Tollie:
NO matter how high the standard is for BOW training if a student sits out for an extended period of time before diving again they will have some problems. Diving does require some level of ongoing participation in the sport to perfect and maintain proficiency. As others have said here a comitment to ongoing training and practice either inside the structure of additional certifications or just practice with a buddy under the boat on basic skills is esential.
I believe that a student who has initially been well trained in boyency control and trim will be a more confident and comfortable diver than a poorly trained student even after an extended layout.
My biggest gripe with training practices has to do with ratios that are really too large for an instructor to safely work with students in perfecting skills in midwater rather than on the bottom. Its up to the individual instructor to reduce ratios and then to transition students from C/W skills which are almost universally taught to kneeling students to O/W performance in midwater with solid trim.
Some good points. I don't see the point in talking about what happens to divers if they lay off diving for a while when they weren't ever any good in the first place, they can't forget it...nothing from nothing is still nothing.
I prefer to see students doing skills midwater before ever leaving the pool (confined water). Then it's a snap in OW. In both confined and open water, skills would be done in buddy pairs. For example, if a diver a diver is replacing a lost mask and needs a reminder that his depth is drifing, it's his buddy who should be helping. Learning to help a buddy manage those issues is just as important as learning to manage them yourself. I'd rather not see divers in OW until AFTER they can demonstrate this.
Early in training when divers can't yet completely avoid the bottom, I still detest kneeling. People go through life upright except when they are sleeping and they need to get out of that habit for diving. I can't think of a case in diving where going vertical is the answer and the tendancy to do that is natural AND causes all kinds of trouble.
In OW when one buddy team is demonstrating a skill, I have no problem with waiting students having a tactile reference to keep them from drifting or wandering off and in some conditions it might be absolutely necessary. I still want them horizontal and neutral though. This is diving and if we aren't swimming we are hovering not kneeling. Maybe standards only require a 30 second hover but I require hovering whenever we aren't swimming.
IMO, ratios are generally always to big. Forget skills demonstrations and look at the tour portion of the dive. If divers are led around in a pack on all their training dives when is it that they demonstrate that they can plan and conduct a dive with a buddy? I prefer 2 or 3 diver teams and I want to see them dive while I do the following. If I need to help them, they need more work. At minimum, I think it's absolutely critical to have the students do the last dive or two without any help from me (I just watch). How can you say that they are qualified to dive independantly if they've never planned and condicted their own dive?
I don't believe in these 5 minute tours either. New divers need time in the water beyond kneeling on a platform doing skills or waiting to do them.
Notice that this means the instructor doubling up on at least some dives for an average sized class...or having more than one instructor. Any way you look at it it's more time and work.
This brings up other problems. I was a PADI instructor but reading the above, would you think that I could ever see my way to taking students on OW dive 1 immediately after CW water dive 1 (as PADI prefers) when critical skills like buoyancy control, ascents and descents aren't even taught until later in the course? What a total waste of a training dive at best and a dangerous mess at worst.
I can't offer this class at the market price of an OW class and I won't offer an OW class any other way. For me, the only answer is to not offer any class. I don't know of an agency who is behind such a thing (or even seems to understand it) so I have no choice but to have no agency. The "poor training" we see is literally designed right into the standards.
I take part of that back. There is one agency and even though I don't agree with that agency about everything (like the disappearing ink certifications), it's the ONLY agency that I currently feel comfortable recommending to a new diver.
