When are we gonna learn?

[boulderjohn]

A quick look at the PADI website tells me I can complete "Rescue Diver" with no open water dives as well,

I think you need to work on your reading comprehension.

 

[boulderjohn]

Many years ago someone wrote up a list of cert cards you could collect without a single open water dive under your belt. I want to say you could enter PADI's DM program without any, but I wouldn't swear that is true. I'm almost certain you can get an AOW ticket without any.

Neither of the above is true.

Evidently, one of them is.

And which would that be?

In order to start AOW, you need to have OW, which requires 4 OW dives. In order to complete OW, you need to do 5 OW dives. You must therefore have 9 OW dives under your best to get AOW. That is not a lot, but it is not zero.

In order to start DM, you have to have 40 logged dives; in order to finish it, you need to have 60.

Neither qualifies as a "cert card you could collect without a single open water dive under your belt."

 

[Kharon]

You can get an AOW without having done any dives outside of the class checkout dives ... but those are open water dives. To get to AOW you will need to have done a minimum of four dives in your OW class, and five dives in your AOW class.

That is pure and supreme nonsense. AOW with nothing more than course dives makes the cert worthless - perhaps not to dive shops/operaters - but certainly in actuality. BFD - open water dives. So what. Diving for a course with an instructor (with a vested interest in your passing) - give me a break.

 

[Kharon]

I had an excellent instructor. When we were done with the class, he said "So now you're certified. Go learn to dive."

+1, +10, +100, +1000 - more!!!

 

[dumpsterDiver]

That is pure and supreme nonsense. AOW with nothing more than course dives makes the cert worthless - perhaps not to dive shops/operaters - but certainly in actuality. BFD - open water dives. So what. Diving for a course with an instructor (with a vested interest in your passing) - give me a break.

I really disagree with you on that. I think the AOW course is very useful and can be a huge help to students, especially when you consider how short the Open water class is. The early dives conducted by a diver are very dangerous (relative to later ones) and doing them with an instructor makes a lot of sense.

We probably both agree that the label "advanced" is a misnomer, but the reality of the matter is more training dives is better .. better than none anyway.

 

[Centrals]

That is pure and supreme nonsense. AOW with nothing more than course dives makes the cert worthless - perhaps not to dive shops/operaters - but certainly in actuality. BFD - open water dives. So what. Diving for a course with an instructor (with a vested interest in your passing) - give me a break.

I have seen plenty of divers combined OW with AOW as one continuous course and finished in less than a wk.

 

[Kharon]

I have seen plenty of divers combined OW with AOW as one continuous course and finished in less than a wk.

That's just plain sad.

 

[Dan]

I have seen plenty of divers combined OW with AOW as one continuous course and finished in less than a wk.

It's amazing to see people find ways to hurt themselves.

I took my AOW after 9 years of diving, logging 400 dives. I didn't see any need to get the AOWC for my warm water recreational dive activities. The reason I took it was as a refresher & for satisfying requirement imposed by some dive operators to have AOWC to dive in certain dive sites.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Absolutely. The time that person spends in the water after certification is the single best education they will receive.

I had an excellent instructor. When we were done with the class, he said "So now you're certified. Go learn to dive."

I taught scuba for a dozen years, and I used to tell my students ... particularly OW students ... that a class doesn't teach you how to dive, it teaches you how to learn diving. The actual learning comes from repetition, and that takes real-world dives. Classes are an artificial environment, stripped of the nuances, circumstances and situations you can find in real-world diving. They teach you "skills" in a serial fashion ... do this, now do this, now do that ... usually with some advance notice of what to expect. Real diving often puts you in a situation where you draw on those "skills" in response to something happening that you didn't expect or plan to have happen. Task-loading isn't generally taught at the OW or AOW level ... in fact, it's avoided. But in real-world diving, task-loading is typically how you will have to deploy the very "skills" you were introduced to in OW or AOW classes. You often won't have the option of planning in advance for when those "skills" are needed, or of kneeling on the bottom to deploy them ... circumstances will dictate that you perform them on the fly, while managing your buoyancy control, awareness, and other "skills" you had to perform serially during your class.

In this respect, yes ... I agree with your point. But those checkout dives you perform in your OW and AOW class are still open water dives. The question isn't whether or not you do open water dives, but whether or not those dives prepare you adequately to go dive on your own once class is over.

In a well-taught class, you will have at some point been task loaded. Many of my students came to me without the ability to do simple things like look at a compass or clear a mask without first settling to the bottom on their knees ... because that's all they'd ever been asked to do. Take the bottom away from them and they lose the ability to perform those "skills". They had to be retrained to do those things while managing their buoyancy, or maintaining visual contact with their buddy. In the AOW class I taught, task loading was emphasized during all of the checkout dives. The final dive of the class was done completely mid-water ... at a depth of 20 feet. The bottom may have been 20 or more feet below you, and with the vis we typically get in Puget Sound you will not be able to see anything but your dive buddy. So you operate without the usual visual cues that divers come to depend on. That dive required the dive buddies to navigate a succession of patterns while holding their depth constant. One buddy was given the compass, the other the depth gauge/bottom timer. Doing the dive successfully required them to work together. That meant paying attention to positioning, awareness, and communication while performing the task of navigating a pattern. The purpose wasn't navigation at all ... while important, it's not a critical skill. Maintaining buoyancy control, positioning, and awareness are ... because those are skills that you will depend on in the real world. But more important, learning how to utilize multiple "skills" to manage a problem is the critical lesson ... the one that will lead to a more successful outcome when faced with the unexpected on a real dive.

And to your point, what's missing from most OW/AOW classes isn't open water dives ... it's exposure during those dives to conditions that you're likely to encounter once class is over and you're out diving on your own. Critical skills aren't learned, much less "mastered" until you can perform them under the real-world conditions ... and those are usually removed from the environment in which the OW/AOW student is exposed during their checkout dives.

It is this aspect of training that, I believe, so often produces emergent divers who are ill-prepared to deal with real-world diving once their classes are over ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

That is pure and supreme nonsense. AOW with nothing more than course dives makes the cert worthless - perhaps not to dive shops/operaters - but certainly in actuality. BFD - open water dives. So what. Diving for a course with an instructor (with a vested interest in your passing) - give me a break.

... it depends on the instructor, and the course offering. I'd be willing to bet that I could run you through the AOW class I used to teach and you would ... even at your current experience level ... learn something from the dives. It'd still be the same AOW class, and still within the standards set by my certifying agency ... but a good instructor can challenge you to learn at any level. The key is that they must possess both the ability to recognize where you can improve and the innovation to come up with ways to challenge you to identify your weaknesses and learn from them. You don't have to be a super instructor to do that ... any instructor worthy of the name could do it if they chose to make it the priority. My students came out of AOW well prepared for diving on their own in some pretty challenging conditions. But then, my vested interest wasn't in passing them ... but in preparing them for the dives they're likely to encounter here in Puget Sound once the class is over. And if after the standard six dives I didn't feel they were prepared, they wouldn't be passing the class until I was satisfied they were. It wasn't uncommon to schedule additional dives, or to tell them to go diving with their friends and practice certain skills and come back later for another checkout dive to evaluate those skills.

I do get tired of the rhetoric about how useless classes are ... it's a broad generalization that's true in some cases and less true in others. The classes are as useless as you decide to make them ... and that's as true of the students as it is the instructor. I've had to, on some occasions, recommend to some students that they'd be happier taking the class with a different instructor, because it became evident to me they were there for a card, and not the education I would require in order for them to get it. I don't want that kind of student in my class.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)