- Messages
- 5,884
- Reaction score
- 2,997
- Location
- Lake Worth, Florida, United States
- # of dives
- I'm a Fish!
Groupon has apparently begun churning many hundreds of students throught the price mill, ensuring that the actual classes are huge, AND that the experiences and training level they receive is about as low as a student could ever get.
Hundreds have been herded to the Blue Heron Bridge Marine Park over the last 2 months, where the lack of boat costs or pool costs is appealing to the Groupon mentality.
The fact that these students really need actual pool time, does not appear to matter.
The fact that they are not able to learn bouyancy skills in such large uncontrolled groups, does not seem to matter.
The fact that the hundreds of students are being essentially bussed in to a delicate marine nursery ground, where they proceed to silt every square inch of the underwater park they are able to swim over ( or crawl, pogo, or drag themselves over) does not seem to bother the Groupon people.
Take a look at a small group typical of the Groupon invasion of dangerously undertaught students: YouTube - ‪silting-instruction‬‏ and for a look at student typical when a horrific lack of teaching takes place, watch this 20 second video showing a guy who does not have a clue about how to swim, yet he is out kicking the heck out of the bottom where all the nudibranch, frogfish, and other rare species are found. YouTube - ‪Diver with skills that split fins were created for...If you swim like this, GET HELP!‬‏ .
As a local, I see this as a wrongdoing being committed by the worst form of advertising practice...they are collecting people in mass who care about nothing but the lowest prices, and then proceed to jam them into classes which will ensure that they will never become good divers ( unless they take a real class afterward) and which will ensure that serious damage will occur to a marine resource like the BHB marine park.
Photographers come here from all over the world now, but on weekends, they really can't use the BHB park---so many groupon students that it feels like a mad house in the maelstrom of students thrashing around everywhere around you, and the visibility goes from clear as air, to less than 8 feet within a few minutes of the entrance of the student hordes.
What is the effect on the delicate marine life in the park? While the life at BHB is oriented to tidal flow, and of course can tolerate some silting, this is still a stress. Each organism here can tolerate conditions in the estuary that most species in the open ocean would be at a greater disadvantage at--would be more highly stressed. However, as this manmade silting is exponentially worse than that from tidal flows, it is a stress level that is going to overstress some of these rare species....it is just bad for the ecology here for us to have huge hordes of students exploding silt bbombs all over the BHB.
My desire is that this issue gets alot of divers discussing it, and how Groupon should be given status of Pariah, in the area of dive instruction and marketing for it....I also think the dive shops that agree to take the groupon students need to seriously re-think their choices, and quickly remove groupon from future use.
Hundreds have been herded to the Blue Heron Bridge Marine Park over the last 2 months, where the lack of boat costs or pool costs is appealing to the Groupon mentality.
The fact that these students really need actual pool time, does not appear to matter.
The fact that they are not able to learn bouyancy skills in such large uncontrolled groups, does not seem to matter.
The fact that the hundreds of students are being essentially bussed in to a delicate marine nursery ground, where they proceed to silt every square inch of the underwater park they are able to swim over ( or crawl, pogo, or drag themselves over) does not seem to bother the Groupon people.
Take a look at a small group typical of the Groupon invasion of dangerously undertaught students: YouTube - ‪silting-instruction‬‏ and for a look at student typical when a horrific lack of teaching takes place, watch this 20 second video showing a guy who does not have a clue about how to swim, yet he is out kicking the heck out of the bottom where all the nudibranch, frogfish, and other rare species are found. YouTube - ‪Diver with skills that split fins were created for...If you swim like this, GET HELP!‬‏ .
As a local, I see this as a wrongdoing being committed by the worst form of advertising practice...they are collecting people in mass who care about nothing but the lowest prices, and then proceed to jam them into classes which will ensure that they will never become good divers ( unless they take a real class afterward) and which will ensure that serious damage will occur to a marine resource like the BHB marine park.
Photographers come here from all over the world now, but on weekends, they really can't use the BHB park---so many groupon students that it feels like a mad house in the maelstrom of students thrashing around everywhere around you, and the visibility goes from clear as air, to less than 8 feet within a few minutes of the entrance of the student hordes.
What is the effect on the delicate marine life in the park? While the life at BHB is oriented to tidal flow, and of course can tolerate some silting, this is still a stress. Each organism here can tolerate conditions in the estuary that most species in the open ocean would be at a greater disadvantage at--would be more highly stressed. However, as this manmade silting is exponentially worse than that from tidal flows, it is a stress level that is going to overstress some of these rare species....it is just bad for the ecology here for us to have huge hordes of students exploding silt bbombs all over the BHB.
My desire is that this issue gets alot of divers discussing it, and how Groupon should be given status of Pariah, in the area of dive instruction and marketing for it....I also think the dive shops that agree to take the groupon students need to seriously re-think their choices, and quickly remove groupon from future use.
