When to start GUE Fundamental Skills course ?

[Roger Hobden]

I have already done a few dives with a drysuit. If you want to dive in the St-Lawrence river at the level of Les Escoumins, this is mandatory. I earned my "advanced" card doing a deep dive and a night dive at that site.

And diving in the Province of Quebec virtually always requires a wetsuit, so I bought one as soon as I started diving. For me it is a standard equipment like a mask and fins.

 

[barth]

Don't do Fundies unless you're in a drysuit and doubles , you will fall in love with this type of training and it will open many doors to your diving future. Start right finish right.

When I did fundamentals I was already diving doubles and a drysuit. I was already doing dives which required doubles and drysuit.

But if you don’t need a drysuit and don’t need doubles the course is not a good reason to start diving drysuit and doubles.

Diving is about having fun. I think the reason to do fundamentals should be improving skills and have more fun underwater.

When my skills are better and awareness are better it would be easier to make better photos.

A lot of people get obsessed and forget why they are diving. They spent a lot of time training skills and buying gear. Some will do tech 1 and a couple of years later they find a new hobby. They did forget why they where diving.

I have been there. When I got a provisional for cave 1. I did drive to France after a lot of training. It was no fun anymore. And guess what? Again I it was not good enough. Because I did only training dives and no real dives my awareness wasn’t better then when I did cave 1...

Fundamentals is about trim and buoyancy and team awareness. If these things are good it would be easy to learn how to do a valve drill when diving doubles. There are even people doing tech 1 in a wetsuit.

It would take a bit more time to get a tech pass when you did receive a rec pass. But doing a tech/cave diving course can also result in a fail/provisional. When you really want to do cave/tech diving it doesn’t matter if it take more time to pass.

 

[Lorenzoid]

I have already done a few dives with a drysuit. If you want dive in the St-Lawrence river at the level of Les Escoumins, this is mandatory. I earned my "advanced" card doing a deep dive and a night dive at that site.

And diving in the Province of Quebec virtually always requires a wetsuit, so I bought one as soon as I started diving. For me it is a standard equipment like a mask and fins.

No reason you couldn't do Fundies in a drysuit with a single tank. But I think the bottom line here is to talk to a GUE instructor before doing anything else and see what advice he or she may have.

 

[KevinNM]

Even the newest GUE instructor has a rediculous number of dives, and not ow training kind of dives. You should talk to one before buying gear for the class, they will be able to help you out with deciding what to get or maybe rentals if you want to try first.

I took it in a wetsuit and yoke single tank, I was planning on doing it in my dry suit but I cleverly created a leak that took a week to find preping for the first dive, so did the second and subsequent day wet.