Is this safe training practice?

[mart1]

Would you expect a Student on their second Open Water (non confined) dive in the UK with less than 1 meters viz and with water temperature of 14 degrees to take their mask off at 16 meters in depth?

Not if this is a PADI Open Water course, since it is against the standards to:
a) go deeper than 12 meters on the secons dive
b) practise mask removal on the second dive
Has nothing to do with temp or viz, just not allowed!

maarten

 

[peter_dorset]

The site was Vobster. Same water temp as Stoney.

 

[dbulmer]

WeDiveBC,

Having just gone past the 100 dive mark I'm going to just say 2 things
a) I won't argue with someone who's probably forgotten more about diving than I've learned and at 100 dives I'm still getting to grips with basic diving skills

b) Even the best divers didn't get to be good without a ton of practice - in the case above I still think that, maybe, just, maybe 6metres with an instructor insisting on neutral buoyancy in a horizontal plane is more beneficial than perhaps 16m taking your mask off at the bottom on your knees and I'm speculating.

 

[jeff99]

I am a pretty inexperienced diver, but I have no trouble at all taking off and refitting my mask - wouldn't think twice about it now. When I did it at 7m in the OW class, which was just a few dives ago really, it was a really big thing. Had I panicked and gone runaway at 16m I could have seriously hurt myself. The second time I tried it it wasn't such a big thing at all, mainly because I understood that having done it once, I could do it again as I knew what to expect. It is, I think, for most trainees a very stressful thing to have to do first time, and as such should be treated a bit more cautiously than seems to have happened in this particular instance. Sure, once you are qualified OW you can dive to 18m and as such you should be able to do all the things you learnt in OW at that depth, but not the first time, surely - it's like expecting a learner driver to be able to drive at 70mph on the motorway in the morning rush hour on their second lesson.

Jeff

 

[wedivebc]

Even the best divers didn't get to be good without a ton of practice - in the case above I still think that, maybe, just, maybe 6metres with an instructor insisting on neutral buoyancy in a horizontal plane is more beneficial than perhaps 16m taking your mask off at the bottom on your knees and I'm speculating.

I don't disagree with you. First of all I wasn't thinking metricly and as mart1 pointed out it is actually a violation of PADI standards to go below 12 metres on dive 2 of an OW. The point I was hoping to make was if a skill has perceived danger to the student where none really exists then making the skill easier will not make the student more prepared for real-life diving. Allowing the student to perform the skill under controlled condition will.
I realize this is recreational and not military diving we are talking about, I just see more and more instructors making the challenges easier to ensure everyone succeeds in their training. I don't think we are doing anyone any favours.