Your thoughts on our PADI ow cert dives

[supergaijin]

Really? I've done two OW courses and neither of them even remotely touched upon compass use.

To add to the hijack, I see more and more AOW students who have never seen a compass. CMAS 1* doesn't include compass work but PADI OW does as a Standard.

 

[DiveNav]

.......I wanted to share our experience of our cert dives we "completed" here in FL to finish our ow cert.
Would be interesting to hear some experienced divers thoughts.......

Thank you for posting this.

As others indicated already, this is not a "typical" OW class experience ... but, more than once, I witnessed situations less than acceptable.

As an example, a couple of weeks ago I was down at our local swimming hole (aka Pacific Ocean) testing a new product we are working on and noticed an OW class that CLEARLY should not have been there; visibility was less than 10ft and the Ocean was not Pacific at all.
During their exit almost all students got knocked around few times, several of them got dangerously close to the rocks and one of them actually got hurt (slammed against a rock).

Did those OW students pass the class? I don't know ... I was not their instructor.

Did those OW students enjoy their OW class that day? I doubt!

Sometime we should learn to say NO (to the shop, to the students, to our assistants, to ourselves).

Alberto (aka eDiver)

 

[boulderjohn]

Really? I've done two OW courses and neither of them even remotely touched upon compass use.

You should report both of them. Nothing can be done about substandard classes if they are not reported. Every one of those skills is listed clearly on the pages of the student's log book. The student is supposed to check off that the skills were done. If you see a skill listed that you didn't do, you should first insist that it be done during the class, and if it isn't, you should report it.

 

[dfx]

You should report both of them. Nothing can be done about substandard classes if they are not reported. Every one of those skills is listed clearly on the pages of the student's log book. The student is supposed to check off that the skills were done. If you see a skill listed that you didn't do, you should first insist that it be done during the class, and if it isn't, you should report it.

Maybe I should have mentioned that those weren't PADI courses (and one was in Europe)....

 

[boulderjohn]

Maybe I should have mentioned that those weren't PADI courses (and one was in Europe)....

Yes, it probably would have been a good idea to mention it, since the topic of this thread relates to a failure to follow PADI standards during training.

 

[MADiveGirl]

I'm really sorry to hear that your cert dives were conducted so poorly.

It doesn't have to be that way. We had our cert dives at Devil's Den and Blue Grotto. But we were at Devil's Den on a Friday, and we were practically the only people there. We wrote the visibility down as 50ft. (I will, however, agree that the walk down there is a little crazy with all of your gear on. Going back up when you're tired is even more difficult.)

We dove Blue Grotto on a Saturday, and it was crowded. (That's quite a walk down and back up too.) But we never went into the cavern area; the farthest we went was the deep platform and a little bit off of there for the CESA. We put the visibility there at 25ft. And we checked off every single one of the skills. Our instructor told us not to go into the overhead area, and not to go to Peace Rock or the air bell because they're under the ledge. (In fact, he specifically said that was to avoid violating PADI standards.) And the lights were on.

It sounds like you had a bad combination of overcrowding, terrible visibility, and a bad/overwhelmed instructor.

I had a similar experience - BG and DD is where I did my OW checkout dives back in February, and it was a GREAT location and experience. BG was a little busy at times, but nothing that made poor viz or crazy. We did, however, go into the bell (which I thought was cool as hell) and down to peace rock - the surface was clearly visible from both of those locations and I felt fine about both locations. DD had some spaces where I was a little freaked out, but again, I always knew where the "up" was so it was just more of an occasion of me getting used to a very foreign experience.

This is NOT to discount what the OP posted - that sounds .... horrible. And if I would have had an experience like that for my checkout dives, I'm not sure how I'd feel about the activity. I'm thankful that mine was much, much different.