@Zack-Bloom, I watched your video yesterday evening and enjoyed it. I'm glad you had fun in your class and learned some stuff. You should also be commended for the way you've handled yourself in this thread.
I've only met John once or twice, but I've gotten to be pretty good friends with Alec over the past six months and have had the opportunity to watch him teach. He and I both attended the TDI IT Workshop together and during the 9 days I got to watch Alec teach and critique other instructor candidates -- Alec is a top-shelf instructor and someone I would gladly send a loved one to. Actually, he and I have been exchanging texts for the past week about trading out some instruction in the near future, there's a very real possibility I'll be spending a week with him in South Florida taking this exact course.
On the topic of gas switches. Someone mentioned the story about my friend Jon Gol who died from breathing pure helium at his 20' stop. A buddy check prior to the gas switch would NOT have prevented him from dying. This is because the bottle WAS a deco bottle and was labeled accordingly, but he had decanted pure helium into it. A buddy would have seen "Jon's about to switch to a deco bottle, OK!" and would have let him do the switch. The only thing that would have prevented his death would have been if he had analyzed the cylinder before putting a regulator on it.
On the topic of running reels in the wrecks. I've had a number of discussions with people who have taken this course and they all told me the same thing -- you do run reels in the wrecks at the beginning. Then, you slowly build familiarity with the wreck and ultimately are only going one or two rooms in. One of my former students, who took this class last year, told me that they even had to find their way out of a wreck with a blacked out mask and no line, and that it was relatively easy to do because you were so familiar with the wreck that you have a mental map in your mind. Personally, this seems crazy to me, but on the other hand, I'm pretty confident I can personally find my way out from "The Lips" without a line and no light, and that would be a further distance than we're talking about here.
Where there some trim/buoyancy issues in the video? Absolutely. Was it the worst thing ever seen in the world? Hell no, I've seen far worse students graduate with cave certs. Remember fellas, these are students in a class and they're learning.
I also picked up a couple of neat tricks from the video that I had not seen before and I'm going to go play with them and test them out (filling the SMB from my wing to maintain constant lift volume and steady buoyancy does seem slick).
