Certifying experience/ability of a diver when booking a dive

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Most boats in UK will accept a booking and do not require sight of or details of certification. Dive centres might be a bit more concerned - some are, some not.

I have yet to see a boat ask for a cert card in the UK. It's diving for adults here. If you book onto a dive, it's accepted that you are qualified and experienced enough to undertake it. There doesn't seem to be a mass amount of inexperienced divers getting into trouble around here, so it works.
 
I don't think any OW/AOW cert card or other documentation is going to accurately show the capabilities of the diver. With very rare exceptions divers with DM and higher level cards are generally competent and safe divers. From my experience, most dive ops check the cert card and the waiver form, specifically looking for number of dives, last dive, and any relevant medical conditions. Rarely (can't remember the last time) have I been asked for a log book. It would appear that if you meet the minimum dive op criteria for the dive, you will be on the boat. How well, or poorly, you do on the first dive may impact on the dive op's willingness to let you do the second dive, or they may elect to shuffle the buddy pairs to somewhat compensate for individual diver strengths and weaknesses. Assuming the same experience level, some divers that have not been in the water for 18 months could be very skilled and competent, whereas someone that dived last week could well be totally incompetent. At its best, running a dive op is a risky business because most of the divers they take on the boat are totally unknown and unproven.
 
The SoCal boats only need you to have a c-card, however when they are chartered you have to go through the group that has the charter.

To get on one trip I spent around 15 minutes with the organizer chatting about my diving experience and training. Although I call it a chat it was a wide ranging scuba test, as well as questions on details of my experience, ending with his reasons why I might want to pass on the dive. I found out during the trip that my buddy and I were two of three non dive professionals on the trip, and were included in the half dozen that haven't been on the trip before.

They're was only other time I had to get certified by an Op to do a dive. I was supposed to do a pool checkout dive but was given the wrong time. I showed up for the boat, discussed the issue, and my recent dive history with the DM, and he decided to do the check out on the dive.

There is no reliable measure of a diver's minimum qualifications.

True, but having a good BS meter in my head has kept me from diving with some real train wrecks. I'd say an experienced dive proffessional could do a better job of evaluation than I can, but that's no objective standard.


Bob
 
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As a general rule I assume anyone with a DM card or higher (including tech certs) is competent to do any dive within recreational limits.

That being said, I'm skeptical of any diver if I don't know them/haven't seen them in the water. Case in point, search YouTube for videos of tech dives...it's amazing how many people gladly post videos of themselves and their buddies that have no buoyancy control, trim etc, and generally look like they shouldn't have passed OW1.
 
True, but having a good BS meter in my head has kept me from diving with some real train wrecks. I'd say an experienced dive professional could do a better job of evaluation than I can, but that's no objective standard.

Bob

This is key. Having a competent gatekeeper with the authority to keep watch to help avoid a potentially deadly situation has saved many people who would have ended up dead otherwise. An underwater lifeguard as it were. The unsung hero of dive boats who's wisdom helps keep the dumbest of us alive. Not useful in the booking and business aspect as it's rare a shop is financially in a good enough situation to be picky about who they allow to dive with them. An exclusive dive operation would have tighter screening.
 
Actually I believe that this could be a textbook example of natural selection at its finest. The only problem being that here the risk of damaging others is significant and that, in the end, there will always be somebody (often instructor/divemaster) that will have to take the responsibility to save the day.

Not as much damage to others as driving a car into a busy pedestrian area, for one example. I think you will agree that a driving test does not prepare one for, say, the highway scene from the final destination 2 either, so all those horrible scenarios that might happen... at some point you just have to come out and say it: s*it happens, people die, others will be blamed.

There is a flip side to it: there's a thread in A&I about an area in Philippines where dive ops apparently will happily take you to places where nobody in their right mind would go without extra training and equipment. What's the flowchart for not booking your dives with an op like that on-line, sight unseen?
 
Let's assume that a diving center accepts booking remotely (through phone, email, internet platforms, homing pidgeons, whispering during sleep...).
Assume that said diving center offers dives which are fairly complex in nature, like wrecks, +30m depths, oxygen enriched and mixes.
How does it ensure that the booking divers are capable?

There's more than one question in there, so there's more than one answer.

For the vast majority of dives, the operator is just going to ask what certifications you have, and insist that you dive within what they perceive to be the limits of your certification. They will not let you dive Nitrox unless you have a Nitrox cert. They will not let you dive beyond the depth "limit" of an open water certification, which varies by agency (60' for PADI, for example). They will also ask when your last dive was, and if it was more than about six months ago, they'll usually limit you to a shallow, supervised dive.

After booking, they'll check and see that you have whatever certifications you said you had at booking time, before you get on the boat.

Now, for dives that are considered recreational, but are at the higher end of the difficulty scale, the dive op is going to employ one of several strategies:
  1. Rather than booking a dive to a specific location, they choose the location with safety limitations of the diver group in mind. So if a whole bunch of divers who they don't know show up one morning, they go on a shallow reef bimble. If it's all people they know and trust, they go to more difficult sites. If it's a mix, they make a judgment call based on conditions at the site, how many customers they have in the water, and how many divemasters or instructors they will have in the water.
  2. They may make it clear that they provide taxi service and safety of the actual dive isn't their problem.
  3. They insist on an initial dive with an instructor or dm so they can assess skill.
  4. They may ask more in-depth questions about dive history.
I don't know what happens for technical dive charters.
 
There's more than one question in there, so there's more than one answer.

For the vast majority of dives, the operator is just going to ask what certifications you have, and insist that you dive within what they perceive to be the limits of your certification. They will not let you dive Nitrox unless you have a Nitrox cert. They will not let you dive beyond the depth "limit" of an open water certification, which varies by agency (60' for PADI, for example).

That really depends on the operator.

Our very first dive after my g/f and I completed OW certification was with an operator down in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. I told them in advance that I was Nitrox certified and wanted Nitrox, but I also told them specifically that my g/f was not Nitrox certified.

Our first very dive with them (which was our first after our OW certification in the local quarry here in VA) was to 85' to see Bull Sharks. That wasn't the dive I booked, but at the last minute they "offered" to "upgrade" us to that dive at no charge, instead of the shallow reef dive I had booked. I'm pretty sure it was simply so that we could go with the DM and one other paying customer that had booked the Bull Shark dive, so the shop could pay just one DM for the day.

Oh, and they gave my g/f and I both Nitrox, without ever checking my card (and after I had told them she wasn't even certified for Nitrox).
 
There's more than one question in there, so there's more than one answer.

For the vast majority of dives, the operator is just going to ask what certifications you have, and insist that you dive within what they perceive to be the limits of your certification. They will not let you dive Nitrox unless you have a Nitrox cert. They will not let you dive beyond the depth "limit" of an open water certification, which varies by agency (60' for PADI, for example). They will also ask when your last dive was, and if it was more than about six months ago, they'll usually limit you to a shallow, supervised dive.

Your statement about dive ops insisting you stay within the "limits" of your certification, or limit you to dive shallow if more than six months since the last dive is clearly not what I have experienced in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Bali, Fiji, French Polynesia, to name only a few. Perhaps they had a more realistic perception of OW limits than other dive ops that you might have experienced, but no dive op I have ever used has given me a max depth of 60'. I personally do not care if I am diving at 40' or 100' as long as what there is to see at 100' is worth the extra air consumption, and if the DM wants to stay at 60' because he/she is leading a bunch of new divers, I am happy to stay at whatever depth is briefed.
 
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