Open Water course

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...

Please visit our website - Chipola Divers

Intro to Tech

Having just finished teaching an Intro to Tech course over the past couple of days and having another one scheduled at the end of the coming week, it seems appropriate to write about it a little. What's interesting about this course is the way different instructors perceive the course.

One of my students posted a question about it on one of the Internet forums and got a variety of responses from instructors and students. One instructor approaches the Intro to Tech course as a very basic course. He states he introduces his students to the different technical gear available, gives them an opportunity to try the gear, and completes the basic in water skills required by standards. While this fully meets the agency standards for the course, it's not what I really see the course as being. However, I do see the potential for there being an increase in the number of divers that sign up for a course like this because it meets the requirements for taking the HOG regulator service technician course (more on this later).

I take a different approach to the Intro to Tech course. I see it as more of a technical fundamentals course than and introductory course. While I do spend time with my students looking over the different gear options available, that's a very small portion of the course. Most of our classroom time is spent talking about proper gas management, dissimilar cylinder volume matching, Respiratory Minute Volume (RMV) calculation, dive planning, and emergency procedures. Once we get in the water, in addition to the standard skills required like propulsion techniques, out of air drills, mask removal, and surface marker deployment, we also get the information required to calculate RMV, work on establishing muscle memory, task load in midwater, and more. I incorporate the skills I'd like to see my students come into an Advanced Nitrox/Decompression Procedures (AN/DP) course or Cavern course with so we can focus on more advanced skills during the two to three days spent in those courses. I also shoot a lot of video during the course so my students not only get the benefit of feedback on how they are doing on the skills, they also get to see what they are doing. It's one thing to be told you keep fanning your free hand, but a different thing to see yourself constantly doing it on video. Video really makes it hit home.

So the point of this is to not blow off a course because of what you may have heard about it or may think of it. Many of the agencies, especially the technical diving agencies, allow their instructors to add more content to their courses. Ask around and interview different instructors. Ask for specific information about the skills that are done during the course. What may not seem like a good course from one instructor may be a great course from another instructor.

Oh, and as for the HOG regulator service technician course. There is a prerequisite for some type of technical diving certification to get into this course and the Intro to Tech course does meet that requirement. E-mail me at chipoladivers@gmail.com if you want more information.

Make sure you visit Chipola Divers!

Sidemount

Sidemount seems a good first topic to start off with since it's our primary choice in gear configuration. We began playing around with sidemount a few months before moving to North Florida in 2007 and immediately saw and felt the benefits of diving sidemount over diving backmount. Shortly after moving we took a couple of Dive Rite Nomads for test dives and came back with big grins on our faces and left with less money in our wallets!

At the time the Nomad and the Armadillo were the only two manufactured sidemount systems available. We had researched both and decided to go with the Nomad for a couple of different reasons. The first was the lift. The Nomad ( at that time) had a lift capacity of 50 pounds while the Armadillo's lift capacity was and is only in the mid 30 pound range. Diving the North Florida caves with steel cylinders, more lift seemed like the best decision. Another issue was the lack of availability of the Armadillo. There weren't as many dealers carrying the Armadillo, and at some point (I can't remember whether it was then or sometime later), no one was making or selling the Armadillo. Today it still remains difficult to get one.

Three years later and sidemount systems have flooded the market. We now have several different sidemount rigs available to divers. They all have advantages and disadvantages. Some are well suited to cave diving, some are not. In my opinion, none of them is perfect out of the box. But that's just the nature of sidemount. The current systems widely available to divers are Dive Rite Nomad, Hollis SMS100, OMS Profile, Oxycheq Recon. The Armadillo can still be found in some locations. There are also some privately made harnesses, such as the Razor, but wing choice and attachment is left to the diver.

As I stated previously, none of these systems is perfect out of the box. I've made several modifications to my Nomad and have other modifications I want to make, but have been too busy diving to bother making them yet. While the modifications I've made on my rig work for me, they may not work for everyone. There's a saying, "Get 10 sidemount divers together at a dive site and you'll see 11 different ways to rig up your gear." You need to choose what works for you and your type of diving.

One of the things I teach in my sidemount course is all of the possible ways to rig gear and why. I have tried several of them myself. For example, I've pointed my SPGs in every direction possible. There are advantages and disadvantages to each of them. One of the key factors in which way you point your SPGs is your valve orientation. I've tried a few different valve orientations, too. I finally have things set up in a way that work for me...right now. In six months it may be different. This is what makes choosing a sidemount instructor that has experience sidemount so important.

Over the past year there has been a surge in the number of sidemount instructors. Many of these instructors became sidemount divers and sidemount instructors the same weekend. They have very little experience diving sidemount and may not even dive sidemount outside of classes. Even fewer dive sidemount in caves, the original environment sidemount was conceived for. (I'll add a blog on the history of sidemount diving in the coming weeks.) Sidemount diving is more than just strapping cylinders to your sides and getting in the water to complete drills. A big part of the course should be setting up the gear before ever getting in the water and then tweaking it between dives to work for you. An instructor who has very little experience diving sidemount isn't going to be able to help you do this. If that's all you want the course for, just buy a book and read it. You'll probably get more out of that. However, if you want to learn how to set up your gear so it works for you and you want to save yourself several dozen dives in trials, find an instructor who has experience and dives sidemount to it's fullest capabilities. Don't only ask the instructor, but talk to other divers about the instructor. Unfortunately, there are too many instructors out there that will misrepresent their experience just to get students.

Well, I'm off to teach a sidemount course tomorrow. Keep checking back here for more information on sidemount diving.

Make sure you visit our website - Chipola Divers

Welcome to the Chipola Divers Blog!

While we try to keep our website up to date with the training options we offer and all the latest dive site conditions, we felt we could do more to provide visitors to our website with more information. We will continue to update our website on a regular basis, but we are also going to add information here for those of you that like the blog format better. Keep checking back here for information on our courses, reports on our dives, and more information on many different aspects of diving. Thanks!

Make sure you visit our website - Chipola Divers