Inadequete Drysuit Course?

[Scared Silly]

You might be surprised - each quarter I get a list of instructors who are suspended, required to retrain (I am DM under PADI). I can not speak to all of this that I am pretty low in the food chain. I will let others who are further up possibly address this.

 

[philmayer]

My LDS threw in the course for free.

Like the other posters have said, a DM isn't allowed to teach that course. Of course, since he didn't teach you anything.............

The 3 skills above are critical. and related too.

Suit squeeze is corrected by adding air to the suit. But with more air in the suit, it's more likely that you're going to get stuck upside down when you thought you were going to be horizontal -- because the air rises and ends up at your feet. You complete a somersault to right yourslef.

I would definitely contact PADI with all of the details!

What region are you in? If you're in the SE, I can put you in touch with their regional director.

 

[asmackofjellyfish]

Thanks to everyone for their replies. I'm going to start calling around to other LDSs tomorrow and confirm that their Drysuit course covers all the important things and probably sign up for the next one. Then I can get back to Diving.

In the end what is important to me is learning how to use my equipment properly so that I can enjoy diving safely. Tomorrow I'm going to call around to some of the other LDSs and clarify what is included in their Drysuit Specialty Courses and sign up for one.

With respect to this Diveshop, I'm pretty much through with them for training, and probably for everything else. I will probably have a rather frank discussion with the owner next week when I go in to pick up some equipment.

Live and Learn.

 

[Upstate Scuba OWI]

I would also let the Better Business Bureau know about it, they have alot on input on actually changing things after a complaint

 

[rakkis]

Make sure you have the Dive Master's full name (and PADI number if possible) as well as the owner and the instructor whose name will be on your card. All three of them broke standards and need to be reported to PADI Quality Assurance. You can send the information as well as the account of what happened to qa@padi.com

 

[tc]

Please don't take the info I'm going to offer up as a substitute for proper training with an experienced instructor, it's not hard to learn the use of a drysuit but there are a few critical skills that must be practiced. In addition to th skills they should have spent time showing you how to maintain the suit- It's a big investment and if proper care is used at can last a long time.

1st critical skill- Stuck inflater. If it sticks you need to disconnect the inflater hose quickly, by feel alone, WITH YOUR NORMAL COLD WATER GLOVES ON! It just takes some practice in the water to get this down. Doing it dry is a bad idea, you need all your gear on and have to be able to get to it by feel alone. If you find that you have trouble getting the inflater hose off of the dry suit connection they make hoses with bigger tabs on the end to make it easier.

As a second part to this drill you need to learn to vent rapidly to get rid of the excess air. If you can't get the air to the exhaust fast enough you need to be able to pinch a wrist seal or the neck seal and pull it away from your skin to arrest a rapid ascent. Not a commonly used procedure but you need to know how to do it.

Buoyancy. As you probably already found out if you are vertical you will feel a squeeze at your feet. When you get horizontal the air distributes around better and the squeeze lessens. Basic principle- Put only enough air in the dry suit to remove squeeze, use the BC for buoyancy control. (Some folks may disagree with this but this is how I've taught it for years and it works) You are able to vent the BC more quickly than the suit so you want to keep as little air in the suit as possible to be comfortable. Second reason is that when you have a lot of air in the suit you can have a big bubble moving around, throws off your balance and if it gets the legs up and inflated you can have a runaway ascent if you don't know how to recover. Which leads right into the trickiest skill of all-

Feet first ascent. This is a bad idea, you probably do not have an exhaust vent at the feet of the suit so if you end up feet up and positively buoyant you are facing a runaway ascent if you do not recover quickly. Ways to avoid this situation include having a suit that fits snugly around the lower legs or using wraps around the lower legs (Gaiters) to reduce the amount of air there. Another method is to use ankle weights- many folks will start screaming as soon as they read this and say that ankle weights are only used to make up for poor skills, etc, etc. I say- if they help you out use them. Now for the fun part, recovering from a feet first ascent. Kick toward the bottom as hard and fast as you possibly can. Kick like your life depended on it! Why? Because it does! A runaway ascent can lead to nasty little things like an arterial gas embolism, something we like to avoid whenever possible. When you are just about to do a face plant in the bottom push out with both arms as hard as you can to get into an upright position and start venting the suit as fast as you can. Until the air moves up the suit you will be fighting to balance on your very buoyant feet. This skill takes a lot of practice but it MUST be mastered. I would not recommend trying this one without supervision, it's pretty tricky at first.

Sorry you had a bad experience, hope this helps a bit. And once again- this is NOT sufficient to replace real training.

Tom

 

[fluffy_the_octopus]

Assuming you took a PADI Specialty Class, look at the back of your card. If the instructor's name who issued the card isn't the person who conducted the class call PADI's Quality Assurance Department (1-800-say-padi). The instructor is required to be present at the dive site and PADI takes standards violations very seriously.

Hope you're enjoying your drysuit!

 

[muddiver]

I like how everybody jumped to the conclution that it was a PADI class. I didn't see it mentioned in the OP, but hey I agrf the posts.

 

[Temple of Doom]

I like how everybody jumped to the conclution that it was a PADI class. I didn't see it mentioned in the OP, but hey I agrf the posts.

Oh, come on muddiver, didn't you notice what happens when you re-arrange the letters in PADI (and turn your head to the side and squint a bit)?

PADI > DEVIL



I actually took the PADI Drysuit Specialty this past weekend. I had a great instructor, had a great experience (blogged about it), and learned a ton. Unfortunately I think the course was way over-priced, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have gone with the mentor-route. Several of my buddies have many hundreds of dry-dives and they could have provided me with the practical help to go along with the knowledge I'd gathered for myself.

If I thought that most of the fee was going towards the instructor, I'd be much happier. But I know that far too much was earmarked for the PADI logo on the cert card and book, plus the mostly useless video (and it was VHS for cripes sake! This is the 3rd Millenium, I had to dust off a VCR!).

As for the animosity shown toward PADI, I think people are better off remembering that PADI is a company, and that they are filling a need in the market. PADI doesn't fill the needs of most ScubaBoarders, but that doesn't make PADI bad.

There are a lot of people out there that want the Master Diver patch on their jacket with chevrons for Boat Diver, Underwater Naturalist, Underwater Photographer, Digital Underwater Photographer, Dive Propulsion Vehicle Diver, Multi-Level Diver, etc, etc, etc...

Good for those people, and good for PADI.

Craig

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I actually took the PADI Drysuit Specialty this past weekend. I had a great instructor, had a great experience (blogged about it), and learned a ton. Unfortunately I think the course was way over-priced, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have gone with the mentor-route. Several of my buddies have many hundreds of dry-dives and they could have provided me with the practical help to go along with the knowledge I'd gathered for myself.

That works great until the day you need to rent a drysuit ... then you'll have trouble finding someone to rent you one unless you produce a card that says you're qualified to use it.

FWIW - I don't have a drysuit card either.

As for the animosity shown toward PADI, I think people are better off remembering that PADI is a company, and that they are filling a need in the market. PADI doesn't fill the needs of most ScubaBoarders, but that doesn't make PADI bad.

I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of ScubaBoarders are PADI certified divers ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)