I know UW Naturalist, Fish ID, and similar often take a beating as they don't offer any sort of traditional diving skills. However, they do offer knowledge. I'm not equipped to teach either of those courses, but I am encouraging a 14 year old student whom I recently certified in OW who plans to study marine sciences to seek out a good instructor for that, as it is relevant to her interests and future studies. Heck, I think I should take Fish ID in my local area, so I get better at spotting critters and showing them to new students who get excited from seeing different life. Now that I thought of the benefit of taking such, I will.
There's usually a lot more to see in lakes than "pretty much nothing but crawfish scooting along the bottom." or "This was in a freshwater quarry, so only got to see bluegill, largemouth bass, crappie, and channel catfish".
And while I would call "fish ID" useless, "UW naturalist" sounds a lot more interesting (didn't look at the course descriptions).
I'll explain...
Recognizing a pike (I think that's the name? these guys
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/Esox_lucius1.jpg/1200px-Esox_lucius1.jpg ) is all but complicated. You find a long fast fish in a lake, 99% sure it's them. Finding them, getting close for photography, or even better finding them as they hunt (and feed), is a lot more complicated.
Getting the name wrong is a lot less troubling to me than understanding what the fish does, why, how, and most importantly: how to avoid disturbing it too much.
In my opinion, the best classes to perfect skills would be:
- GUE fundies
- probably UTD/ISE/whichever other equivalent to GUE fundies
- a personalized class (let's call it coaching) with some of the instructors that offer it (Steve Martin, or guys like Andy Davis as well). If you're there for the skills, screw the card.
Worst class if you want to perfect your skills is probably something along the range of fish ID.
Classes that I've done that were pointless and where I did not learn a thing:
- Nitrox
- "Advanced adventurer". Well technically it's wrong, I did learn something there: some people believe you need a lot of training to use tables and were surprised I could do it when I had never seen a table before that course. Often the same people believe you need to have tables with you for when your computer dies, without considering that no computer = no depth/time.
Now surely it depends on the instructor for "AOW", but nitrox is just pointless and definitely a steal imo. Should I ever find the time and location to become an instructor, it'll be included in my OW course (although I might put a slightly larger price on it because of the gas and fees).
Oh, and a class I really would like to do but most likely will have to learn by myself: Search and recovery. But that's because I want to get the crap out of the lake, so learning to properly use a lift bag could be useful, most likely not that complicated, but screwing it up in a solo dive doesn't sound too appealing.
