Am I progressing too fast?

[NAM001]

IMO it depends on the student when they are ready. surely you are not ready to go tech with your dives being avg of 30 ft. I say this because you have not experienced things like the increased gas usage at depth. you have not experienced the lack of a monster at 61 ft. that sounds funny but it is true. there is a confidence factor that only comes from experience. courage you get from your instructor but confidence is from experiencing things your self. there are things that may take a year or so for the light to finally come on and make sense. my wife for instance made a dive at vortex to the cave enterance. she was scared to decend into the drop hole. and surprised when nothing happened to her at 60 ft and then even more when on shore found she had little air. she said this never happened before. I said you have never been deeper than 25 - 30 feet before. how can you appreciate the idea of rock bottom with out that experience to reinforce teh need for such a calculation. classroom theory has to be second nature. forget the names of boyle and the others, just know the meat of the matter.... you I am sure found that shooting a buoy from 30 ft is no easy chore as compared to 60 ft. just one of those things you have to experience and figure out why. the more you figure out through experience the safer and more confident you become. for me, my tech class was easy. calculating partial pressure was native because of my OW class in the 60's and occupational background,, so was e a d when i took my nitrox in 2003. seemed stupid the way they did it but the light came on in tech class using trimix....... e a d and e n d are very similar if not down right identical. same process just applied a little different. no more do you calculate e a d in nitrox class because computers do it for you. With out going through it you have no idea of why you do e n d the way you do. classes have been dumbed down and it leaves the good stuff to be found on your own like e n d without ever knowing e a d. another course is rescue. take the class and by theory you never have to use it to save a life. the real meat of the class is the aspect of how to prevent the situation and monitoring your buddy and surroundings. I cant say if you are ready for tech or when. You appear to have a rational scientific and logical mind. if so you should be ready much earlier than most others.

 

[hxtk]

Just give some thought as to who you choose as a mentor. Personally...I’d pick someone with a similar risk aversion level.

That's just the thing, though. Seldom will a diver be upfront with anyone (least of all themselves) that they're an extreme pedal-to-the-metal diver. I consider myself highly risk averse; you can judge a lot about me from the fact that my pencil sketches are almost always lighter than I'd like because I'm practically scared of making a mark too heavy to take back. I like to think that my diving practices line up with that level of risk aversion, but I do wonder if that's just my ignorance talking.

 

[Cyborg Pirate]

No I do not think it is too early for a fundies class and a drysuit class. 30 dives if you have been working at skills and had them as you had mentioned focused on by your initial instructor. Take those 2 courses

 

[JohnnyC]

Obtaining and perfecting skills is not going too fast. However, exceeding limitations without having mastered those skills is absolutely going too fast. As long as you’re not putting yourself at risk by diving beyond your ability, there’s no problem.

Having a plan is a good thing. Keep planning, and keep practicing, preferably with mentors that are doing the types of dives you want to end up doing.

 

[kafkaland]

As it was already pointed out, diving, diving, and more diving is the key to becoming a better diver, and get ready fort he next level. You mentioned drysuit diving as something you'd like to learn. I don't know what your dive sites are like, but if a drysuit helps you getting in the water more often, or doing more dives on a given day because you went getting as cold as in a wet suit, then by all means take that's course and get a drysuit. You'll dive more often, and get better faster.

 

[PfcAJ]

I'm a relatively new open water diver interested in getting into technical diving. I see my first technical diving class as something a couple years away. At 30 dives with only an OW card, don't feel that I'm pulling a zero-to-hero or card collecting. At an average hard-bottom depth of 32ft across my dives, I don't think I'm exactly rushing into the deep. I had just a little bit of a head start compared to some because I had the good luck of taking OW from an instructor who placed heavy importance on proper weighting, buoyancy, trim, and generally not silting the place out, but I would not consider myself a particularly skilled diver for the amount of experience that I have.

However, there are a couple things where my views aren't exactly what some would consider kosher. I learned to shoot an smb and run a reel from the "take things slow and do lots of drills" school of dive training. I haven't violated the 60ft depth limit of OW but to be completely honest that has nothing to do with my lack of an AOW card and everything to do with wanting to refine my fundamental skills and form a stronger buddy team with my dive partner(s) prior to doing so.

I guess I'm somewhat of an internet diver in that there are academic topics in diving that I know way more about than I probably need to, especially around dive planning, because like being able to give a specific reason grounded in reality for why I dive the way I do.

All of this is building up to a recent conversation I had with a tech instructor. I was interested in taking GUE Fundamentals and learning how to use a drysuit this year. He referred me to an allegorical (but real) interview with someone who progressed far too quickly, ignoring the advice of his seniors right up until he awoke in a hospital having avoided death by sheer luck. The message was pretty clear: I'm going too fast and will end up as a statistic if I don't slow down.

I was skeptical. Me? Going too fast? No one had ever suggested such a thing before. I talked to a couple of more experienced divers I know (some with technical and/or DM training, but admittedly no instructors) and they seemed to agree with me that I'm not progressing at an unsafe rate, but I talk to them enough that it might've become a bit of an echo chamber, so I've come here seeking a third opinion. Do I appear to be diving recklessly, whether in general or in the specific case of trying to make the jump from OW to OW+Fundies+Drysuit in a year? If so, what can I do better? I'm willing to provide more details as needed to help answer that question; whether my current practice reflects it or not, I'd like to have a long diving career, free of near-death experiences

Why do you wanna learn to technical dive? Is there something specific you want to see? Have you ran out of interesting options at your current certification level?

 

[Landau]

Here in the cold many students do their first OW dive in a Drysuit.

I’m not too familiar with GUE but I thought Fundamentals was about basic skills and perfecting them.

Both seem OK to me after 30 dives

 

[hxtk]

Why do you wanna learn to technical dive? Is there something specific you want to see? Have you ran out of interesting options at your current certification level?

The original thing that drew me to scuba diving was caves, which are definitely not OW, but my local diving has introduced me to a lot of interesting history in the tech1 range, and I'll admit that the fact fewer living people have seen some of it than have seen the surface of the moon is really exciting to me. But for the exact same reason, I definitely couldn't run out of places to dive in the OW range in one lifetime.

 

[PfcAJ]

The original thing that drew me to scuba diving was caves, which are definitely not OW, but my local diving has introduced me to a lot of interesting history in the tech1 range, and I'll admit that the fact fewer living people have seen some of it than have seen the surface of the moon is really exciting to me. But for the exact same reason, I definitely couldn't run out of places to dive in the OW range in one lifetime.

Good reasons.

Dive your face off. Take Fundamentals.

 

[AJ]

Dive your face off. Take Fundamentals.

Best advice you can get. Fundamentals will teach you much more than skills. Tech is about mindset and experience, not about the number of dives.