I originally started this blog tackling a theory that many divers hold, that Advance Open Water and Rescue Diver are high level courses. While I will get into explaining my answer where I believe these are only basic skilled courses, I also found myself commenting and sharing my views on a couple of other comments I regularly hear and read; “Which agency is best?”, “It’s all about the instructor?” And “You need to gain experience first”.
Now this is not an Agency bashing post and I am going to stay away from commenting on specific Agency names. I will use some common course names, as the majority of divers will recognise the level I am referring to. I did just try writing this blog using terms Level 1,2,3 etc but it was difficult for me to even keep track of what I meant. So when I talk about ‘Open Water’ level, this is also known as Open Water 20, Ocean Diver, Scuba Diver, Club Diver etc.
Agencies:
Normally when people talk about dive qualifications, one agency is known above everyone else! Sometimes people can name a small handful. However many are shocked to understand there is over 150 different agencies (Some of these are linked as there are some parent Agencies, with offsets under them).
At the very top is the WRSTC (World Recreational Scuba Training Council) and many of the agencies work with this council. There is also CMAS (Confederation Modiale des Activites Suaquatiques) which was actually the first under water diving organisation setup in 1959, which does something slight different. Now the WRSTC mission is to set MINIMUM training standards an agency must meet to qualify a scuba diver. Many people believe they set the standards an agency must follow! This is incorrect an agency is able and it’s in own right to set higher standards than the minimum set out by the WRSTC.
A phrase I hear commonly is, Agency does not matter it’s all about the instructor. While this does have some underlying truth to it, it is very far from a truthful or informative statement. How I see it, agencies fall into certain categories. Below I have tried to split these out in a table below. This is not a definitive list as some agencies can fit into multiple categories, but more a way to show how agencies can have very different missions and goals.
| Professional Recreational Agency | These are agencies that predominantly cater to professional recreational dive instructors. These courses are very much structured to offer courses that can be delivered in a set time window. These courses are normally broken down in to chunks, allowing customers to choose what they want to learn, but also assist the instructor in making a living from selling courses. |
| Club Based Recreational Agency | Club agencies are there to cater mainly for volunteers and groups of divers who want to get together and go dive as group. Courses are normally longer, contain more content with the idea of it being delivered on a continuous basis alongside normal club diving. Their specialities consist of courses to enable the club to go dive such as Chart Work and Boat Handling. |
| Professional Technical Agency | Same as Professional agencies above, but focus what they class as Technical Diving courses |
| Club Based Technical Agency | Same as club but focus what they class as Technical Diving courses |
| Professional Tec to Rec Agency | In recent years a couple of Technical Agencies have expanded in to the recreational course arena, and have added a slight twist by bringing some of the skills and disciplines of Tec diving into their recreational courses. |
** What contributes as a TEC course can vary greatly between agencies. There are club based agencies out there that teach things such as decompression diving and twinset in their recreational program!
This table also does not mean all the agencies in a group are the same. If you take the Professional Recreational Agency group, there is a range between the agencies in the standards they set and the content of their course. So my advice is investigate the different agency options available to you, and work out which ones best suit your needs. Then aim to find a good instructor in that agency. Now you might find a great instructor who only teaches in your 2nd or 3rd choice of agency. This will then come down to a decision only you can make. If they are miles ahead, then go with the high quality instructor. Keep in mind, there is nothing stopping you switching agencies and instructors. It’s something I would suggest every diver does, as each Instructor, Agency and Course has it’s pro and cons. Take me for an example, I write these blogs and I try and share as much of this information in my teaching and diving as much as possible. There will be a time, where I have passed on the majority of it and the students learning curve will flatten off. If they want to continue getting extra knowledge above and beyond the course material then going with another instructor will open them up to a completely new set of ideas and views.
Agencies can also play a big part on how the instructor teaches with some having a lot of restrictions while others very few. Restrictions are not always a bad thing but they are not always a good thing. The level of support from Agencies also differs substantially. This can impact the normal courses as a consumer, but if you are looking to go Pro can have a big impact on your choice of agency.
So what makes a good instructor and how do you recognise one? That is going to be a fairly long blog for another time. Until I get round to writing, there are blogs written by others you might want to check out, as well as ask in the various social media forums.
Courses:
Now one of my pet peeves is course names, and I covered why in my blog You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know. While the course names have been a fabulous marketing strategy, it has breed a misunderstanding of the level of the course and who should take it. This has also been amplified by schools and agencies using this misunderstanding in sales pitches which has continued the cycle.
I see courses fitting into the following categories, again this might cause some debate, but it’s mainly to show how my thought process as formed.
| My Category | My Take on My Category | How I think Courses fit into My Categories |
| Foundation | These courses lay a foundation of basic skills a diver needs to operate underwater. Many of the courses out there do not adequately equip a diver to conduct all but the simplest of dives. By this I mean going diving with an equivalently trained buddy independent of a school or club, basically going off by themselves. | Try Dives, Discovery Scuba, Scuba Diver, Open Water etc. |
| Core | Core skills are separated in many professional agencies across multiple courses. To me, all divers who want to go dive should have these key core skills and knowledge to dive safely and deal with the majority of issues that arise. I see these very much as core skills not advanced, and every diver should have them. | Advanced Open Water, Scuba Diver 2, Rescue Diver, Sports Diver, Navigation, Boat, Drift, First Aid, O2, Enriched Air, Master Scuba Diver |
| Professional | These skills focus around safely conducting and providing training. It’s about managing groups, courses, as well as a business. While these will improve a divers skills, unless you are actually going to progress into being an instructor, there are many more Advanced courses out their which will improve your diving. | Dive Master, Asst Instructor, Instructor |
| Advanced | These build on core skills and opens them up further and in greater complexity. While not required in recreational diving, it certainly can make a huge difference. The main focus for these courses is the more in depth planning, tighter controls & processes, and task load management. I have added ‘Deep’ as to me this requires advances skills to truly dive safely at this depth, however it is poorly taught in my view. I also * rebreather has with costs coming down, I think in the future, more recreational rebreather courses will be available for brand new divers skipping out open circuit completely. | Deep 40, Deeper 40+, Twinset, Side mount, Decompression, Overhead, Rebreathers**, |
| Expedition | These types of courses, focus not just on the in water logistics of complex dives but also all the logistics on making those dives happen. It’s not about putting a few divers on a boat and going somewhere, it is about the researching a unknown location, gathering info on and planning routes. Conducting a project such as clearly mapping a cave system, or recovering large artefacts from ship wrecks. These are also conducted in the more challenging environments and locations. The skills learnt are very much around the very large picture. | Advanced Diver, First Class, Cave, Mine |
| Special Interest | Not everyone likes taking photos, not everyone is interested in fish. There is a number of these that divers in the community look down at, and this is normally for a couple of reasons. Instructors offer these to keep turning over courses and only cover the minimum standards. If there is something you are interested in, find an instructor who really has a passion for the subject and the course will be extremely worthwhile. | Marine Life, Photographer, Search & Recovery, Wreck, Dry Suit |
There is not a direct link between course level and the quality of the diver. The same with number of dives, even two equally qualified divers with the same number of dives can be miles apart in terms of quality and knowledge. However on average the more courses someone has done and the more dives, does lead to divers being of greater quality. To put some perspective on that, let’s you have a scale of 1 to 100 on the quality of diver, the difference in the above could be 5 or 10 points, meaning there is a clear difference, but we are not talking either end of the scale. Again there are exceptions such as divers who have only done a couple of courses that are better than divers who have done loads. This is down to the level of tuition provided by the instructor and the divers only natural abilities.
The only way real way to improve is through structured learning; courses, workshops, perfect practice and research. Imperfect Practice, no practice, assuming cause and effect, all do not lead to great improvements. So the idea of just going diving is greatly going to improve you diving is a misconception, it will improve it very slowly compared to the efficiency as seeking knowledge and skills from an instructor or mentor. For example, a common question people ask is how to use less air and the majority of responses are based on an incorrect assumption of cause and effect on how we actually breath, rather than the actual correct answer that its in related to exertion. I did a specific blog on this subject How To Use Less Gas While Diving.
I am going to jump right in at the so called ‘Rescue Diver’ level as this has come up recently in the various forums. There seems to be this belief in the diving community that Rescue Diver is somehow an advanced course and you should really have more experience before you go do it. My first response to this, is Rescue Diver does not actually qualify you to do anything more in terms of recreational diving. The course is there to teach skills on how to mitigate risk, be more self-aware of your diving and those around you, and how to safely rescue a buddy or diver if need be. To me this course content will greatly increase the safety of diver, and if they are able to pass the skills and knowledge tests, why would someone stop them from not taking it just because they only have 10 dives? I would rather dive with this person, than someone who has had no experience on any rescue skills. Now rescue diver does qualify you to assist and act as a rescue diver on courses, where having a decent amount of experience under your belt is ideal. However the choice of rescue diver comes down to the instructor, and many will only select a rescue diver they believe is capable of being one to a group of students. This is where experience will come into the decision. That’s not saying there is bad practice out there and there are instructors who will use an inexperienced rescue qualified diver to ensure a box is ticked. I have a similar issue, of people suggesting getting more dives in before taking their Advanced Open Water, when there are clear skills that would immediately make them a much better and safer diver. My other challenge is if someone qualified 10 years ago as a Rescue Diver, not been involved in any rescues, not practice any, then compare them to someone who went through the course last week!
Carrying on the ‘Number of Dives’ stipulation, I believe this is an absolute must for Professional Courses. You need the experience to understand how everything in diving ties up and have the knowledge to answer the huge range of questions put to you from students. You also need to understand the conditions and site, so you can ensure the maximum safety of your students. I have seen a couple of instances of instructors taking newbies to a site they did not, and this shift the instructors attention away from the student and on to the site. A diver should have a decent amount of experience in number of dives and a variety. The knowledge is not what impacts them and their buddy as divers like core skills would give! This is about gaining experience on how things affect others, so they can easily identify trainees strengths and weaknesses and how to best support them. I do have some concerns around ‘No of Dives’
- It’s done on an honour system so anyone could fudge their dive statistics.
- No of Dives does not equal scope, this means someone could do the same dive over and over to make up the numbers.
- The required No of Dives is sometimes too low in my view.
I think professional levels should require a greater number of dives, and have some stipulation about diving in different environments (Boat, Shore, Drift, Night/Limited Visibility, Cold Water, 20m+ Range, 30m+ Range etc.).
Expedition courses should also have the same and from my knowledge they all do, as divers need to build up that knowledge and experience of real world situations. For Advance courses, I think it depends on the course, but most are broken down to different levels anyway.
Experience:
Now with everything I have said above, I am not dismissing experience. Experience can play a huge part in scuba diving, as long as divers learn from it. I see a couple of real issues in the dive community, close calls are laughed off and not really discussed and excuses are made. When people do share their incidents in wider groups, rather than a discussion taking place, what you find is finger pointing and grand standing. How are these divers, who are showing a willing to learn, going to learn when other divers just attack them, rather than working through the problem with structured solutions? Debriefs are just as important as briefings, as it gives the opportunity for everyone to reflect on the dive. By missing this out we could be normalising deviance, and embedding bad practice. Another blog plug Normalisation Of Deviance. To learn from a dive, it does not need to be a bad dive, even looking back at a good dive and really understanding why it went well can be just as enlightening than a bad dive. The key is to be open and supportive, as everyone can have a bad dive, and anything can go wrong. I have a recent example which happened the other day! There is a fairly advance dive I do maybe 10 times a year and I have dived it for a number of years. This year we have been blessed with some awesome visibility which has been amazing and made the dive less challenging. Over the course of a dozen dives, confidence grew and I started to forget how challenging the dive normally is. Then we dived it last week, the viz was poor, and it became a very challenging dive with a close call. Yes we did have a giggle about it after, but we also had a very serious in depth conversation about what happened, what we did that lead to the challenges we had and what we could have done differently. It also made us go back and review our planning. Our overall plan has not changed for the dive, but we have certainly added further detail to it and added some more what ifs solutions. This was stuff we hadn’t planned as previously they were totally unknowns (Just to point out, I am not aware of anyone else who does this dive, so it’s not like there is additional knowledge readily available). The experience gained and learnt will certainly now shape future dives at this site, but also can be used elsewhere.
As always I hope you enjoyed my ramblings, please check out my other blogs as I do try and vary the subjects.
G-SAV
Note: Thanks to Kosta Koeman for reviewing this for me, and giving me a couple additional points to add.
Graham Savill (G-SAV) Scuba Blog 