Cave Diver Training Length

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Originally Posted by aainslie

Err... other than reviewing a bunch of self-congratulatory unsubstantiated statements by people who took forever to learn some pretty simple skills (apparently Floridians learn slowly....), most of whom have posted these exact opinions in other threads, what does anyone think they're learning in this thread?

I did a quick search on the words "zero hero" and found about 3 pages of THREADS, many themselves running many pages, of similar statements.

Seems Floridians not only learn slowly, they also forget quickly... or require massive reinforcement... :)

Ah... and I took longer than 14 days. I actually believe that doing so reduced the learning, but what would I know... I only teach for a living...

God, imagine if armies did this.

basic hand combat 1

3 months in the field, min 10 enemy killed

basic hand combat 2

3 more months in the field, min 50 enemy killed

basic weapons 1 (no more than 5 bullets, 1 magazine)

3 more months, min 100 enemy killed

basic weapns 2... oh damn, there don't appear to be any "recruits" left to take that class so forget it.

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Should we make it a 11 day course and include DPV & Stages too? :?

I'll agree with you on academics. Continuous learning is the best way. It's one major pitfall with computer science programs in colleges. You have C, Java, SQL, etc before you can take an upper level course where you write real software. By the time you write your first code in that course, it's been >2 years since you took Java. On the other hand, you don't have the experience writing any programming language to attempt a real program right out of java, so it's a catch-22.

In the sense of cave diving, I worry that the physical fatigue would inhibit a divers ability to perform to their highest level during the class, and time would be wasted working on remedial skills that would be fine when they're well rested. I also think universities see the value in allowing students to go home and study the material covered in class. I know that we're given at least 24 hours between meetings to review notes and study. Last week we were studying performance evaluations and hard disk scheduling. I missed the question in class because I needed to go home and memorize the 5 scheduling algorithms....there was simply no use in continuing to discuss disk scheduling in class until I had some time to master what was already covered. Very similar to if I jammed a reel in JB's flow and had to re-run it the very next day without some practice time in lesser flow caves like Peacock and Madison to build up my skills. There's a physical aspect that's just going to take time. I can calculate deco obligation, dive time, and scooter burn time as well as gas requirements for a dive to EOL in Manatee but that doesn't mean I'm physically nor mentally ready for such a dive.

Finally, college professors are at an advantage over cave diving instructors because their students are pre-screened via SAT/ACT and GPA's.

Not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you here since you didn't post an ideal time frame. For me, cavern+intro then 50 dives, and then apprentice+full cave (which should include stages IMO) is the route I would go if I did it over again. I would say a 1-2 year time limit on that would be reasonable as well, but I'd prefer closer to 1 year. I would like to see sidemount and dpv still offered as voluntary training for divers to seek out when they feel they need it if they don't have easy access to mentors diving with those tools.

I think to rush the process is foolish. Just my 2 cents. Thanks to Obama that is all i can afford.

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Originally Posted by aainslie

BTW, I am also a huge fan of REFRESHER classes. if anyone finishes their full cave, doesn't dive for 4 months, and thinks that when they return to the water the're in good shape, they're nuts. They should pay an instructor to run over skills with them for a few dives.

How many people ever do that?

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I think the key point there is people who finish their course but don't dive for a while. A lot of folks do a warm up dive with a mentor which is fine. I am OK with folks who recognize they need to 'shake the rust off'. That is a sign of diver maturity. Knowing your limits or recognizing your limitations is a dive by dive thing. But there are folks out there that don't do that, they are the ones who would not take a refresher course anyway. You can't fix stupid.

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Originally Posted by jj1987

In the sense of cave diving, I worry that the physical fatigue would inhibit a divers ability to perform to their highest level during the class, and time would be wasted working on remedial skills that would be fine when they're well rested.

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I agree. People also have trouble integrating information and moving information to long term memory under large amounts of stress. If you've ever bene through boot camp, OCS, etc you'll recognize a pattern of intense stress initially that then fades to a lower level of stress after about week 2. After 2 weeks they have more lss broken donw any rsistance to change and eliminated the non useful behavior patterns, but then they back off on the stress so that you can actually learn something new.

To some extent, the same thing applies to cave training. By neccesity you need to stress students and task load them to see how they perform in stressful and task loaded situations. But it can start a downward spiral if a student worries about poor performance and then stresses about having to repeat it with a better result on the next dive, the next day, etc.

In many cases, getting solid on the basics or prior material will greatly reduce both stress and task loading and free up more psychological and physical resources for the new stuff. That argues for greater learning as well as greater retention in a cave training program where various segments may be split up over 2-3 trips with practice in between versus a single zero to hero class. I suspect long term retention is also much improved with lower doses over time (admittedly with some review needed, although that review may happen during the practice dives with buddies, mentors, etc in normal dive briefs and debriefs) as oppsed to a zero to hero format.

OK, so the key issue is that cave diving, like many more physical pursuits (flying is a nice example since, like cave diving, it has a mix of mental and physical requirements), requires lots of practice. But does it require a year of practice?

There's probably a middle ground that works well. For example, pilots that I've seen take a year to get their licence aren't the sorts of people that you want to fly with too often. They generally do too little flying with long breaks in between, and end up being pathetic especially when encountering something unexpected.

Another nice thing about the pilot example is that there's a certain mandated amount of solo time required before getting a licence. A certain number of DIVES (not a period of time) in between classes (especialy intro and apprentice) might be useful (ignoring my flippant comment about soldier training).

One thing is for sure - I can think of some divers whose skills I really respect that did 8 straight days of training with no dives in between, and some pathetic ones that took 6 months to a year. And I can think of inverse examples. I really think this thing is just way the hell overdiscussed. Many of you who live in the panhandle believe that there should be a practice period in between, because you a) have the luxury of being able to dive any old weekend, and b) didn't have the cash to do it all together anyway. Fair enough. But I'd argue that it moves one away from realizing a few key issues: a) we're not born equal. Some of us will always suck, some of us are naturals. b) That natural talent is mediated by practice. The more you practice, the better you'll be regardless of natural ability. How one does the training is minor relative to these.

And at the end of the day, currency is what really matters. You have to practice these skills, whether during or after training. Which sucks for people like me that live on the other side of the country. I try to make it up by being in the ocean most weekends, but there's no doubt that it's a poor substitute for being in a cave. Although it can be fun... here's last weekend's fun:

www.asainslie.com/videos/destroyerapril10.wmv

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Originally Posted by aainslie

....And at the end of the day, currency is what really matters. You have to practice these skills, whether during or after training. Which sucks for people like me that live on the other side of the country. I try to make it up by being in the ocean most weekends, but there's no doubt that it's a poor substitute for being in a cave.....

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Yes, practice is key. I had nearly 1000 dives, and took a few years break, and when I started back, I was back at apprentice level. It took a couple of months to get back to where I had left off.

FWIW, OW diving isn't bad practice, if you treat it like it was a cave, and only surface at the beach, or boat. Also try to keep good cave bouyancy and trim. It helps a lot to use cave gear :-)

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Originally Posted by aainslie

OK, so the key issue is that cave diving, like many more physical pursuits (flying is a nice example since, like cave diving, it has a mix of mental and physical requirements), requires lots of practice. But does it require a year of practice?

There's probably a middle ground that works well. For example, pilots that I've seen take a year to get their licence aren't the sorts of people that you want to fly with too often. They generally do too little flying with long breaks in between, and end up being pathetic especially when encountering something unexpected.

Another nice thing about the pilot example is that there's a certain mandated amount of solo time required before getting a licence. A certain number of DIVES (not a period of time) in between classes (especialy intro and apprentice) might be useful (ignoring my flippant comment about soldier training).

One thing is for sure - I can think of some divers whose skills I really respect that did 8 straight days of training with no dives in between, and some pathetic ones that took 6 months to a year. And I can think of inverse examples. I really think this thing is just way the hell overdiscussed. Many of you who live in the panhandle believe that there should be a practice period in between, because you a) have the luxury of being able to dive any old weekend, and b) didn't have the cash to do it all together anyway. Fair enough. But I'd argue that it moves one away from realizing a few key issues: a) we're not born equal. Some of us will always suck, some of us are naturals. b) That natural talent is mediated by practice. The more you practice, the better you'll be regardless of natural ability. How one does the training is minor relative to these.

And at the end of the day, currency is what really matters. You have to practice these skills, whether during or after training. Which sucks for people like me that live on the other side of the country. I try to make it up by being in the ocean most weekends, but there's no doubt that it's a poor substitute for being in a cave. Although it can be fun... here's last weekend's fun:

www.asainslie.com/videos/destroyerapril10.wmv

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any video with stevie playing is OK in my book

I found the 40-something dives I had between Cave 1 and Cave 2 were useful to simply practice going through cave without beating the crap out of the cave. In retrospect right out of C1 I was clanging my tanks on some very large cave passageway in the beginning, and I got much better before C2. There's a certain amount of confidence building as well that occurs. Going into C2 with complex navigation and restrictions having those abilities made me better coming out of C2 than if I'd just taken C1 and C2 back-to-back.

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Originally Posted by aainslie

Nope. I sugest that you reread your survey. Nowhere do you state that the classes are "condensed". Most cave syllabi (certainly CDS, IANTD, NACD) are split into 4 x 2 day classes, for a total of 8 days of instruction. As I understood your first post, you were just asking how people split those 8 days up.

I am suggesting that continuous training may actually be better than training broken up. I am not suggesting LESS training. I am just suggesting that taking the training contiguously is not necessarily such a bad thing.

With graduate level classes, I've tried teaching classes where there's a break in the middle. Invariably I spend my first week or so back in the classroom reteaching the stuff they'd forgotten. I will no longer do it - it's just inefficient use of the time.

BTW, I am also a huge fan of REFRESHER classes. if anyone finishes their full cave, doesn't dive for 4 months, and thinks that when they return to the water the're in good shape, they're nuts. They should pay an instructor to run over skills with them for a few dives.

How many people ever do that?

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by aainslie

OK, so the key issue is that cave diving, like many more physical pursuits (flying is a nice example since, like cave diving, it has a mix of mental and physical requirements), requires lots of practice. But does it require a year of practice?

There's probably a middle ground that works well. For example, pilots that I've seen take a year to get their licence aren't the sorts of people that you want to fly with too often. They generally do too little flying with long breaks in between, and end up being pathetic especially when encountering something unexpected.

Another nice thing about the pilot example is that there's a certain mandated amount of solo time required before getting a licence. A certain number of DIVES (not a period of time) in between classes (especialy intro and apprentice) might be useful (ignoring my flippant comment about soldier training).

One thing is for sure - I can think of some divers whose skills I really respect that did 8 straight days of training with no dives in between, and some pathetic ones that took 6 months to a year. And I can think of inverse examples. I really think this thing is just way the hell overdiscussed. Many of you who live in the panhandle believe that there should be a practice period in between, because you a) have the luxury of being able to dive any old weekend, and b) didn't have the cash to do it all together anyway. Fair enough. But I'd argue that it moves one away from realizing a few key issues: a) we're not born equal. Some of us will always suck, some of us are naturals. b) That natural talent is mediated by practice. The more you practice, the better you'll be regardless of natural ability. How one does the training is minor relative to these.

And at the end of the day, currency is what really matters. You have to practice these skills, whether during or after training. Which sucks for people like me that live on the other side of the country. I try to make it up by being in the ocean most weekends, but there's no doubt that it's a poor substitute for being in a cave. Although it can be fun... here's last weekend's fun:

www.asainslie.com/videos/destroyerapril10.wmv

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The conclusions above make sense to me.

I had been diving in the ocean at the tech level and then took the full-cave work in one week - my goal was to learn how to use a reel to penetrate the Doria but I ended up getting hooked on cave diving. My next cave dive, a month or so later, was with my current buddy and we started with a 90-minute dive. Actually, I can't ever remember us doing anything less than an hour on any cave dive since, as most were an hour or two on OC and have steadily worked up to 4 to 6 hours on RB. He probably had 800 hours or more in caves when we started together in 2001, is a talented and incredably safe diver, and has turned out to be an excellent mentor - taking me in most of the caves in Florida & many in Mexico.

So, I agree that it depends on the instructor, the student, his or her background before taking up caving, the quality of the people he or she dives with after certification, and the frequency of dives during his career.

Given the above, a good student should be able to master the threshold skills that go with full cave in one week, IMO. Without all of that in place I can see it taking longer.

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Originally Posted by w ripley

...and has turned out to be an excellent mentor - taking me in most of the caves in Florida...

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How many caves are in Florida?