Any particular courses/agenicies that you'll reccomend Mike? say from AOW/equivalent to tech/trimix/wreck?
Lets put agancies aside for now and talk about what I think we should be looking for.
Diving is like almost anything else in that the basics are probably the most important things to learn well. Why? Simply because everything else should be built on top of that. The basics are used on every dive and in all diving tasks.
IMO, the place to start is with an entry level class that provides a really solid foundation in the basics. Lets define that a little better. What is diving? 98% of it is just moving around midwater...or it should be. Controling your position and movement in the water column is
the core skill. Regardless of how all those individual task related skills are introduced, eventually they need to be integrated with controling position and movement in the water column and without that midwater control you haven't done anything and you certainly aren't diving.
What's wrong with "traditional" dive training? They sit you on the bottom and teach you to clear a mask, reg, share air and whatever. Sometime during the class they get you off the bottom for a couple of minutes, and a couple of minutes is all that standards require. Often they never go back and integrate all those individual skills into a diving context and standards don't require it. So now you go to open water and again kneel to do these skills and take a couple of short tours bouncing off the bottom.They teach it all exactly backwards and never go back and finish. They have made kneeling the core skill rather than controling position and movement in the water column.
When the student says to the instructor "I still don't really get this buoyancy control thing" they're told they'll get it with experience or are told to take another class.
ok, your certified. You sign up for an AOW course and go to 60 ft to kneel and do "skills". You might do a S&R dive and kneel to tie knots. Where is the diving? Why go to 60 ft if you can't yet dive well at 10 ft? The AOW class wouldn't be quite so useless IF they had actally taught the basics that the AOW course assumes that you already know and you were actually applying those skills to those new environments. As is, it's just kneeling and sloppy diving in some different environments.
NEVER do they go back and teach what was missed in OW...not in AOW, not in rescue, DM or even instructor courses. The instructors can't teach it because they never learned it. Well, if you take a cave class you will finally have the mechanics and importance of trim explained but not everyone wants to cave dive and this is something that should be explained in the classroom before you every even get in the water.
Where do you find a class that lays down the solid foundation in the basics that I described at the start? I know individual instructors who do but the agencies don't seem to get it. I've heard good things about LA county but that's a little out of the way for the rest of the world. In regards to those basics, I think GUE has the right idea. I've sat in on a couple of their classes and everything I saw was great...but you have the DIR thing and the disappearing ink they use on their c-cards (they expire). I would expect their entry level course (which is up and running according to their website) to be really good. I think all the GUE instructors are also instructors with other agencies so I think an OW class with just about any one of them would be a good option. At least we know that they know the stuff.
For an AOW course, what Bob (NWGratefulDiver ) teaches sounds fantastic but you can't go to an agency for that, you need Bob or another instructor who has developed such a class. I think the folks at PADI (and the other agencies) should take Bobs class and learn how...after they take a good OW class so they see what one of those looks like. I also think the GUE rec triox or scuba diver2 or whatever they're calling it these days is a good option from a skill point of view.
Note here that I don't have any association with GUE and I've never taken any of their classes. I just think they do a really good job of teaching all those basic diving skills. In fact, I'm no longer an instructor with any agency so I don't have a stake in any of them.
What do you do? You can play the game, buy your cards and access (that's what you're really paying for is access) and then go learn to dive on your own like many of us did. You can search for an instructor who "gets it". That's pretty hard for a new person who doesn't know where to look or what to look for. Most divers just buy their cards and they go on just not knowing what it is that they don't know...just take your newly purchased access and go play in the water. I know some people get mad when I say this stuff and some argue but the fact is that we can go to just about any dive site and just watch to see exactly what I'm talking about.
This is getting long so I'm not going to go into any of the tech stuff. In any case, with a good foundation in the basics all that stuff is easy to learn. The only thing that makes it hard is having to go back and learn OW skills at the same time. All this stuff too needs to be built on that foundation in the basics that we should have developed in the entry level course.
