"Advanced Divers Only..."

[Mastow1]

A Different Focus On The Term Advanced Diver For Them That Are Not (always)

AS pointed out, ad nauseam, the term “advanced diver” is ambiguous. It is best considered, a personal and situational call for a diver to personally evaluate the activity considering conditions, abilities/experience, equipment, and contingencies. So, what’s a diver to do?

Enjoy! Learn from the operator and others who are experienced and competent with like dives: prepare for the dive and enjoy it with relatively low anxiety. Take pride in contingency preparation, gain proficiency from experiences, and pity (avoid them as dive partners) those that think that a title has meaning in an emergency. Enjoy the accomplishment of a well-executed advanced dive. With experience, you will understand what “advanced diver” means.

 

[Scuba-74]

As I suggested in my last post, you are more likely to be restricted in what you want to do by an operator who does not do checkout dives than one who does. If you are diving in a DM-led group, the quality of your dive depends upon the quality of your least qualified diver.

If you are diving with an operator who requires checkout dives and, after having done one, restricts your ability to do the dives you want to do, maybe the problem is not the dive operator.

I do agree with you in principal that if a dive shop is able to segregate divers by ability it is to everyone’s advantage.

 

[Edward3c]

I've had instructors turn up to dive with the club. When talking to them pre-dive it has become clear they've never dived in UK waters or worn a drysuit. These are the people who should know their limitations, but we get them.

Would I class them as advanced? No.

 

[TMHeimer]

I've had instructors turn up to dive with the club. When talking to them pre-dive it has become clear they've never dived in UK waters or worn a drysuit. These are the people who should know their limitations, but we get them.

Would I class them as advanced? No.

Right. You can be advanced in one type of diving and not in another. I've always said I want to be taught by an instructor who is advanced in the place where the course is. I couldn't care less if he/she's never done a wall or drift dive.

 

[ChuckP]

Those were not the cases that I meant. I was never restricted in anything after I dove with an op - be it a checkout dive, or a first 2-tank dive of the trip. Those were the cases when I didn’t get to dive at all because I either didn’t agree or didn’t have time for their BS.

The most egregious case happened when I was making arrangements to dive with my newly certified JOW 10 yo son in Cancun. He was certified just a few weeks prior to that, and did his checkout dives in a lake in Connecticut in late October, where he had to break ice to enter the water. He did excellent in the class, including finding and retrieving a dive belt lost by another diver in that lake. The only reason I had him do checkout dives back home is so we can do really exciting ocean dives when we go on a family trip to Cancun, where we would only have 1 or 2 mornings to devote to that. So when I reached out to a shop next to a hotel and was told that, essentially, instead of going on a real dive trip, we would have to play in the sand with some DM to check my sons ability I was really, really pissed.

I ended up reporting the shop to PADI for an attempt to override/supplement official certification requirements with their arbitrary BS, and took my business to another shop that gladly took us diving where we wanted to go.

So in your opinion a ten year old diver that was just certified in a lake, should be good to go for an open ocean with current dive? No reason to check them out? Let alone the fact that it's a 10 year old newly certified diver.........

As a DM/Instructor/OP, we want you to have a great time and most of all, we want you to be able to go home in a seat verses a box. How bad is it to go do a quick check out dive in the afternoon? I have a 14 year old son that is fantastic in the water, if on vacation a shop said we're gonna limit him to 60' and we need a check out dive - I have zero problems with that nor would my son. My word means zero to another shop that doesn't know me - they are looking out for our safety and I have tons of respect for that.

Go next door to the shop that'll let you do anything!!! Perfect!!

I seen a dad with his 10-11 year old kid here, insisted on nitrox even though not certed, insisted on no depth limit for the kid. The DM that objected is now sorta pushed aside because the shop would rather sell the diving to that guy. Father / son carried knives in the park (not allowed), kid taking fins off and running across the bottom, bouncing into everything, kid takes the knife out and uses it as a reef hook to drag himself across the coral.......... This isn't toward your kid, it's towards shops that rather sell verses look out for divers safety.

 

[Coztick]

I think the lesson here is, "Be careful what you ask for, you might just get it!"
I'd rather be denied a dive then find myself in peril but it seems a crap chute.
One op may limit a proficient diver where the op next door may take a poor diver in poorly fitting rental gear into a wreck they have no business penetrating.

 

[Scuba-74]

So in your opinion a ten year old diver that was just certified in a lake, should be good to go for an open ocean with current dive? No reason to check them out? Let alone the fact that it's a 10 year old newly certified diver.........

First of all, there was no current on those dives. And I specifically inquired in advance if those sites were suitable for a JOW.

Secondly, yes, I’m of the opinion that anyone who is comfortable in a cold water low visibility dives will do just fine on shallow Caribbean dives.

Finally, I think it should be left to a discretion of the parent who knows their kid ability and has an idea of what type of dives they are signing up with vs. what the kid did before.

 

[wgw04024]

Is this a joke? Someone has 500 dives and doesn't understand that?

 

[Edward3c]

Secondly, yes, I’m of the opinion that anyone who is comfortable in a cold water low visibility dives will do just fine on shallow Caribbean dives.

That’s a dangerous assumption. Cold water divers can, and do, dive too deep and for too long (exceeding no stop times), because of the myth that if they can dive in cold waters they could dive anywhere.

 

[Altamira]

It is totally reasonable, and I fully expect to be looked at closely during a checkout dive before being allowed to participate in an advanced or possibly challenging dive. I would do the same if I owned a dive op. In my experience, a competent Instructor or DM can accurately assess a diver's capability in the first 5-10 minutes of a dive, and there is generally little need for a lengthy checkout dive. With thousands of hours flying Air Force fast movers, and being a major airline captain with more flight experience and certificates than their most experienced instructors, I still had to get a checkout flight prior to renting a Cessna 172. After 10 minutes in the air, the instructor said "OK, you're good to go, but since you paid for an hour, what do you say about we go out and play for the next 50 minutes?" And we did. Same applies to diving, and I have fun doing a checkout, or any dive, even with a group of new OW divers.