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.
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Really? I've done two OW courses and neither of them even remotely touched upon compass use.
Thank you for posting this........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.......
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.
Maybe I should have mentioned that those weren't PADI courses (and one was in Europe)....
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.