DevonDiver
N/A
I was talking to a friend the other day and he told me he tried scuba at a resort in Mexico, he was briefed for 1hr after which he dove 50ft and claimed that there was "not much to it". What can you really learn in 1hr? Isn't this dangerous? Is it common for resorts to do this?
Heinous.
Most organizations put strict limitations of 'try dives' or 'discover scuba dives'. For PADI it is 6m (dive 1) and 12m (dive 2, if training was conducted with an instructor).
However, many dive shops choose to provide 'experience dives' that are not formal and do not follow organization guidelines. As such, they are unlikely to be covered under the liability insurance of the shop/instructor concerned...so if anything goes wrong, then legal actions would be painful.
Realistically, being taken to 50ft, under the careful supervision of an instructor is no more dangerous than being taken to 10ft....however, as the the customer concerned has no formal training or theory knowledge (they are not a trained diver, or diver in training)...and are much more likely to freak out underwater (they have not been progressively introduced to being underwater) then they are completely at the mercy of the person taking them for the dive.
For me, as a professional dive instructor, I would never want to take a 'discovery' diver to those depths....there is too much to go wrong and too many variables...and I would not want responsibility for their safety in those circumstances and I would not want the legal repercussions in the event of an incident. Maybe the instructor concerned (I assume it was an instructor!?!) had greater confidence in themselves.