Is there a "hardest cert/most stringent certifier?"

[Johanan]

I don't know much about them but I saw some videos Jill Heinerth did for them and I was not impressed by the diving.

Yeah, I know this video and don't like it either. However, in the real life I had a good experience. My sidemount and cave instructor is RAID training director for UK and Malta. An outstanding diver and excellent instructor. The fact that I'm his friend but didn't pass the Intro to Cave course with the first attempt is quite telling. Perhaps it just affirms the tenet that instructor is the most important element in training.

 

[rivers]

I don't know much about them but I saw some videos Jill Heinerth did for them and I was not impressed by the diving. She did a good job with the film itself but the kneeling on the floor was not impressive to me and makes me doubt that their instruction is that much better than.anyone else's.

I'm fairly certain I know who the divers in the video are. If I'm correct, they are very high level divers, and I'm surprised at the standard to which they are diving.

 

[socaljohn]

LA County.

 

[muzikbiz22]

People learn to dive to have fun. Too many instructors from all agencies have lost sight of that goal and their classes reflect that..

AMEN 100 times over !! I dive for me, not for an agency, not for the sake of ego, not for anyone or anything else. The best thing a diver can do, is DIVE !! Regardless of agency, there are not "underwater talent scouts or scuba police" buzzing around underwater handing out citations for "bad finning" or Gold Stars if you look great kicking underwater. Make acquaintances along the way, chat with other divers, travel, and get a few mentors. With that said, someone mentioned earlier the LA County program. Best of my knowledge, it is/was the most rigorous.

 

[RainPilot]

The OP asked which is the strictest agency so GUE and UTD came up. Before anyone jumps on the GUE / UTD band wagon they also need to look at the overall cost vs benefit situation of going that way.

GUE and UTD are both expensive not just in terms of courses but also the style of diving. UTD Tec 1 guys have to use Helium as a standard gas below 100 so if they are doing decompression dive at 120 feet on standard gas, they spend 90-100 USD on back gas alone. TDI divers get to choose for themselves when they need Helium. For decompression diving in the 120 feet range it is uncommon for divers to be using Helium and the cost of the back gas is half for the TDI guy than it is for GUE/UTD fellow. In the long run this means that a man with limited budget will dive more if he stayed away from GUE/UTD even though they train divers to a higher level. Some of my UTD friends feel trapped because firstly you need to log a certain number of dives to progress to the next level and secondly the cost per decompression dive that these guys incur is more than what my TDI dive budies are paying. Standard gasses are expensive for shallower depths and so is the mandatory gear and lights etc.

In another thread, I asked about Cave training and to be full cave certified through a mainstream agency, the training expense is coming to be 1500 - 1800 USD. If I was to do GUE Cave 1 then that course alone is 2600 USD range. Keep in mind that GUE Fundies would have to be cleared as a pre-requisite course which is another 800 - 900 USD. The total cost would then be close to 3500 USD for GUE Cave 1.The cost in which GUE is training me to start my cave diving is the cost in which I would become an experienced cave diver with 170 - 200 real dives after my certification if I went with NACD. The question then should not be if GUE's newly graduated Cave 1 diver is better than an NACD newbie graduate Full Cave diver because they are half the price of each other. The question should be if GUE's Cave 1 diver better than an NACD Cave diver with 170 - 200 real dives under his belt because they are both created in the same money.

Let me make this thread simple for the OP.

If you wish to be a highly trained diver who has no money left to dive because he spent it all in training then GUE / UTD are the way to go. If you wish to be the poorly trained diver who gets to dive a whole lot more because he saved money by sticking to cheaper certifications then PADI,SSI, SDI, NAUI etc are the way to go. Choose how you wish to be miserable and dive.

One of the most important of the UTD tenets is to create a thinking diver. Much like other members have posted, for dives outside of the training environment one is free to adapt the procedures as applicable to the situation. So, if a UTD team decide to do some dives down to 120 ft without helium, that is something that the team needs to consider and decide on. There is no UTD police going to come and take away your card. The flip side of the coin is that cost vs safety is a dangerous area for many. I have friends who tried to save on scrubber costs on a rebreather and found out the hard way that saving 20 bucks isn't worth a life. The economics of diving are unfortunately often a part of the incident chain, from cheap training to bad compressor maintenance to inferior equipment to unserviced LSE, the list goes on.

RAID is worth to look at.

As far as the OP goes, I think the answer to the title question is :
GUE is the most stringent, followed pretty closely by UTD. I am only referring to the equivalent of OW and AOW here, I cannot speak for the cave and overhead environment as I am not there yet. I imagine that the same would apply though.

As far as RAID goes, I do have some comments, again NOT from an OH point of view. I started as a NAUI instructor in 2003, one of the things I loved the most was the "Freedom to Teach" philosophy as well as the "Loved One" standard. This meant that I could teach any number of additional skills, require any passing standard that i wanted to (as long as it met and exceeded the base standards) and even if a student passed and met all my requirements, if they were not someone I would trust to be the buddy for my son or wife I didn't have to pass them.

When I started diving rebreathers, I looked at RAID for my certs for a number of reasons. While I was doing this, I did my instructor crossover as i was really impressed with the online training and the support for the students wrt theory training as well as the basic philosophy.

What I liked especially was the fact that, like GUE and UTD, the training was designed backwards from a very technical skill set, so that I never have to tell a student "For this course you will do it this way, but later on you will do it that way" which I have always hated with a passion.

Things like donating the primary, all skills to be performed on all courses with neutral buoyancy, in the hover, horizontal etc are, for me, basic building blocks for training new divers.

What is also nice is that the standards are in some ways like NAUI of old. For example, a student must show proficiency with a "non-silting propulsion method". So I can teach frog kick and modified flutter etc on an OW course as the students needs dictate.

With GUE and UTD, there can occasionally be issues in remote dive locations when the operators are not familiar with the agencies (I only know PADI syndrome...) so often my UTD students end up dual certified. When I do a UTD Rec course, it meets all the requirements of a RAID OW course and so, if they have done the online theory, I can sign them off with no additional requirements. With PADI, there are several extra (and to me obsolete) things that have to be added in.

On balance, I feel that the commercial agency with the highest requirement for OW skills to pass is RAID (no knowledge of CMAS or BSAC so apologies if Im insulting our friends)

On a last note, AFAIK RAID is the agency that stipulates the most minimum hours in water for certification (6 total of which 2 hours MUST be in OW). This helps to limit the "4 dives of 20 min each" sausage machine that I see often in the PADI-type agencies.

 

[bamafan]

I'm fairly certain I know who the divers in the video are. If I'm correct, they are very high level divers, and I'm surprised at the standard to which they are diving.

I have seen these divers in other videos and I wouldn't say they are a shining example of a good cave diver. The frogkick needs help too and can they even spell trim? I know people who don't hold themselves out to be a professional that would put these to shame. I have seen similar stuff from instructors, bod members of the major cave training agencies. If someone would use this for advertising instead of a comedy video I have little faith in what the typical diver they are turning out looks like. Oh well do what makes you happy.

 

[RainPilot]

This is the required skill circuit for the OC Deco 50 course, equivalent to PADI Tec 50. The Deco 40 course can also be done with twins in which case these skills are required, equivalent to PADI Tec 40.

 

[RainPilot]

This is a PADI Divemaster skill circuit

 

[boulderjohn]

This is a PADI Divemaster skill circuit

That's just plain depressing, but not not surprising.

Before that video was made, PADI changed its standards and made it plain that it preferred that skills be introduced to students while they are in horizontal trim and buoyant. They did not, however, disallow teaching on the knees in the very sad way the skills are done here. People are reluctant to change.

In teaching DMs at the shop where I was recently employed, the Director of Instruction said that, yes, it was good that I taught horizontal and neutral for my classes, but we MUST teach the DMs the way he was taught to do it in the instructor development program where he was trained in Roatan, in the most absurd, regimented, overweighted, on the knees way imaginable. He had just completed the program a year or so before. He said that in Roatan, they were told that, yes, PADI preferred it to be done differently now, but they had been doing it that way for years and they could therefore guarantee that if they did their skills that way, they would all pass with flying colors.

I refused to do it, and I withdrew from teaching all DMs.

As I said, it is just plain depressing.

 

[Neilwood]

That's just plain depressing, but not not surprising.

Before that video was made, PADI changed its standards and made it plain that it preferred that skills be introduced to students while they are in horizontal trim and buoyant. They did not, however, disallow teaching on the knees in the very sad way the skills are done here. People are reluctant to change.

In teaching DMs at the shop where I was recently employed, the Director of Instruction said that, yes, it was good that I taught horizontal and neutral for my classes, but we MUST teach the DMs the way he was taught to do it in the instructor development program where he was trained in Roatan, in the most absurd, regimented, overweighted, on the knees way imaginable. He had just completed the program a year or so before. He said that in Roatan, they were told that, yes, PADI preferred it to be done differently now, but they had been doing it that way for years and they could therefore guarantee that if they did their skills that way, they would all pass with flying colors.

I refused to do it, and I withdrew from teaching all DMs.

As I said, it is just plain depressing.

Such a pity they chose to do that video with everything done on the knees - if you consistently stress to avoid bottom contact and neutral buoyancy, show people the ideal way and train to it from the start, they don't get a chance to do it wrong and therefore you don't need to correct it later.