Although a majority of our courses are overhead and technical related – cavern, cave, advanced nitrox, etc – we do teach open water courses on a somewhat regular basis. We’ve taught a couple of open water courses this year and have another starting this week. What brings up this subject today is a particular discussion on one of the Internet forums.

A particular instructor has posted in an instructors only section of the forum that an open water course with 6 student go by the following schedule – 3 hours classroom, 6 hours pool/confined water, and 8 hour at the quarry. He claims he is able to teach everything that needs to be taught and produce 6 competent divers who have been able to master the 20 skills required of an open water diver. When I stated I give my students about twice the amount of instruction time, he retorted by saying I was too slow and stupid to be able to get the information across faster. I don’t feel he deserves a response to that. But I do feel our students, current and prospective, do deserve to know why we teach our courses the way we do.

There is a lot of information to learn in the basic open water course. This is the foundation for all other diving courses. At the completion of this course, my name is going on a diver’s card stating I feel that diver has completed all of the requirements necessary to go dive to a depth of 60 feet without my supervision. Our classroom time does take about 5-6 hours. There are 5-6 sections in the open water student manual, depending on the agency. The subjects that are covered are physics, physiology, environment, equipment, dive planning, and many more. Each section also has a quiz which must be reviewed and there is a final exam consisting of 35-50 questions. Finally, we show a couple of videos directly related to the environment we teach and dive in to our students. We believe everything we do in the classroom is absolutely necessary to produce safe divers.

As for the confined water sessions, 6 hours simply is not enough. Each course must start out with a watermanship skills evaluation. Students must swim 200 yards and tread water for 10 minutes. This takes a minimum of 45 minutes to conduct (we let our students rest between skills). We then spend about an hour or two teaching our students how to snorkel and breath hold dive. While a snorkeling course is not a requirement during an open water course, we have found that teaching students how to breathe out of a snorkel, clear their snorkels and masks of water, and equalize their ears during a breath hold dive helps students master the open water scuba diving skills much easier. Once all of this is completed, we begin the confined water sessions. There are 4-5 (agency dependent). We could just teach the skills, have the students repeat them a couple of times and move on. We don’t do that, though. After teaching our students the skills, we spend a majority of the time swimming around the basin and drilling the students over and over so they do have the opportunity to master each of the skills. We also feel that by having our students perform the skills midwater while swimming makes them better divers than having them perform them while kneeling on the bottom. I think you can see why this takes 10-12 hours to complete.

Finally, we head out to our open water sites and conduct the four open water dives. We have our students plan the dives, using proper air management rules. We get in the water and we begin our dive. During the dive, while swimming around, we have the students perform the skills they were taught during the confined water sessions. We stay underwater until the student has reached the planned ascent air pressure. This could be over an hour if someone has a good consumption rate. However, many instructors will spend the minimum 20 minutes on a dive with a majority of it kneeling on the bottom in a semi-circle to perform the skills. During our surface intervals, we also talk to our students about other courses they could take after the open water course. We explain all the possibilities to them. We talk about the dangers of cavern and cave diving without the proper training. We talk about the places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen. After all, diving is a social activity!

So, you let us know. Which format would you rather have? We’re not about to change our format, but if you would rather have the 17 hour course, we know where we can refer you…

I was recently asked a question about why I showed one of my students a modification that isn’t normally done in backmount. This question came up as a result of a discussion on one of the Internet forums. Here is a slightly modified ( ;-D ) version of my response:

I received an e-mail asking about the reason I have my inflator and dump valve swapped and why I showed one of my students that modification. As my students has already stated, his intention is to transition to sidemount eventually. One of the common modifications in sidemount rigs is swapping the inflator and dump. There are a few reasons for this. In the standard wing, the butt dump is located on what is the underside of the wing when it is mounted properly. Air rises, so when dumping air from here it is necessary to change from a horizontal position to a head down position so the air bubble can rise to the bottom of the wing and release from the exhaust. This change in position isn’t always possible when diving some sidemount passages. Also, with the inflator hose on the top of the wing, the only way to get all of the air out of the wing, short of inverting and using the butt dump, is to go into a head up position and raise the inflator hose up. It’s physics. Also, in a sidemount rig if the inflator hose is on top, the elbow is exposed and unprotected and subject to damage.

Okay, so with that aside, I also had a student in the course that was in sidemount configuration. When looking over his rig I spoke with him about the two different ways of configuring the inflator and dump valve. I explained to both students the advantages and disadvantages of both and gave them the option of configuring their rigs either way. One thing I never do in my courses is tell my students how they must configure their gear, unless it’s a safety issue! I let them know all the different ways I have seen rigs configured and allow them to make the choice.

One of the more important things about overhead diving, both real and virtual overhead, is to build up muscle memory. It’s absolutely necessary that divers know where the inflator is, the dump valve, d-rings, cutting tools, etc. I started my cave and tech instructor internships about a year after having gone to sidemount. I hadn’t been in my backmount rig in over a year and one of the issues I found I had was reaching for the inflator and dump without thinking about it. They were both in different locations on my backmount wing and I found myself constantly going to the locations where my sidemount inflator and dump are. I teach students in backmount and sidemount. I also feel it’s a disservice to my students if I don’t demonstrate skills, such as valve drills, in the configuration they are in. So I dive in backmount when I have students in backmount. Somewhere along the line I decided to mount a set of manifolded doubles to my sidemount rig. This left the inflator and dump in the same locations as I’m used to and reinforced the muscle memory I have built up over the years. I also found that dumping from the top was much easier , even in backmount! Because the dump valve is on the back of the wing (or the top when it’s on), there is no need to change orientation in the water. There’s no need to go head down or head up. Just reach up and dump. The air, as per the law of physics, exhausts up like it’s supposed to. Because my student is intending on eventually diving sidemount (before he takes a cavern course), it also made sense to start building that muscle memory now in his current rig. While the inflator and dump may be in slightly different locations, they will be close enough that the transition should be fairly easy. I presented him with the information and he made the decision. While I see some benefit to some of the DIR philosophies, I don’t agree that everything needs to be one way. I believe doing what works for one’s own diving is the way it should be, as long as safety is not compromised.

And as for technical v. recreational courses… According to many agencies, cavern and intro/basic cave are recreational, but so are cave and advanced nitrox and decompression procedures. IANTD even considers Advanced Recreational Trimix as a recreational sport diver course (max depth of 160′). The technical courses begin with Technical or Extended Range Diver (max depth of 180′) and continue with normoxic trimix and above. While some may disagree, the skills learned in ITT are an excellent foundation for cavern. The cavern diving course involves a lot of task loading. There is a lot of line running and doing multiple skills at the same time. Rather than learning to multitask in an overhead environment, it’s beneficial to learn how to maintain neutral buoyancy and horizontal trim while task loading prior to that. This is where ITT comes into play.