Which Agency?

[Rupert Vidion]

Hi,

I hope that this won't turn into a "My agency is better than yours" thread, but....

I've done my recreational diver training (OW, AOW, Nitrox, Rescue, etc.) with PADI and I am now looking to move on to technical training. As PADI doesn't really do tech I need to find a new agency.

Can anyone give me some pointers;
Which ones are wreck orientated and which ones are cave orientated. What are the lead up times and availability of their courses. How do safety records compare. Who favours rebreathers. Does anyone have a particularly good reputation or a particularly bad one. Etc..

Cheers,

Rupert

 

[Doppler]

Hi,

I hope that this won't turn into a "My agency is better than yours" thread, but....

I've done my recreational diver training (OW, AOW, Nitrox, Rescue, etc.) with PADI and I am now looking to move on to technical training. As PADI doesn't really do tech I need to find a new agency.

Can anyone give me some pointers;
Which ones are wreck orientated and which ones are cave orientated. What are the lead up times and availability of their courses. How do safety records compare. Who favours rebreathers. Does anyone have a particularly good reputation or a particularly bad one. Etc..

Cheers,

Rupert

Hi Rupert: TDI (Technical Diving International) has a full curriculum including cave, advanced wreck, closed-circuit rebreathers and so on. We've been in the game since 94 (when a small group broke away from IANTD), and we are the largest tech agency in the world... not that in the sceme of things that meaans much. We have instructors around the world including NZ and if you send me an email with your location (work is steve.lewis@tdisdi.com yes, I actually work for TDI so full disclosure I am biased), I'll send you some contacts. Best thing you can do right now is talk to people doing the sort of diving you want to do and work from there.

If travel is doable, our regional director in Australia is a good friend and a very active technical diver who also happens to be a Kiwi... so who knows, you might get along!

There really are several good agencies in the tech area. They all provide the sort of training you are looking for. The safety records of all are extremely good. There are cowboy instructors out there and if your bull**** radar goes off when you're talking to someone, chances are good that you've found one.

NACD and NSS-CDS both focus on teaching cave specifically and are both based in North Florida (some excellent caves there). Many of their instructors also teach for us.

Anyhow, you might find the article at the end of this link useful.

A student?s guide to a technical diving course Doppler’s Tech Diving Blog

 

[Standingbear56]

Hi,

I hope that this won't turn into a "My agency is better than yours" thread, but....

I've done my recreational diver training (OW, AOW, Nitrox, Rescue, etc.) with PADI and I am now looking to move on to technical training. As PADI doesn't really do tech I need to find a new agency.

Can anyone give me some pointers;
Which ones are wreck orientated and which ones are cave orientated. What are the lead up times and availability of their courses. How do safety records compare. Who favours rebreathers. Does anyone have a particularly good reputation or a particularly bad one. Etc..

Cheers,

Rupert

Hi Rupert,
Actually PADI does do Tec under it's DSAT division. This is just an FYI.

 

[rescue15]

OK, here is the my agency is beter than yours...

I have had classes in both SDI and PADI. My PADI ranges from OW to Rescue with several specialties. I have recently discovered SDI/TDI and there is a world of difference. Maybe it's the instructors, I don't know but I feel my dive training started 10 years after I started diving.

I would go with SDI/TDI

Steve

 

[Rupert Vidion]

Hi Standingbear56,

I know technically (no pun intended, honest) PADI has DSAT (all their blended gas tables come from DSAT) but they don't appear to have much of a presence outside of North America.

Cheers anyway,

Rupert

P.S. Thanks Doppler will e-mail you.

 

[eponym]

Rupert,

I took TDI's advanced nitrox and decompression procedures courses (the two are very often combined) a year ago and I can't speak highly enough about the content and the challenges. No coddling, no hand-holding, rigorous standards and some washouts. Exams were essay-style and required some real thought and application. It was not at all like most recreational courses.

I should add, though, that I chose to learn from someone I had dived with before and whom I consider a friend, in a town with some of my favorite wrecks. As has been said a thousand times here, it's the instructor that makes a course great.

Check 'em out here. Trimix, Cave, Wreck, Rebreather, . . .

-Bryan

 

[Rhone Man]

I know technically (no pun intended, honest) PADI has DSAT (all their blended gas tables come from DSAT) but they don't appear to have much of a presence outside of North America.

PADI/DSAT has a decent presence in the UK - at least as big as TDI and much more visible than IANTD. Personally I think the DSAT courses sound too rigid and inflexible, and frankly a little bit too conservative (they limit deep air at 150 fsw and trimix at 240, compared with 180 and 330 for TDI).

The DIR divers will be here to tell us about GUE shortly, I'm sure.

 

[Rupert Vidion]

Thanks Rhone Man.

Can you give me any more advice r.e. TDI versus IANTD versus DSAT versus DIR? What are their training programs like? Would my previous certificates from PADI (Nitrox/Rescue/Wreck/Deep/Search and Recovery) count toward anything?

Work is sending me to Europe for 6 weeks in late July so I may have other options we don't have in New Zealand.

Cheers,

Rupert

 

[Rhone Man]

I am a long, long way from being an expert, but here is my two PSI.

- The oldest mainstream tec diver training agency is IANTD (although there are still some smaller ones around that are even older). IANTD open circuit tec courses follow the following basic progression: Nitrox, Advanced Nitrox, Deco Procedures, Extended Range (Deep Air), Basic Trimix, Trimix. They also have overhead environment courses (cave, wreck) and rebreather courses, as well as others. Frankly, they have a lot of courses.

- About 15 years back, TDI was formed by a group who split off from IANTD. TDI outgrew them and are now the largest tec diver training agency in the world. TDI follows the same basic open circuit progression with slightly different names, and they too have overhead environment courses. TDI and IANTD are the main two tec diver training agencies today. I found TDI to be much more professionally organised.

- PADI/DSAT appear to have been late comers to the scene, PADI having previously always insisted it would not get into tec diver training. DSAT offers a much more basic open circuit structure, and no overhead environment courses. There are basically three courses: Intro to tec, Tec Deep (deep air) and Tec Trimix. As mentioned above, PADI has much greater prerequisites to start their courses, and then only regards them as certifying you to go about 75% as deep.

- Incidentally, lots of other recreational diving agencies (NAUI, SSI) also have tec diving arms.

- GUE are a bit different. People either love them or hate them. They promote a "holistic" form of diving, that focus greatly on core skills, and equipment configurations. As such they have many more courses, which tend to be longer and more expensive (and, so the rumour goes, they invariably fail people first time, so you end up repeating courses). I am pretty negative on the GUE/DIR thing, so I will keep my thoughts to myself on that score otherwise this thread gets hijacked for sure. They are certainly quite different from the others, but everyone seems to agree that their training is excellent and that they produce first rate divers. They are certainly much smaller.

Everyone tells you, the main importance is choosing an instructor and not an agency. I didn't find that helpful because there were no tec instructors where I came from, so it was a leap of faith. Eventually I went with TDI and have no regrets.

 

[Rhone Man]

This slightly old poll may be of interest:

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/te...53081-tec-training-agency-ies-do-you-use.html