Scuba Diving

I have never been diving before so I am looking into doing it this summer. Everywhere I look seems like you have to take 2 to 3 two hour classes and or courses before you dive. Is this necessary? Can’t they just give you the basics and you go out there? Have anyone ever been diving before? Is training longer than a day necessary?

Thanks

There are a few ways "give you the basics" can be handle:

1. Discover Scuba: The instructor will go over some very basic stuff. You will then get to play around in the pool or in some very calm and shallow ocean/sea water with the instructor by your side.

2. Resort Course: You go to a resort. The instructor will give you a very basic course. For your stay at that particular resort, you will be able to go on some simple dives with the instructor nearby.

3. Open Water Diver Course: You spend time in the classroom learning theory. You spend some time in the pool learning some skills. You then do some certification dives demonstrating what you learned in the class and pool. After certification, you can follow your training and go diving with a buddy.

With PADI, the fastest you can get certified (classroom, pool, and certification dives) is two days, and those would be a couple of really long and exhausting days. The typical class that I teach is five weeknights for about 5 hours each night to cover the pool and classroom. After that, you will have to do the certification dives over two days.

The training is necessary. You can kill yourself or get severely injured (like a ruptured lung) if you mess up while scuba diving. Scuba diving is safe and easy, and preventing major accidents is easy as well. Without that knowledge, you could mess up.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under dive training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.