open water training question

[LCF]

My husband is a PADI instructor, and gear removal and replacement underwater is required from the students in the pool. If they are wearing wetsuits there, they do the skill in a wetsuit.

I don't know the rationale for teaching it, except to place the idea in the student's mind that it is a possible thing to do (the same as a CESA). Thus, if they find themselves hopelessly entangled and buddyless, they might think of being able to take their gear off and clear the entanglement.

[DA Aquamaster]

We did it as well but it was 1985 - I have no clue about now. At the time PADI was already into kneeling on the bottom and one suggestion was to lay your weight belt acroiss the top of your thighs while you took all the other gear off to manage the suit buoyancy.

In 25 years of diving I only took my gear off once in the real world, and that was to get un tangled from some serious mono on a solo dive in basically zero viz. I was in a dry suit at the time, but the buoyancy issue is no big deal - just don't let go of the tanks/wing, or for an OW diver with weight integration, the tank/BC.

[LiteHedded]

I did not, in any of my rec classes. But, other than the intuitive "confidence building," what are the specific objectives for teaching a doff/don gear exercise?

i have no idea. can't think of any reason I would need to do that on an open water dive

[Sludge]

Why would anybody need to do pushups on the beach wearing the cylinder? They sure taught THAT in the '60s!

[WEPIV]

When I first got my doubles I jogged around my yard with them on just to see if I could do it.
I could but not for long...

[LiteHedded]

Why would anybody need to do pushups on the beach wearing the cylinder? They sure taught THAT in the '60s!

chicks dig it

[Xenia]

We did this at NC state in the Rescue class, 4 years ago. However, this is totally not your normal OW certification.

I was lucky to do OW and Rescue in an academic program, each class lasted a full semester. The agency is NAUI, as you know they leave many degrees of freedom in the classes. Plus you have a whole semester to try in a pool many many skills.

We would remove gear, remove weight belt at the top of a bus at a quarry (10 ft depth). Of course we were wearing wetsuit, it was too friggin cold even with this! Then we would pull ourselves in from the vertical line of the buoy that marked the bus, put on belt and gear. Vertical line adds safety going up and down.

It teaches you a lot about buoyancy but it is quite tough and stressful (to me at least). I guess for a rescue class it makes sense, but I don't think it would make sense of OW. The comfort is just not there to do something like this in an OW class.

[Meister481]

Every one of my students does it, Exposure Protection/Integrated weight or not.

[alias]

At both shops that I work in, we have the students wear in the pool the same thing they will wear during their certification dives. Going to wear gloves at Vortex? Wear them in the 85° pool.

I've been to sites where classes were going on and students were being shown how to put exposure suits on for the first time. I think it's wrong to have students configured one way in a pool and a completely different way during checkout dives.

I meet too many people that got certified and never went diving again. A lot of new things and they're not having fun.

So easy to preach Southener! I think people would bail or faint out from the pool fast if they had to pull the 14 mm on torso and 7 mm on rest of the body plus hoods and 5 mm gloves that we had for our 50F check out dives. Many dropped out and I personally know some directly for these reasons from the initial shock (like the claustrophobic hood we had never had, not the cold water per se). Just too many new things.

I think some things just can't be introduced in the pool in some circumstances. However, my shop really went wayyyy beyond to handicap us. We used different brand of BC:s in pool vs check outs. We used steel tanks in pool and then when we added humongous amount of neoprene for lake, we swapped to Al tanks for the first time. WeeHAA!

And no, we did not do gear removal. Not in pool, not in lake. Only thing we removed was weight belt, and held onto it. I didn't find my course very demanding, so personally I did gear removal with freshly minted buddy soon after certification. It was an interesting experience

[Half-Fast]

I did the remove & replace drill in the pool in my OW class back in 1988, wearing a wetsuit; don't recall whether we also had to do it on a checkout dive or not. My son took PADI OW this past summer and did not have to do it.

I think it's worth teaching. I don't recall that it caused great difficulty or stress to anyone in my class, and it does help with confidence and comfort in the water. Is it a necessary skill? Maybe, even if it's not something you'll need often. Over the years I've had to do it on a dive a couple of times, both times due to a tank slipping from a loose tank strap.

One of the (several) things I dislike about integrated weight BCs is the difficulty presented if you're in a wetsuit and need to remove the BC for some reason.