji2]

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Do you still see this happening?

No ... to my knowledge, only one of those "Posse" guys is even still diving, and he matured nicely. The rest of them are off being "the best" at other activities now.

Our local GUE community has an extremely good relationship with the diving public as a whole. A great deal of the credit goes to people like Lynne and Koos ... who represent the leadership of the NWUE. a lot of it also goes to the active members of our local online dive forum ... Northwest Dive Club ... which is actively inclusive, and comprises a great many people who really don't judge people by their training agency or dive gear choices before they decide to go diving with them.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[TSandM]

Very little of this back and forth has anything to do with the OP's question, guys.

I am absolutely sure that there are well-educated and skills technical divers with good teaching skills in ALL agencies. There are also instructors with high standards in all agencies (I suspect I'd suffer if I took a class from GDI, for example!). The difficulty is for a student who is coming from outside of an area, to determine which instructors are skilled, thorough, and as demanding as the student wants to find (and Bob is right, some people don't want "the best", they want "good enough"). I don't know any dive instructors in Thailand (except for one Fundies instructor), and I suspect almost all the people who have responded here are in the same boat. A number of us have recommended an instructor based on the fact that the agency he teaches for is pretty consistent in the quality of its instructional staff, AND that we personally know the man and know people who have trained with him. However, that route is probably not optimal for the OP, for reasons I have listed before.

If somebody has a cogent recommendation for a technical instructor IN THAILAND that they know is an excellent person from whom to take training, they should pipe up. Otherwise, I really think that everything that can be said about the general process of selecting technical instructors has been said, and oversaid.

 

[Ayisha]

You and Ayisha have both now, multiple times, accused me of "attacking" GUE...

You might want to check that. I have only called you out once in all of these years, which was on this thread, after seeing dozens of your posts critical of GUE across various threads over time, and noticing this very prevalent pattern in your posts.

I only have 2 prior posts in this thread, the first was to recommend checking with Gideon while the OP is away, whom I had the pleasure of diving with and was mentored by in my GUE Fundamentals course last year. The second was the post you quoted earlier. So I have "accused" you once, again using your word, not "multiple times".

 

[boulderjohn]

You might want to check that. I have only called you out once in all of these years, which was on this thread, after seeing dozens of your posts critical of GUE across various threads over time, and noticing this very prevalent pattern in your posts.

That's pretty funny. Over the 11 years I have been on ScubaBoard, I thought the pattern was just the opposite.