Written or oral? J/K
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I agree with you on this, who makes anyone the scuba police. All I see is them asking are "Who the #$#% are you?" I think you the OP would be over stepping the line on what people do and regardless if they have formal training. If they didn't have the formal training I don't see what you can do, what are you going to tell PADI on them?
Im not trying to be mean, but who died and made you pope? Let them do what they want and enjoy it. You might make a friend or become the biggest turd on the block if you push them around.
sorry for my misunderstanding, I see why questioning them on topics to see what they have done and learned, I do that to for per-buddy clearance to see if I would want to dive with them and I have refused to dive with people that haven't meet my expectations. I think if they are good divers and are safe I would dive with them regardless if they pass a class since they might know something or know of some real good dive spots.
Ouch! You're testing me! That was ten years ago! :lol: It wasn't much, but . . .
Navigation - Handed us a route on a slate, followed us through it. I cheated though - by the second turn, I noticed there was 'something' that indicated the turn point - a large rock, the corner of a discarded net. I did MUCH better than my hubby. *snicker*
Night dive - briefed the dive plan, demonstrated signals underwater, came up at appropriate time, signaled to boat for accountability.
Deep dive - demonstrate appropriate deeper safety stops, even though we didn't go past NDLs. Narcosis tests at depth. Did buddy breathing and air-share during ascent. Owed margaritas because we came up on the wrong boat.
I think search and recovery was one of the others . .
I've noticed a tendency for instructors/ops to assume that I want the least amount of instruction possible to get a card, and to offer me that thinking I will see it as a plus.
Examples:
1) At the start of AOW, we had some choices on the optional categories (deep and nav are required, then there is a menu of others to choose from). The instructor said "Hey, you've been diving off the boat all week, so you could just sign off on that and have one part done already!" I said "But that would be less learning, and I *want* to learn more." I had to practically insist/re-explain why "knocking that one off" based on already having dived off a boat didn't make sense to me, and seemed like we would be getting less for our money/knowledge.
2) Wanting to learn more about deep/wreck, stopped into a shop to ask about taking those specialty courses (in AOW they are just one-dive samplers, which we had already done). "Sure, we do that" "Great! Can you tell us more about it, what we'll learn, what is included for class time, and etc." "Oh, don't worry, there's no class time; you could do all four dives and have the card in a day!" (We never indicated that we didn't want class time, and/or that minimal cost or time was important to us; in fact, I made sure not to word my query in such a way.)
Based on these examples, it seems that some instructors/shops figure that divers are just looking for cards and are hoping not to "have to" learn very much or have it be at all "hard" or "intellectual."
Blue Sparkle