Nailer99 wrote:
So true. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of divers don't practice skills enough, (myself included, unfortunately....gonna try and work on that more) but that others overcompensate by doing too many skills dives, and not enough actual dives. Ballance is needed here, just like every other aspect of life. You gotta have core skills, even for easy recreational dives, but if it's not fun, why do it at all? If you're not seeing and doing new stuff in different places from time to time, you get bored and you quit diving.......and if you lack survival skills, you might pay a very high price if the unexpected or unplanned for should happen.
Balance is something an individual diver needs to create for themselves, although a good instructor will provide guidance in terms of how to get there.
My perspective:
A bad agency/instructor won't emphasize skills enough, at the other end of the spectrum is an instructor that will emphasize skills too much at the expense of actually thinking underwater. Both are problematic, but in different ways.
Personally, I'd rather have an instructor err on the too much skills side of things-if your skills are solid, your situtational awareness will eventually grow and the thinking will happen. Instructors that turn out students with insufficient skills are the absolute worst thing out there, because their students end up doing dives that they believe are safe, when in reality they objectively probably are not ready for such dives. Because of the issues of primacy, the diver advances far along the path and still doesn't know what it takes to be safe on a dive. This is especially true in the tech diving world.
Honestly, there are way too many instructors out there that are punching cards too quickly. To loop back to the original question of where to go next, do some due dilligence on an instructor and ask them how they develop skills and what their coursework looks like. Also do some due diligence on what the base level of skills are (in your mind, based on your research) for the dives you want to do. Assuming you want to be a safe diver, look for someone that teaches more than a checklist in terms of skills, that doesn't promise passing in a certain amount of time, and that is also out doing the dives you want to do.
Then, go diving with the possible instructor or with some of their students. See if you want to dive that way, see if their skills line up with what you think are sufficient, and only then sign up for a class. Also, solicit feedback as you've done here.
Ultimately, the responsibility to be a safe diver is yours alone. That means being an educated consumer of dive training-which can be difficult when you don't know what you should know. Good for you for posting here, this is one good way to get educated.
If you have more questions, pm me.
-Doug
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