rstofer
Contributor
I'm not advocating 100 hours/12 diver for everyone, a good base can be had in about 50 hours with 6 dives, half the time.
Works for me! But I'm not satisfied with 6 dives. I don't think 6 supervised dives in cold water leads to guaranteed retention.
The mentoring thing does work. It helps the new diver, it gives the experienced diver a change to get back to basics and reinforce basic skills. And it's fun to watch someone "get it." Often that's a lot more fun than seeing the same thing that you've seen on thousands of dives before. Going diving with a new diver is often like going out with a new set of eyes.
But it puts an awful burden on the 'mentor'. Any failings in the training of the OW diver are now their responsibility. That's fine if the mentor is really qualified - like an instructor. But just an AOW diver or another OW with 50 dives or something like that just doesn't impress me. Maybe someone with 1000 dives. Then again, I'm not impressed by instructors with 100 dives.
You proposed 50 hours, 6 dives for OW. Fine but I would propose 100 hours 21 dives. Get some bottom time! Then dive with a mentor. Or anybody else for that matter.
I just think that, if retention is to be a metric (and I don't agree that it should be) the new diver needs sufficient exposure to really be independent. And I really believe those first 20 dives, or so, need to be with an instructor.
Maybe I'm taking too much on myself, but those do not sound like situations that would bother me much. But one again, you're confusing mentoring with insta-buddies ... not the same thing, though an experienced mentor or instructor can often help even an insta-buddy.
I retain the memories just to remind myself why I never wanted to be a dive professional.
There are people who can better handle these memories. But I can tell you for certain that it is terrifying to surface and find a diver has disappeared. Sure, after we did a search at varying depths and for varying diameters, we discovered she had gone back to shore. But we didn't know it when we surfaced!
Frankly I think that anyone going out on a small boat with any role other than sitting there with a life jacket on should be able to tie a bowline left or right handed, coming and going. Extending that to divers in cold water ... you'd best be able to do it with mitts (or these days for some, dry gloves) on.
Yup! The bowline is the most useful knot on the planet. Of course I do a bit of sailing so I use them all the time. You should also be able to tie one behind your back.
And you should be able to throw a tugboat-bowline while running down the dock. You never know when you might need to toss a line to an errant boater or swimmer.
I won't get into whether or not the line floats and whether the rescue team anchored the bitter end before tossing the line. I will say the class lost $100 worth of line. Not my squad, of course. We just drove over the line and fouled the prop! From a Man Overboard class on SF Bay...
Richard