speciality courses

[Doc73]

"Experience should be gained prior to teaching. Experience in teaching should be gained *teaching*" perhaps?

This experience thing is something that I think should be addressed by diving organizations on all instructor levels. Much more diving should be required before becoming a OWSI. The requirements to become a dry-suit, ice or other basic spec instructor are ridiculous. You send in a paper (or now on-line too) stating you have done 20 dives in that area of diving and bang you are now an instructor for that specialty. If you are dishonest you might not even have those dives done, nobody seems to check. They also don't require you to be diver certified on most of them.
In this light, it's quite absurd that a diver with say 500 dives with a dry-suit is not allowed in the water because he/she doesn't have a c-card for drysuit. I had to fight for a very long time to get double tanks in the redsea, they were insisting on a tec-card, even though the dive planned was not deco (just very long), I had log-proof of about 600 double tank dives. :realmad:
The way this industry goes, I would not be amazed to find myself forced to do all the specialty courses again on the Meg. CCR night, CCR wreck, CCR drysuit, CCR photo... :razz:

J

 

[Peter L]

Turn the coin over for a second and look at it from the view of someone who is comparatively new to it all but wanting a bit of progression as all of these incident reports keep saying 'diving outside of skills'.....

Every time I approach a trainer the conversation flips away from 'what are you hoping to achieve' to these are the courses I am running and by the way, don't mind if it doesn't suit your aspirations or respect your needs or timing or the fact that you're going to take large swags of time off work because I only want to train on weekdays. Great for you, run your business however you want, don't be surprised if I am not there to support you.

Frankly from the outside looking in the entire system is broken, the motives of the agencies are by majority suspect and people asking questions on threads like these are clear symptom that trust has been lost. I want skill progression not stupid tickets.

 

[w ripley]

I have to confess my opinion on this topic has shifted more than once over the last 20+ years. Today my concern is not over which courses are taught, but over what cards are required?

Most probably agree there is a need for basic OW certification, trimix, cave, etc., you know "the basics." It's all of those in-betweens that cloud the issue. If you dive trimix, you should have enough sense to dive a RB with it no matter how deep you want to go. If you dive caves, you should have enough sense to dive a RB in one. I hope you get my drift.

However, there are some "other" cards that I see value in, although I don't see a universal trend by operators to require them (yet).

Take the self-sufficient RB diver (solo) card. It's a piece of trash, IMO, but I can understand why some places now require it. If I were running a dive boat and a unknown showed up to dive solo I can understand why evidence that he can solo dive would be important. I have one (local quarry required it) and I end up showing it a lot more than I thought I would.

Take the Cave DPV card. If for no other reason than to demonstrate how a DPV can tear up a cave, I can see value. I have one (Ginnie requires it, although it's easy to slip in without one).

I can't fault the dive industry for trying to make a living. Teaching more courses and issuing more cards is one way to do that. (I still remember how proud I was when I received my AOW card.) It's when the industry starts believing its own propaganda and then hiring inexperienced people to supervise its dive boats or dive sites that everything goes to the dogs.

Sooner or later the decision drops on the desk of a CEO, for example, who doesn't dive but reads the insurance policy covering the activity. Without the nod from the dive industry (that means a card), that CEO's hands are tied and we divers are the ones that suffer.

It's a tough balancing act. Cards tend to add weight to our side of the scales.

 

[jturner]

This experience thing is something that I think should be addressed by diving organizations on all instructor levels. Much more diving should be required before becoming a OWSI. The requirements to become a dry-suit, ice or other basic spec instructor are ridiculous. You send in a paper (or now on-line too) stating you have done 20 dives in that area of diving and bang you are now an instructor for that specialty. If you are dishonest you might not even have those dives done, nobody seems to check. They also don't require you to be diver certified on most of them.
In this light, it's quite absurd that a diver with say 500 dives with a dry-suit is not allowed in the water because he/she doesn't have a c-card for drysuit. I had to fight for a very long time to get double tanks in the redsea, they were insisting on a tec-card, even though the dive planned was not deco (just very long), I had log-proof of about 600 double tank dives. :realmad:
The way this industry goes, I would not be amazed to find myself forced to do all the specialty courses again on the Meg. CCR night, CCR wreck, CCR drysuit, CCR photo... :razz:

J

Definately agree on the first point re OWSI as an example. Regarding the 2nd, as another example, the chap who runs the LDS I work with recently had a muppetry moment and arrived on site for a day's teaching having left his drysuit thermals somewhere... luckily, the site is a Fourth Element test centre so you can borrow their thermals and try them out for a small fee. Despite him being well known to the site due to having bookings for the school (which has taught there for as long as I've been involved with it) and having just brought a van and shed load of students on site to teach with a staff of about a dozen, they wouldn't loan him the thermals without him showing the Dry Suit cert card! Apparently, they weren't joking about it either! :disappoin