Hi there!
Some of my local dive stores (in Hungary, Europe, diving mostly in Mediterranean and Red sea) sometimes makes a little stress test sessions for mainly OW/AOW (anybody can come who OW as minimum, but it’s definietly not for DM-candidates) divers which looks pretty awesome for me (Been twice.), but never heard anything on the internet about this kind of sessions. (Again, I’m not talming about DM-stress test.
)
It used to be held in a 4m (about 12 foot) deep pool.
There is two types which I’ve met:
1.) The first is quite similar to DM-tests: hardest things are swim down to bottom of the 2 meter pool without anything (no mask, no fins, nothing), open the bottle, and suit up into full equipment and while breathing from a single 2nd stage (buddy breathing) exchange masks and fins.
2.) I found the second type more useful. It starts lile a regular dive, pairs form up, get into equipment, check each other and just swim around. The things is there are a few DM/DI who acts like pretty naughty fairies. First of all after we have have put together equipment, but before we suit up, there is a little briefing under which some faults just occurs from nowhere: inflator tubes disconnects, air valves are closed, dump valves are got disassemled, etc. Next thing is buddy-check which quite often misses these problems, every time there is a few diver who gets under water with some problem.
The next phase is when we (the victims) just swiming around while the sharks... err... the DMs sometimes just ripping out our regulators (sometimes they get ahold of it, so instead of searching you have to change to octopus), closing our water (you’ll learn really fast that you buddy have to be there, not the opposite side of the whole ocean), stealing some masks (find it or change to spare), stealing fins and weight belts/integrated weights or just pumping your BCD full with air.
Basicaly it’s all part of the OW course, but you’ll never learn till you have to handle it unexpectedly, and I found it more useful this then the first one.
Is this stress test truly this rare or just I wasn’t capable to find anything about it?
Some of my local dive stores (in Hungary, Europe, diving mostly in Mediterranean and Red sea) sometimes makes a little stress test sessions for mainly OW/AOW (anybody can come who OW as minimum, but it’s definietly not for DM-candidates) divers which looks pretty awesome for me (Been twice.), but never heard anything on the internet about this kind of sessions. (Again, I’m not talming about DM-stress test.
)It used to be held in a 4m (about 12 foot) deep pool.
There is two types which I’ve met:
1.) The first is quite similar to DM-tests: hardest things are swim down to bottom of the 2 meter pool without anything (no mask, no fins, nothing), open the bottle, and suit up into full equipment and while breathing from a single 2nd stage (buddy breathing) exchange masks and fins.
2.) I found the second type more useful. It starts lile a regular dive, pairs form up, get into equipment, check each other and just swim around. The things is there are a few DM/DI who acts like pretty naughty fairies. First of all after we have have put together equipment, but before we suit up, there is a little briefing under which some faults just occurs from nowhere: inflator tubes disconnects, air valves are closed, dump valves are got disassemled, etc. Next thing is buddy-check which quite often misses these problems, every time there is a few diver who gets under water with some problem.
The next phase is when we (the victims) just swiming around while the sharks... err... the DMs sometimes just ripping out our regulators (sometimes they get ahold of it, so instead of searching you have to change to octopus), closing our water (you’ll learn really fast that you buddy have to be there, not the opposite side of the whole ocean), stealing some masks (find it or change to spare), stealing fins and weight belts/integrated weights or just pumping your BCD full with air.
Basicaly it’s all part of the OW course, but you’ll never learn till you have to handle it unexpectedly, and I found it more useful this then the first one.
Is this stress test truly this rare or just I wasn’t capable to find anything about it?
